Why Long Form Story Telling Matters for Brands

Original article and research by Jillean Kearney

Brands have been telling their own stories for years, but the rise and importance of content marketing has provided companies with more opportunities to tell stories online that grab the attention of their target customers, build trust, entertain and educate. Long-form storytelling has proven to be particularly effective in helping brands establish thought leadership. In this piece, I'll detail how thought leadership can't exist without a great narrative, how to tell a great story and much more. 

What is Thought Leadership?

The foundation of modern “thought leadership” is a brand’s ability to build a reputation as an expert within its industry by sharing proprietary point-of-views, unique insights or original research.

Effective thought leadership builds customer affinity and powers a brand’s persuasion capabilities by spearheading new approaches to problem-solving and inspiring counter-intuitive ways of thinking.

What is Long-form Storytelling?

To get technical with this definition, a piece of content is considered long-form if it is over 1,200 words in length. Long-form becomes a story when it follows a narrative arc – meaning it has a premise and a plot (a beginning, middle and end).

Long-form storytelling is not new. Thoroughly researched, hyper-focused and eloquently written narratives have been the gold standard of respected journalism for ages. Journalists – whether a feature in a magazine, a newspaper or online – have always relied on the power of narrative devices to tell rich, in-depth stories about people.

With the rise (and rise) of content marketing, the lines between traditional media and branded content have blurred. An increasing number of brands are telling their own stories, their customers’ stories and creating in-depth content hinged on the familiar three-act narrative arcs – setup, action/climax and resolution – used by journalists.

Thought Leadership + Long-form Storytelling = Content Marketing Success

Thought leadership, within the context of content marketing, exists to change and influence perspective. This is also why stories exist – and humans thrive on stories.

Anecdotes fuel conversation. Great dramatic arcs are the reason why hours and hours are spent binging on television shows. The winding and weaving plotlines of podcast Serial reeled in legions of fans episode after episode, and its success has inspired countless others to pick up a microphone and share new stories.

The power of storytelling can be harnessed and applied to thought leadership content by incorporating narrative devices to:

• Articulate new paradigms and possibilities
• Showcase a breadth of knowledge and expertise
• Present original research and data in a palatable format
• Connect with target customers on a personal and emotional level
• Build long-term, trusting relationships with existing and prospective customers
• Differentiate from the competition and rise above

What Long-form Storytelling Does for Thought Leadership that Short-form Content Can’t

Short-form vs. Long-form

Content with less than 1,000 words is considered short-form. Examples of short-form content include blog posts, social media updates and infographics. These types of content have their place in a content marketing strategy. Tweets, Facebook updates, and blog posts are great for driving social engagement, starting conversations and generating clicks to a brand’s website.

Unfortunately, returns on investment (the time and money spent to generate snackable content) will be short lived, compared to long-form. Short-form content has a high turnover rate, and its shelf-life is limited to such a tiny window of time that it needs to constantly be produced in order to get in front of an audience wide enough to impact conversions. The average lifespan of a tweet, for example, is just 18 minutes. As a result of all of this, most people are bombarded with so much short-form content that they need to block out most of it to get through their day, and a good portion of it goes unseen.

Content pieces lacking in word count, especially anything under 300 words, are not going to be SEO superstars (fun fact: the average blog published on Wordpress is just 280 words long). Google rewards rich content that is informative and educational with high rankings. Content with higher word counts generally dive deep into a topic, while short-form only provides surface-level understanding. Additionally, long-form content is more likely to generate back-links from other websites, signaling to search engines that a piece of content is a great read and should be ranked higher.

A study found that the average word count for content ranked in the top 10 Google search results is more than 2,000 words. 

When it comes to SEO, one of (if not the most) important assets in content discovery, long-form wins.

Another important content discovery asset is social media. It’s proven that long-form content is shared much more frequently across all social channels than it’s less-word-heavy counterparts. MOZ and Buzzsumo teamed up to analyze over a million articles, and they found that content with higher word counts get more shares across all social networks.

It may seem counter-intuitive to tell long stories now – when social media and bite-size content dominate the digital space and have caused significant shortening of attention spans. But long-form storytelling is making a comeback. “[It can] be a sensible antidote to the craze for the ultra-concise. When done well it can shine, providing a deeper level of engagement,” Greg Saunders, Founder and Creative director at White Label, very nicely and succinctly noted. [Source]

Chartbeat, an analytics firm that monitors a network of over 50,000 sites, has seen a significant increase (starting in 2015) in the amount of long-form content being produced – a return to “simple long form storytelling”. Parse.ly, another analytics firm, has noticed the same trend and has praised long-form storytelling for its ability to build a brand. 

How Storytelling Supercharges Long-form Content

Our collective shortened attention spans (in millennials, in particular) actually means that people are better at quickly determining what content they care about, what to spend time on and what to abandon – and people care about good stories. For proof, look to the most popular journalism properties today docu-series from Serial, VICE and HBO all produce lengthy, in-depth stories that enrapture their audiences for hours and hours.

