Top 3 Reasons Why You Should Be Using WordPress
The first thing to think about when it comes to creating your new website shouldn’t be what it is going to look like but rather what you are going to use to build it. There are a couple of website builders people tend to gravitate towards when building their first website, those being Wix and Squarespace. While these do offer their own benefits, there are a few reasons why WordPress should be your first choice. Here’s our top 3: 1 – Easy to use and customise These simple website builders offer basic features for people who aren’t experienced in web design to build a website quickly. While these options may seem cheaper and easier at first, where these website builders fail is when it comes to expanding on your website with additional functionality and accessibility options. Something a website should do as your business evolves. This is where WordPress comes in, its ever-expanding library of plugins and themes far surpasses that of any other site building platform out there. How we’ve done this for a client – We built Woodstock Day Nursery a new website in a user-friendly website builder. This means that staff can make changes to the website themselves which is important to them as a busy small business. Once the website was completed, we delivered a training session for the staff to make sure they can use the website builder to make any changes they need to. It’s worth mentioning that 30 minutes of website changes are included in our website maintenance package. So even if you can do most of the changes, anything you can’t do we can do for you as part of the monthly fee for keeping the website secure. 2 – Security When you are building your new website you want to be sure that it is protected against malicious attacks. This is where the multitude of security plugins available on WordPress come into play. One popular example is Wordfence, a plugin which periodically scans your website for issues and security breaches. It can also send you notifications when users log in to your website. This can help you figure out who is accessing your website and when exactly they did it. How we do this for clients – Whenever we have a maintenance agreement with a client we always ensure that we add security plugins to the website. This is to ensure that the site is protected against malicious and harmful attacks. These attacks often include creating a backdoor into your website for unauthorised users to access, defacement of the website and slowing down the load times of the website. While these security plugins aren’t guaranteed to stop everything, they do protect against the vast majority of attacks. 3 – Data Data portability isn’t often something people think about when creating a website but it definitely should be. Being able to export your whole website and move it seamlessly to another location such as a new domain is a massive timesaver, and WordPress makes this very simple. Other website builders such as Wix make this process much more difficult than it needs to be, as they don’t want you to take your website away from their servers. This means that you can’t export your website to another host if you are unhappy with the service they are providing. Flexibility is what WordPress is all about. Being able to design your site how you want, with the ability to move it to a new domain in an instant, all while making sure your site is secure. What more could you ask for! How we do this for clients – We use WordPress for all of the websites we build and this allows us to easily transfer a whole website onto another URL. The huge benefit this has is that the website ‘in progress’ is a live site so it looks exactly how it will look when it’s transferred to the main URL. Rather than having to view the site in an editor which may not be showing you exactly what your site will look like when you hit ‘publish’. Personally, we couldn’t recommend WordPress enough. If you want to find out more about why you should be using WordPress give us a call on 01903 686858 or email our web development team at web@constructivemarketing.co.uk See below for some examples of websites we’ve built for a variety of clients. Clicking on one will take you to the site:
3 Easy Things You Can Do Right Now To Improve Your Social Media Marketing
As we head into 2024, you may be looking for quick wins you can do to get your social media marketing off to a good start in the new year. In honour of National Mentoring Month, we wanted to give you three easy things you can do to do just that. When we’re delivering social media training, we always like to give people a couple of ‘constructive nuggets’ that they can come away with and implement straight away. Which is what we hope you get from this blog post. So, without further ado, here’s what we suggest: Use authentic photo and video One of the things we see time and time again with all our clients is that when we use authentic photos and videos in their posts, they get a lot more engagement. With most of us having smartphones with fantastic cameras on them, getting quick snaps of the work you’re doing has never been easier. If what you do involves improving a space, a great thing to do is get a photo before you start work and a photo after – preferably from the same spot. This will allow your social media audience to see your work and compare the results. Which acts as a great portfolio for you and is something you can easily implement into your posts for better engagement. Make sure you’re using your banner photo space A mistake we see all too often is businesses not using the banner photo space they have on their Facebook, X or LinkedIn profiles to showcase what they do. This is something that can be easily fixed with a great photo of your product or service that will act as a centrepiece for your feed. As an example; you could use a before and after photo – as we suggested in our first tip – to really demonstrate what you do. There are free versions of image software like Canva that allow you to make sure that your photos fit in the given space. Which will ensure it crops well and is easily visible. Use hashtags properly If your business is on Instagram, X or LinkedIn, hashtags can be a powerful tool to help you reach the right people. Next time you write a post for your business, try to include hashtags that are: It’s important to make sure that you don’t overuse hashtags and keep them relevant to the audience you want to reach to maximise their potential. If you’re already doing these things and your business is still struggling to benefit from social media, it might be time to speak to our social team. They will be able to help identify where you’re going wrong and establish a social media strategy that works for your business. Give us a call on 01903 686858 or email social@constructivemarketing.co.uk.
