This is how you connect with your audience: Creating for attention and how to stand out.

What you’re chasing is something very attainable, but you don’t know how to make that deep connection needed. You’re looking for ways for someone to care, to pay attention to what you do. Sadly, your intentions are shown by the way you repeatedly talk about yourself or your company. The other solution is more effective, which is the complete absence of self talk. I promise you that there’s always a better way to do your marketing.

It’s time to move away from superficial and transactional storytelling and become a force opposing everything shallow and narrow minded in the world. Our times are screaming for creativity and artistry more than ever.

Become meaningful to someone else.

So many emotions we feel we don’t have the words for or can’t explain. These emotions are often rooted in a longing for something greater, something unattainable or out of reach. These are the emotions that are inherent in your audience and for you to stimulate. Everybody is starved for reality, so when you put something true into the world someone are changed, and your existence becomes meaningful to someone else. Once somebody has been touched, they want to be touched again.

The Biggest challenge.

Every time you reach out to someone and come away with nothing you start to wonder what’s holding them back. How many times have you asked yourself: There must be another way, when instead you should’ve asked: Why is my view so limited?

Maybe it's the emotional spectrum you’re drawing from that is limited and not big, bold and brave enough? Or maybe you're just lacking curiosity about people and the world? Because the biggest challenge is to tell interesting moving stories that people want to connect to. 

" The best relationships are not based on what you can do for someone, but rather how you make them feel. "

-Talaya Waller

Your mission.

When you tell your stories, there are so many ways to appeal to your audience through different moods and feelings. What you create needs to be emotional and moving in one way or the other. The tricky part is that you want what you make to be more than it really is. Your mission is to create something to someone who has felt everything they ever gonna feel. 

You say what has already been said a thousand times before, still there is a myriad of creative ways of expressing different emotions. You’ve said all that is to say about what you do and what you offer, yet the opportunities are greater than ever to touch someone through storytelling.

Ask yourself, what is it that someone feel the most when they think about me, and how am I impacting the heart of someone else?

Reach out to the dedicated ones.

You also know that there’s no excuse for stealing someone else's time for personal gains or profits, because if you do, people will fade away and never come back, unless you pour your whole heart into it and reach out in the face of indifference.

This is what give people reasons to care. Because indifference is easy and fighting against it takes a lot of courage. Isn’t it then quite reassuring to know that you cannot understand communication and still end up single?

Aren’t we all trying to find meaning in our lives? Longing for that feeling of being connected to someone or something meaningful? You should try to reach the dedicated ones, to give them a sense of belonging and empowerment. 

Fulfill our needs in new ways.

If you want to touch us you have to talk to us in a way that will fulfill our needs in new ways. Your mission is to gain insights into our emotional lives, make sense of the world for us, connect the dots and connect with us. In order for you to understand the world around you, you have to first understand the world within yourself.

Isn’t that also the purpose of art, to connect us with our emotions and inspire in us a new feeling?

You have to create something that we can see, hear or read that speaks to us, that we instantly want to inject ourselves into the narrative of and be a part of.

Your downfall.

I’ve been working for four different marketing agencies and I’ve realised how lonely my creative professional life has been. I always imagined these organizations to be more daring, braver and constantly trying new things, allowing for experimentation. 

Being a man with an insatiable appetite for learning and creating I didn’t find these places to be as stimulating as I fantasized they would be. I envisioned these places to have ideas in the air constantly, but rather they lacked intellectual creative energy. How could that be? Even when I talked to the biggest, most respected creative agencies out there, they too struggled with convincing their customers to be gutsier, more daring in their campaigns and try something else than what worked before. These exact inadequacies and challenges also proved to be their downfall. 

Being laughed at for being too weird.

I remember my school teacher telling me that my essays were too much out of this world and that I needed to come back down to earth, she even read my essays for the whole class as examples on how not to write. I was only ten years old.

When I was 17 my classmates and a teacher laughed at my ideas for being too weird. They were dismissed for being silly, foolish, absurd or impossible. Granted, my ideas are different and explore our inner workings and emotional lives, our wants and needs, dreams and memories, our actions and realities.

