Have you ever noticed how much quicker you get distracted online than you used to?

If you do, then you’re not alone. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, our average attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2013. The most visible consequence of this has been the tendency for publishers to break online content up into ever smaller digestible chunks.

But are attention spans really shrinking in the way we think they are? The popularity of long running, intricately plotted series from the likes of HBO seem to suggest otherwise. The problem instead is one intrinsic to the online space. With online content saturation, it could be that our diminished attention spans have more to do with a growing tendency to be more selective with the content we consume online and to assess what we like and what we don’t like far quicker than we used to.

But there is one thing that has time and time again proven remarkably adept at cutting through the white noise and that’s a good story. We’re not talking Game of Thrones here, but there has been a growing trend for businesses to begin embracing the concept of using narrative in their marketing.The Power of Stories

The use of storylines in advertising has been around for some time (think Nescafe’s long running campaign that practically became a soap opera) but this need for a narrative to hold our attention has become ever more concentrated over the last decade or so with the exponential growth of content online. What people now crave are stories to help them make sense of what brands are about.

Caption: The long running Nescafe advertising campaign was an early and very successful example of creating an overarching storyline across a long running marketing campaign.

The ability to entwine emotive content seamlessly with a strong brand or marketing message is the modus operandi of all good content marketers. Creating content that carries narrative structure allows the viewer to become emotionally invested, whether that be through a comedic punchline, a heart breaking outcome or a sense of mystery, awe or even pride. The emotional spectrum that content marketers have to play with when using stories is potentially as diverse as any movie screenwriter. Employed in the right way these techniques have been shown to create far more loyalty, advocacy and ultimately enquiries and sales from consumers than content based around rational appeals, even in the information heavy B2B marketplace.

Stories don’t have to be linear either and nor do they have to be one-way. The growth of social media and mobile internet has seen marketers embrace so called non-linear marketing strategies that take advantage of different mediums and platforms to create a narrative that is more dependent on user interaction and, at times, user involvement and contribution.

Caption: Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign is a good example of a non-linear marketing campaign that encourages people to share with their friends and create their own stories.

The Death of Interruption Marketing

The rise of storytelling in marketing can be seen as part of a wider trend towards inbound marketing and a rejection of so-called “interruption marketing”; a term Seth Godin termed way back in 1998. Godin’s premise then was less about the rise of internet marketing, which was still in its infancy, and more about the growing number of distractions in our daily lives that predispose us towards a more permission based form of marketing.

“The interruption model is extremely effective when there’s not an overflow of interruptions. But there’s too much going on in our lives for us to enjoy being interrupted anymore.”

What Godin had hit upon was a growing propensity towards inbound marketing that had been subtly taking place in the mind of the consumer for thirty years. Despite evidence that it is still highly effective in driving sales, television advertising was and continues to be seen as a nuisance to many consumers. It was only with the internet revolution that a truly viable permission based model of marketing began to take shape. By the time HubSpot’s Brian Halligan coined the term “inbound marketing” in 2005, the content marketing revolution was already well underway. People didn’t want to be force fed marketing anymore, they wanted to choose when and where they would see it.

It’s impossible to ignore Google’s influence over this trend either. In 2011 the company released its Panda algorithm update that saw sites with thin content, poor quality content and high ad to content ratios start to drop in the search rankings. Various updates over the years have continued to place more emphasis on the need for higher quality content and as a result raises the bar for content creators and SEOs wanting to do well in search engine marketing.

Conclusion

With 2014 having been labelled the Year of the Story, it’s looking like the story continues in 2015. The revolution in permission marketing has taken a long time to come about but it’s already shown just how powerful storytelling can be in creating far more meaningful relationships and associations between brands, their content and consumers than cold outbound marketing could ever hope for. Effective content marketing strategy today is as reliant on a good storyline as any Hollywood movie.

About the Author: Jon Mowat is the MD and founder of Bristol based video production company, Hurricane Media. You can follow Hurricane on Twitter or Facebook or check out their award winning videos on YouTube. You can also now download Hurricane Media’s whitepaper, on how to stand out in the content soup by visiting their website.

http://www.hurricanemedia.co.uk/

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