Content Trends To Look Out For In 2024
And how your business can start maximising them now! As 2023 draws to a close, it’s important to be looking ahead at 2024. Over the last few years, the content marketing industry has been growing rapidly and 2024 will be no exception. Statista predicts that by 2026, the industry’s revenue will reach $107 billion. The short of it is, if you’re not yet using content marketing as a tool to grow your business, you’re missing out. The good thing is that it’s never too late to start and with a new year on the horizon, now is the perfect time to get going. As content marketing specialists, we understand that the term ‘content marketing’ covers a huge amount of topics, techniques and theories. So, what should a business be paying attention to most as we head into 2024? To make things easier, we’ve listed the top three content marketing trends of 2024 and how your business can make the most of them now: 1. Video marketing We know you’re probably not surprised to see this at the top of our list. Video marketing has been growing exponentially over the last few years and it’s only going to get bigger. This is mainly due to the shift in just how much video content is produced and consumed everyday. At one time, video marketing mainly referred to online content with the exception of TV ads. Now, businesses are using other channels like DOOH (Digital Out Of Home) billboards to reach their target audience with video marketing. Video personalisation We’re also likely to see more personalisation come to video marketing. In previous years, personalised content was something that wasn’t used for video, but in 2024, it’s thought that this will be explored more. Businesses will likely be capitalising on it as a way to form a better connection with consumers. Short form videos These short, ‘snackable’ videos have become one of the most consumed forms of content in the last year or so and this is only set to grow further into 2024. Businesses have rightfully begun to use this form of content as a way to reach their target market and the need to do this is only growing. How can my business use video marketing? We often work with businesses that are reluctant to jump on the video bandwagon as they feel that a video can’t be made from what they do. This really isn’t the case! Video marketing doesn’t have to be something that’s scary to do, if you’ve already got photos of the work you do or the product you make, you already have the content you need to make a video. With a few clever animations, you can really capture an audience’s attention. Don’t have the time to put it together? We can help. Even if the work your business does is very hands-on, you mostly likely have an HD video recorder in your pocket. Just taking one minute to film what you’re seeing on the job, or a quick demonstration of a completed job filmed on your phone is more than enough to be getting on with. Just recently, a client of ours sent through a video of a product they had just installed in action and it has quickly become their most engaging post on LinkedIn. 2. User-Generated Content Authenticity and credibility have only increased in importance and will continue to do so well into 2024. This is mainly due to a societal shift in being less trusting post pandemic (when the public was most vulnerable) and the economy experiencing a shrinkage post pandemic. Both causing people to be extra careful with where and how they spend their money. With more and more information available for consumers to inform their buying decision, the process is taking longer. As a business, it needs to be a top priority to build consumer trust and make sure that you’re the business that consumers choose. Which is where User-Generated content comes in; the easiest and possibly the most effective way to build trust among consumers. What is user-generated content and how can I use it? User-generated content is as it sounds, content that has been produced by a user/ consumer. The most common form of this type of content is reviews and testimonials. By managing the community engagement your business receives through its marketing channels, you’ll be able to create a sense of belonging and trust among your consumers. Customer reviews are paramount We always tell our clients that one of the most powerful things you can do is collect customer reviews. These are like gold dust and serve as a good conversion tool as 47% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family. The amount of reviews a business has can also influence how trusted it is among potential customers. Sharing customer reviews with your target market is a great way to use user-generated content and make for a great social media post too! 3. Meaningful content Something we’ve always said is the principles of marketing stay the same, it’s the channels in which we practise these principles that evolve. Meaningful content making it on the content marketing trends list for 2024 is proof of that. While it’s always been key to produce content that resonates with your target audience, it is now more important than ever. As we’ve mentioned, consumer trust has declined so it’s never been so important to make sure the content you’re putting out builds that trust with your potential customers. That, paired with the fact you’ll need to stand out among the rest of the noise, means that meaningful content is certainly going to be a trend for 2024. How can I create meaningful content? Understanding your audience is the only way to make meaningful content that resonates with them. Think of it like giving a gift, how can you give someone a gift they’ll like if you don’t know them that well? Understanding your target audience
