Narrative Storytelling: How to Weave Stories Into Your Marketing

Wondering how storytelling can help you better connect with your fans and customers? Looking for ways to tell more interesting marketing stories?

To explore how to weave narrative stories into your marketing, I interview Melissa Cassera.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Melissa Cassera, a storytelling expert and screenwriter for television and movies. Her course is called Obsessed and she teaches businesses to create passionate audiences using storytelling. Her podcast, Totally Obsessed, is forthcoming in Spring 2019.

Melissa explains how to tell stories about customers overcoming their problems or achieving their goals.

You'll also learn how to hook your ideal clients and how conflict helps customers relate to you.

Share your feedback, read the show notes, and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Storytelling for Marketers
Melissa's Story
About 15 years ago, Melissa worked in public relations and publicity, leveraging the power of the media to tell stories for clients. She helped clients appear in news media, television, magazines, newspapers, and so on, and her big claim to fame was getting clients on Oprah, The Today Show, and similar high-profile shows.

Eventually, Melissa took on all of the private clients she could handle, but entrepreneurs and small business owners started asking her to teach them how to tell stories and grab the media's attention. She began teaching workshops, and eventually her workshops and online classes became her sole focus.

During a restless period, Melissa and her husband lived on the road, traveling the U.S. in an Airstream. On her travels, she had an idea for a TV series, wrote the script of the first episode, and hired a consultant to evaluate it. Although that script went nowhere, she soon got her first screenwriting deal for the movie Girl Followed, which was about the way a predator grooms a teenage girl online.

Melissa also adapted a book into the movie Her Stolen Past. As the screenwriter, Melissa was hired to adapt the original novel into something that looks visually amazing onscreen. Since then, she's also sold a TV series and has three more feature films in development.

Melissa continues to teach the narrative storytelling techniques she uses in screenwriting to help businesses tell stories that are basically as hot as a Netflix drama.

Listen to the show to hear Melissa discuss how she researched Girl Followed and why she felt good about making the movie.
How Storytelling Helps Marketers
People are psychologically wired to enjoy a good story. Stories help your marketing audience understand concepts, products, and services because your audience can place themselves in the shoes of a story's main character. As marketers, you want the main character of your story to be your customer, such as a case study about your customer's journey with your product or service.

If you're selling a program or book based on your experience, you share your own narrative, such as a rags-to-riches story. Everything was terrible until you developed this amazing system, which you've compiled into the program you're selling. Your story explains how your program helped you overcome obstacles because a story like this hooks people, gets them excited, and makes the sale.

Storytelling also enables marketers to engage and create a deeper connection to customers, which leads to more sales. This is particularly relevant for social media marketers, who need to build connections and relationships, instead of talking at people or interrupting them with advertisements.

Airbnb is a great example of using stories to build engagement and deeper connection. In an ongoing campaign,