 

A well-crafted story is timeless. A narrative that is focused on a point of view, a new idea or a person doesn’t have to be tied to an event, a trend or a product launch. A great story published in January is still a great story in October. This provides increased visibility and more opportunities for target customers to find and engage with the content over a longer period of time.

The foundation of effective thought leadership is built upon sharing content that is so in-depth and informative that it influences how your target customer perceives and thinks about a topic. This is extremely difficult to accomplish in short spurts of content and without a format that can capture and keep the attention of an audience. ?

There is a science to storytelling and its effect on readers. Humans are hardwired to remember stories, making storytelling an exceptional vehicle for disseminating thought leadership. When a reader listens to or reads a story that elicits an emotionally charged response (as all good stories do) like humour, joy or sadness, dopamine is released by the brain making it easier to remember the story with great accuracy. Science rules!

First Comes Thought Leadership, Then Comes Storytelling

Traditionally, marketers have tapped into their company’s talent pool to write thought leadership content. Founders and executives have been enlisted to author first-person whitepapers and blog posts about innovative concepts and ideas that have contributed to their success as a provider of a product or service. This does not make for the best stories, or even great thought leadership. The source of thought leadership doesn’t have to be a prominent individual, and thought leadership should never outright sell or advertise.

Thought leadership is an indirect type of content marketing that – when executed properly – creates prestige for the companies that produce it because it establishes a brand as a topical expert. Effective thought leadership provides the best answers to the questions that a brand’s customer has – and also the questions they maybe didn’t know they had until an answer was presented to them. It provides the information that customers need to do their jobs better, generate sales pipeline, live a happy/healthier life – whatever the topic may be.

The answers can and should be backed by original research and a wide breadth of experience dealing with the topic – and applied to form a new and fresh point of view about one topic. Before a brand can start telling stories, they need to determine what topic to own and which questions they need to answer – and how to answer – in order to build trust and authority with an existing and target customer base. This process includes:?

• Talking to customers and doing market research to find out what they need help with
• Conducting original research to find the best answers to these questions (surveys, interviews, data-mining, etc.)
• Crafting a point-of-view or taking a stance on how to approach problems, find solutions, etc. (this should fit within the framework of a company’s mission/core purpose)

A point-of-view backed by original, in-depth research signals to customers (existing and prospective) that a brand is insightful, knowledgeable, and would be a great partner to work with and buy from – elevating a brand above it’s competition.

Types of narratives that work with this approach include stories about people that have applied a brand’s original idea to get from point A to B, using original research to tell the history of a specific topic and using owned data to tell a story that forecasts what’s next.

Before diving into the elements required to craft a long-form storytelling and how to merchandise this content, let’s examine a real-life example of a brand’s ability to strengthen thought leadership using long-form storytelling.

How American Express Uses Long-form Storytelling to Build Thought Leadership

The Small Business Expert

 American Express was a brand publisher long before it was trendy. OPEN Forum is a website that the brand launched way back in 2007 – it features blog posts, videos, and long-form guides that aim to help entrepreneurs make better decisions as they navigate the small business world. Content is organized into four main sections: planning for growth, managing money, getting customers, and building their team. These are the areas in which small business owners need help the most. The site serves as a helpful resource and companion to American Express’ small business offerings of charge and credit cards.

OPEN Form also serves as a great foundation for experimenting with rich, in-depth storytelling, which has strengthened the brand’s reputation as the expert in all things small business.

The brand regularly produces long-form, engaging digital storytelling. Its series “Local Business Stories” showcases small businesses that are making an impact in their respective communities.

The stories featured in this series are well over 1,200 words each. They are well-thought out, beautifully written, fully-formed journalistic stories of the highest quality. The user-experience is top-notch as well – with multimedia (images and videos) included to provide an interactive element to the story.

Why “Local Business Stories” Works

Being a small business owner isn’t always easy. A lot of entrepreneurs learn on the job, and a lot of them learn from other small business owners. Enter: Local Business Stories by American Express.

By sharing the stories of small business owners with other small business owners, the brand is providing the content that a.) its target audience wants b.) helping small businesses learn from the success of others c.) establishing itself as they brand that knows everything there is to know about running and owning a small business.

In terms of narrative arc, American Express has successfully found the right content, plot, structures, and narrative devices that bring its thought leadership to life. There are common elements within each story:

A Beginning – Exposition: This includes a description of community in which the small business resides, backstory of the small business’ conception/why the company exists and a profile of the entrepreneur.

Middle – Climax: How the small business found its place within it’s small community and endeared itself, how any adversity was overcome and soundbites from regulars.

End – Conclusion: Future plans for continued success.

