The marketing landscape has changed over the last decade. We can not deny that new consumer information channels and the habits of Millenials and Generation Z audiences have forced marketing to find new ways to approach them. One of the largest debates is the audience attention span. We need to catch our audience’s interest in a fraction of time and story splitting is a great approach to keep your marketing team agile.
Storytelling is a method in marketing to get topics to our audience in a way that makes them feel cozy and very personal. Storytelling is the new interactive art of using words and actions to reveal selling offering elements and images along in a story while encouraging the listener’s imagination.
Now let’s take the next step splitting our story into bite-sized junks. Story splitting is an agile marketing technique that helps marketing teams to break information into consumable junks of information, easier to understand for their audience. Stacey Ackerman, who is passionate about agile marketing techniques summarized the topic on Martech in the below Infographic.
Agile Teams are Happier, Agile Teams are Flexible, Agile means you are quicker and more Productive.
Stacey uses the sample of a cake to visualize the needs of the marketing teams. Time to market or how quickly we can deliver a message to our audience is key to move fast in today’s environment. She states: Agile marketing is all about getting valuable work to customers quickly. Story splitting is exactly the way you can achieve more in lesser time by focusing on smaller junks of information. In the infographic, you can find valuable information on how to split your information into smaller pieces instead of losing your audience’s focus on the whole story at once. Let us review some of the ideas.
Length
The length of a story can impact the audience’s attention span massively. It is very logical to cut them into consumable pieces, considering breaking content into chapters seems to be a good method. Take the sample of a cake, who can eat the cake as one piece?
Audience
When we talk about the audience is it very similar to buying a suit. One suit does not fit everyone. A tailored suit is a good choice. Similar is when you adopt a chapter of a story tailored to a smaller group of audience. For marketers, this might be handy since each person might have experience with a different audience group which can then be utilized in full. Think about serving a webinar, while you would put everyone into one single room, it makes sense to gather experts together.
Channel
Not every story can be told on every channel. A TV might transport a message of a cooking show on “How to make a cake” perfect with illustration and proper sounds and vocals. While broadcasting the story of how to cook the cake across all social networks, decide to specialize on a single channel, for example, Facebook. This gives you the possibility to optimize your story on specific channel features and options. Would this violate the omnichannel approach? Well, not really. Consider to cross-market the channels as needed and directing the audience properly to the channel where your story is told.
Detail
I see the mistake happening a lot. People lost the way a story is told in multiply marketing steps. Messages vanish and the focus is dragged by making a single social media post and sequencing every single piece of information in there. Take the story in steps, separate information, education, and call-for-action.
Wrap Up
Stacey brings it really to the point. Marketers need to adjust agile business models to agile marketing methods. Marketers are asked to keep speed with the market and business more than ever before. What the pandemic over the last months showed us is the fact that agile means reacting fast on conditions of market and needs. Who wants to be a successful player needs to adopt in light speed, time to do so for marketers.
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