Why Content Consistency Gets Great Results
Spending big advertising budgets with little ROI? Here’s how content marketing can help It can be tempting to want to spend big on digital advertising, but in our experience, it often overpromises and under delivers. At Constructive Marketing, we consistently produce high quality content to achieve clients’ business goals – and it works What is good content? Before we dive into why it works and the results we’ve achieved for clients, it’s important to understand what we mean by good content. What you think is a good piece of content may not be what your ideal customer is looking for and therefore may not resonate with them. Resulting in you not getting the results you want. We have written a whole blog post on what makes good content, but in short you need to ask yourself these three questions: We dive into these three questions deeper in our blog post so it’s well worth a read to help you improve on your own content. Why does good and consistent content work? There are two main reasons that good and consistent content garners good results, the first is that by consistently providing good content to consumers, you build up a good relationship with them. Which builds their trust in you and ultimately converts them in one way or another. Whether that be to sign up to receive more content from you. Or for them to purchase a product/ service from you. The second reason it works is because the algorithms love consistent quality! LinkedIn, for example, shows companies/ users that post consistently at the top of other user’s news feeds. With users spending an average time of just 7 minutes on the platform, you’ll want to make sure your content is near the top of their feed to increase the chances of it being seen. It’s important to remember that consistent doesn’t mean constant so it’s important to only commit to an amount of posts a week that you can stick to. Whether that’s once a week, twice or even three times a week. Whatever it is, making sure you can stick to it is the key. You also need to bear in mind that posting consistently isn’t a quick fix, but you will see results after a short time. As long as you’re consistently posting good quality content that resonates with your audience. In our experience, it’s like a snowball effect – once the ball starts rolling, it quickly picks up pace! Client success stories It wouldn’t be right for us to preach about being consistent with good quality content if we hadn’t seen fantastic results from it. So here are a couple of success stories we’ve had within the last six months. Propelling Cheesmur’s reach We are really proud of the fantastic success we’ve achieved with Cheesmur’s LinkedIn page. Over the last three months (July-October 2023), the page has had way over 27,000 impressions and has an engagement rate of 88%. Which is 84.5% above the average engagement rate for LinkedIn company pages. Earlier, we mentioned the snowball effect and Cheesmur has definitely experienced that with their follower growth having an increase of 8.5% when compared to the previous three months. Now, Cheesmur is consistently reaching, on average, over 300 construction professionals every day on LinkedIn alone and it’s thanks to consistent posting of good quality content. For Cheesmur, this means our content team works with the contracts Director and site managers to receive information about current projects. Which our team then turns into engaging social media and Google posts. We also develop the more detailed projects/ topics into long form content for their blog. All of which improves both their brand awareness through multiple channels; social media and Google. You can read the full Cheesmur case study here. Getting Admor on Google’s page one without spending a Google budget With our expert knowledge, we were able to take Admor’s budget and make sure that the content we produced for them was placed in the right place to achieve their goals. The result was that their dental software website moved to page one of Google and they began to get more traction on social media. You can read more about the initial stages of the strategy in the case study. Since then, Admor has trusted us with looking after their other brands. So we’ve implemented a content marketing strategy that spans across all three of their brands. The new strategy has only been in place a month (September-October) and has already achieved way over 285 impressions. With an engagement increase of 4,200% when compared to the previous period (July-August), we think it’s safe to say that encompassing all of their brands into one strategy has been a success. Let us help you too! We would love to help you implement a strong content marketing strategy to help you achieve your business goals too. Give us a call or email us letting us know what it is you’re looking to achieve. So far, we’ve helped businesses increase brand awareness/ engagement, sales and even helped over 20 become award winning!You can read more of our case studies here.
