By Kylie Jane Wakefield
Want to be a great content marketer? Learn how to be a great storyteller first. Marketing online, or emarketing, is what small businesses must do in order to grab the customers’ attention and persuade them to buy products. As 
Bryan Eisenberg of ClickZ says, “Effective content marketing is about mastering the art of storytelling. Facts tell, but stories sell.”
A story can come in the form of a video, blog post, or photos. It can be fictional, or feature real life people. It can talk about a small business and the employees behind it, or showcase a service or product that’s being offered. The possibilities are endless. It’s up to you to decide what story to tell. Here are some tips on how to tell it.
Have a beginning, middle, and end
The essential to any good story is a beginning, middle and end that occur in three acts. If you aren’t Quentin Tarantino, you probably shouldn’t break out of the mold and produce a nonlinear story. Stick to what will be guaranteed to work. Randy Murray of Who Writes For You says that the beginning should be “latest possible moment that will allow your readers to enter into the story” and the middle is where the story unfolds, suspense builds, questions are posed, and the character is revealed. The ending needs to be “a revelation, a realization for the reader, a sudden clarity as to what has happened, and why.” Watch your favorite movie or piece of branded content. Notice the beats and actions and when they happen. Take notes and structure your story before you write it. The formula is sure to resonate with audiences.
Include an emotional hook
Your story should make readers laugh, cry, get angry, or have some sort of emotion, or else they won’t be glued to their computer screens. They will stop caring about the story if there is no emotional stake involved. According to the NMX blog, because consumers are bogged down with information, there must be an emotional hook within the first few seconds of the story. One example of emotional storytelling is Expedia’s Find Yours campaign. The campaign featured a dozen videos created by the travel company that told emotional stories about marriage equality and cancer survivors, to name a few. Shane Snow writes that the campaign “aimed to tie Expedia to feelings of boldness and discovery rather than sell plane tickets on the spot.” If you want your small business to be viewed a certain way, create a story with emotions that consumers will link back to you.
Relate to the audience
If you run a nail salon and day spa, chances are your story will want to target women. If your small business sells children’s toys, you will make a story that parents can relate to. Figure out the demographic and “Think about what is interesting to your audience as consumers and work that storyline,” says Marketing Land’s Arnie Kuenn. Does your audience use YouTube? Are they going to read a long story on a blog? These are things to consider as well.
Place a call to action at the end
Storytelling isn’t just for fun. It’s there to help sell products and services. Every story needs to include some call to action. Though it 
was nice that Kony 2012 made people cry, it also made people spend. Invisible Children, the foundation behind Kony 2012, made $10.3 million off the video. A lot of money was raised from $30 action kits featured at the end of it. You don’t have to be so extreme, but provide something at the end — a link to subscribe to your company’s e-newsletter, or a button to follow you on Twitter. That way, you’re building your subscriber list and potential customers for the future.
By using content marketing, you’ll find more traffic coming to your website. Turn those leads into sales with tips from Infusionsoft’s latest e-book.
This post Content Marketing: Telling a Story was first published on the Big Ideas Blog.