Teachers do try to encourage creativity, yet they always dislike the most creative students. To my delight the likes of Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity rather than undermines it. His ted talk “Do schools kill creativity” is now the most viewed ted talk ever with over 40 million views.

The Variable for success.

Creativity is also proven to be one of the main benefactors of successful businesses. Gary Vaynerchuk have said many times that it’s the variable for succeeding on social media and in business. Just think of Dollar Shave club where one, just one, piece of creative video grew them to a $1 billion dollar company almost overnight. That video instantly gave them over 12.000 new customers.

Humble the poet has also built his massive audience purely through the often weird and highly creative work he shares with the world. He says ?Don’t be realistic, don’t play the popularity game and don’t chase trends, today belongs to the weirdos, the creatives, the introverts, the beardos and everyone else who doesn’t fit in.? 

I've been asking myself:

Why do so many pieces of content feel like desperate signals of morse code from businesses in trouble? 

What choice does your brand have?

Why are your stories, your content marketing and advertising lacking creativity, so boring, so ignorable, and so contrived? It takes most of us less than five seconds to see through your inclinations. Why do you think you can fool us and win us over with your stories? 

No wonder Doug Kessler of Velocity Partners expressed: ?We’re all about to be buried in crap.”

In his blog article 'It’s pretty simple, make better ads.' Mitch Joel asks and answers: 

"So, what choice does your brand have? Make better ads. Make the best ads. Build the most creative teams to get the best insights, and push that creativity for all that it's worth. Don't annoy. Don't interrupt. Be strategic. Be in the right spaces for the right audiences (technology has certainly delivered on that promise). BUT... and here's the big BUT... don't blow it with junky creative that is me too, derivative, uninspiring and unoriginal. It will only drive to one result: underperformance (and being totally ignored). We beg our teams to do great work. We beg our C-level suite to lead us to incredible new heights. We beg our agency partners to bring the best insights and innovations. Why do we still (and continually) settle for bad ads?”

Are you also doing the same thing over without analyzing, without adjusting to what we want rather than to what you want to say and sell? We know it’s not because you don’t care, maybe you just don’t know how. 

Don't just add to the noise.

Creating and providing value works, that’s why people are slowly starting to wake up to this new storytelling approach, replacing the old ways of branding themselves.

We are all suckers for stories, we love stories, we thrive on them, it’s what creates our personalities and the realities we believe in. There is a reason why your kids don’t fall asleep to bedtime facts. Humble the poet think creatives have a mission “...to create new ideas that the world hasn’t experienced. Those ideas influence the entire planet. As artists we are here to contribute something, not just add to the noise. People want stimulation, growth, experience, contribution, we grow when we learn, that's when we are able to contribute."

"If you don't figure out how to create and distribute creative written words, audio or video into the platforms of the internet, you will become irrelevant?

-Gary Vaynerchuk

In this new day and age it’s both hard and easy to build a might of yourself. Hard because emotionally engaging stories are so difficult to write and convey, It's easy because we have the tools necessary on us at all times, both as an opportunity to grab somebody’s attention and as a means to put something true into the world. Digital marketing pioneer and writer Ann Handley suggests that:

"What matters now isn't storytelling; What matters is telling a true story well.”

To tell a true story takes hearts, brains and guts because you need to make BIGGER, BRAVER, BOLDER stories, according to Ann Handley.

Do you sound like everyone else?

We are being bombarded with contrived, boring, ignorable marketing and content because everyone and every brand now own a media channel. Yet stories and information can be so beautiful and so moving.

Only artists, the truly innovative and creative know how to communicate in new interesting ways. Gary Vaynerchuk explained that "All the magic is in the shit that is corny... because you all look the same... if you all are playing up to the same standards to what is cool and what’s good, and what’s good content, you end up all looking the same.”.

In their book ?Talk Triggers?, Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin explains that ?For a differentiatior to keep spreading beyond the first telling however, it has to be inherently more interesting, it should be unexpected. It should be worthy of a story, meaning that it has to be intriguing enough to the recipient to be worth the exchange of time for information… The best way to create conversation is to have a selling proposition that is actually unique. After all, same is lame. We are physiologically conditioned to discuss what is different and to ignore average.?