American Express is featuring its target customers – not its products or services – as the protagonist of each story. An important element is creating and maintaining thought leadership through storytelling is building trust and expertise without advertising or selling. By featuring customer stories in such depth, American Express is showing (not telling) that it understands its customer base, their needs, struggles and what they need to be successful.

Along with rich, unique and personal stories like “Local Business Stores”, American Express also provides tactical how-to content and guides for small business owners – perfectly rounding out the brand’s Open Forum credibility as a trusted resource for entrepreneurs and solidifying American Express as a small business expert.

The success of “Local Business Stories” inspired the recent launch of a new series,“Growth Stories,” which showcases the emerging businesses and nonprofits that have set up shop in Ponyride, a 30,000 square foot building in Detroit’s Corktown Area.

The Elements that Make A Thought Leadership Story Great

 Emotions, Humans Like Emotions

 Emotions make storytelling an effective marketing tool. Using a narrative to elicit emotion about a certain topic can influence perspective and build trust, too.

Stories with emotional content actually perform better than content without. In fact, two professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, teamed up to figure what causes some stories to go viral. They studied over 7,000 articles from the digital archives of The New York Times to determine what type of content made some articles more popular than others.

The professors found that articles with some emotion outperformed the articles with none. Happy articles performed much better than sad articles. They concluded that the more positive a story was, the higher the likelihood of going viral.

The Familiar Three-Act Narrative Structure

The three act structure is a basic structure used in storytelling – it includes a beginning, middle and end:

Act 1: This is the where the premise of the story is solidified, the scene is set and characters are introduced.

Act 2: This is usually the lengthiest portion of a plot, and where the character faces adversity – emotional, physical, philosophical, etc. Classically (and this doesn’t always need to be applied within the context of content marketing) the character tries and fails to overcome adversity once or twice before succeeding.

Act 3: The final act is the turning point of a story – the resolution. Wounds are healed, battles are won, etc., etc.

The Seven Basic Plots

Christopher Booker released a book in 2005 called The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. Booker theorizes that there are really only seven plots that most stories utilize. He also suggests that a story’s character always, always, always needs to go on a journey (sometimes a literal journey, and sometimes a metaphorical journey). For example, American Express’ “Local Business Stories” generally all fall under the “Rags to Riches” plotline.

The seven plots are:

1. Overcoming the Monster: The monster isn’t always literal, but the character must defeat an adversary.
2. The Quest: In which a hero must set out to perform a task.
3. Tragedy: A protagonist who wants something so desperately that they will suffer greatly to gain it.
4. Rebirth: Similar to tragedy, but an outside force intervenes and allows the character to change their ways before hitting rock bottom.
5. Romance: Soulmates meet, are ripped apart, unite, happily ever after.
6. Voyage and Return: The hero finds him/herself in a strange land where everything is different, and they must make sense of this upside down world to get home.
7. Rags to Riches: A Cinderella story.

Great Design + User-Experience

The advancement of digital technologies has quickly and drastically evolved how long-form stories are told – and designed. User-experience has become just as important as content quality.

Now, content creators can now be extremely creative in delivering immersive and interactive storytelling experiences that combine rich text and multimedia elements. Interactive content experiences are capturing and engaging audiences for both journalists and brands.

The catalyst of long-form, immersive digital storytelling was published in 2012, when The New York Times introduced “Snow Fall,” the story of the Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. The story combines text, graphics, photography and looped video in a parallax scrolling form. Within six days, the article received more than 3.5 million page. Snowfall was one of the first editorial examples that combined these elements of multimedia, and readers loved it. They felt immersed in the story and found it more exciting than the traditional alternatives.

Many heralded the piece as ‘a new medium’ and ‘the future of web storytelling’. They were right.

Other publications quickly followed, like Pitchfork, a music publication that created a series of multimedia interviews as part of their ongoing “Cover Story” section.

With mainstream publications taking on the format and finding great success, it has been adopted by brands, even those that don’t have the same level of interactive and graphics manpower (like the American Express example above). Since Snow Fall’s launch and the widespread adoption of the format, many tools have hit the marketplace that make it easy for marketers to turn long-form content into immersive digital experiences. Scroll Kit, for example, popped up right away. The company who developed a visual online editor that allowed users to recreate a slightly less advanced version of Snow Fall’s design in just one hour, was acquired by WordPress.

ScribbleLive’s new feature, aptly called Storytelling, provides content teams (both media and brands) with a quick, easy and templated way to create long-form, immersive content experiences – that can be updated in real-time.

In Conclusion

Great long-form storytelling, enhanced with immersive experiences, stands out in a world of snackable content. The return of simple, long-form storytelling bodes well for creating content that positions a brand as a thought leader on a chosen topic integral to building customer trust within its vertical.

 Adopting the familiar narrative devices of exposition, conflict/climax and satisfying conclusion provides a content framework that is easy for content creators to work within – and for readers to hook into and understand. ?

 And now, technology exists that empowers content teams to tell great stories and create top-notch immersive experiences.