It's getting weirder out there.

"It’s getting weirder out there, and harder and harder to keep up. In every industry, the old is going away faster than the new can replace it. That leaves us in what I call the in-between... If you want an edge on the future you have to be willing to go weird", says Beth Comstock. According to Ann Handley: to have a "Gutsier, braver voice is a differentiator in a sea of mediocre content.? Chris Anderson of TED says ?what our brains notice is things that are different.” Krista Tippet say that ?change come from the fringes.? Sally Hogshead coined the term:

?Different is better than better.?

Also Remember Kurt Vonneguts words that ?Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the centre. Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first?. This means that if you seek to stay ahead you need to surround yourself with creatives, the change agents, people that see the world differently, true artist and the heretics in society, because creatives are great at revealing our emotional lives and connecting with humanity. I’m preaching the need for leaders to support the voices on the edge!

"Creatives are empathetic, they care about the things beyond what they’re creating, they try to bring something to the world that is beautiful. They’re consumed with beauty, not in a pretty way, but in terms of elegance... which is good for businesses.?

-Marty Neumeier

Challenge your own thinking.

It’s time to create content experiences, not content marketing, or as Jason Miller expressed it: "We don't need more content marketing, we need more relevant content". In his article "It's time for the content marketing conversation to evolve" he suggests that "It’s time we acknowledged that we operate in the most dynamic media environment ever, targeting audiences whose habits and thinking processes are changing at an extraordinary rate, and that like every other area of marketing, we need to move forward... I think the key to evolving any area of marketing is a commitment to challenging your own thinking".

Content that connects.

What type of content can you make that help us connect emotionally, that can change our beliefs and bring a distinction to your brand in a crowded marketplace? 

According to Robert Rose, poet content is what drives feelings and beliefs in your audience. When talking about how this type of content is working on an audience, Robert says that "We are looking to make them laugh, cry or feel some emotion that aligns with our story or purpose. We are in essence bringing them along a journey the way any storyteller would. If our goal is to introduce something that will truly change a paradigm of thought or require a new way to look at things, poet content is truly the only kind of content that has this power?.

It’s power comes from it’s ability to empathize with the reader or viewer. 

"We're bad at empathy? says Seth Godin, and "…as a result, when we're arguing a point with someone, we tend to use words and images that work on us, not necessarily that help the other person. So, if you want to understand how to persuade someone, listen to how they try to persuade you. For example, one partner in a conversation might use concepts like power and tradition and authority to make a case, while the other might rely on science, statistics or fairness. One person might argue with tons of emotional insight, while someone else might bring up studies and peer reviews. What they're actually doing is talking about things in the way they like to hear them."

“We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”

― Ana?s Nin

The first of all passions.

Empathy is about understanding. Empathy let’s us see the world from other points of view and help us form insights that can lead us to new and better ways of thinking, being and doing. Our best work demands empathy, but not everyone has this trait naturally in them, but there are ways to become more empathetic. Psychologist Martha Nussbaum argues that wonder helps human beings see others ?part as ones own circle of concern… no emotion matches wonder in its capacity to evoke true empathy or compassion.?

The French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist Decartes thought of wonder as the first of all passions because wonder is a state of utter openness and deep connection.

Great ideas comes from the intersection between curiosity, empathy, imagination.

Tim Brown, the CEO and president of IDEO experienced at first hand that "Nurturing a creatively competitive organization requires curiosity above all else. Asking the right questions is more important (and more difficult) than having the right answers."

Now that we know that only creative bold unexpected idas are the ones that get attention, and being empathetic will get people to care about you, what are you going to do?

Will you take a chance on hiring an artist or do you dare to dig deeper into your soul and tell the stories you were meant to tell, that will leave a mark on someone else, and change them for the better? It's time for you, like Steven Pressfield would say:

"... end your hero's journey and start your artists journey."

Aren’t we all here to make the world better for everyone and give the next generation reasons to hope? Let’s start by telling more meaningful and better stories because it’s the stories we tell ourselves that becomes our inner voices. Also, these are the tools for you to expose your uniqueness which will separate you from everyone else and make you remarkable to some. This is how you build an audience.