KIP: Branding
What is a brand? Why is it important and how can you start managing yours? One of the things that we do for clients is manage their brand reputation to make sure that they are represented in the correct way across all marketing channels. This can take a variety of forms as every channel requires different management. In this Knowledge Is Power article, we’ll be taking a deeper look into branding. We’ll explain what a brand is and give examples of the ways in which we manage our clients’ brands to give you a better understanding of how you can be managing your own. What is a brand and why do I need one? We hear the word ‘brand’ being thrown around a lot, but what really is it and why is it important to have one? In short, a brand is the identity of a business or ‘the sum of how a product or business is perceived by those who experience it’. The most important thing to remember about a brand is that it is one of the things that separates you from your competition. It also helps you to build a strong relationship with your customers. Both of which are very important when it comes to establishing yourself in your market. How to manage your brand When talking about branding, people often think about the huge international ones like Coca-Cola or Amazon, but every business has the opportunity to have a brand – including yours. There’s lots of components to a brand, but we’re going to be looking at brand personality and the elements you need to think about in order to manage it. As well as real examples of how we put theory into practice at Constructive Marketing. Be consistent As we’ve mentioned, a brand is a way for you to differentiate yourself from your competition. As such, it should be recognisable among others. The key to this is consistency with everything that you do. From the quality product or service you provide to the customer service and of course, your communications. There are two main elements of communication that people will recognise most – your visuals and your copy. Consistency with your visuals can be achieved by adopting brand guidelines and sticking to a template for social media posts. If it’s difficult to stick to a template for social posts, simply using your logo on all the images is a good idea so that consumers recognise it’s your business. Not to mention that by exposing your target audience to your logo, you will be reinforcing your brand to them. How we do this for clients For Cheesmur, we developed branded social icons that we use across all platforms for specific post types. For instance, if we’re posting about a finished project, we’ll use the ‘Cheesmur project complete’ logo. By doing this, a style can be established which allows Cheesmur to be recognised in people’s news feeds. Posting consistently with this style allows the Cheesmur brand to be reinforced to its followers. It also shows their target audience that they are actively working on and completing projects. Manage the tone of voice Although visuals are recognised quicker, the way your writing sounds when you’re representing the business is also important. A lot of people like to think of a brand as a personality and so the tone of voice in text is important. It’s how your business sounds and it needs to align with your brand values. Make sure that the copy you write for all channels is consistent to reinforce your brand and make it recognisable. That’s not to say that the message has to stay exactly the same on every channel as the audience will differ slightly from channel to channel. How we do this for clients Take Wall Bros as an example; the message we’re communicating for them is that they’re local flooring experts that have extensive knowledge on flooring. They also deliver high quality customer service and are traditional in their approach (they don’t sell online). We don’t explicitly say these things, but we convey that message in different ways across channels: The thing that stays consistent across all channels is of course the tone of voice. Which is warm and friendly. Hopefully seeing our breakdown of the different channels and what we do on each of them demonstrates to you how your messaging can be communicated through different channels in different ways. Making sure you’re managing your brand personality is integral to a marketing strategy and helps you achieve your goals. If you’re struggling with managing your brand, or you need help establishing a marketing strategy, get in touch. Our team of marketing specialists are on hand to give you the help that you need.
Telling Your Story In The Right Way
What is good content and why is it important? Over the last couple of years, the importance of good quality content has become really apparent. With Google changing its algorithm to favour helpful content and other search engines following suit, it’s important to make sure your content is up to scratch to maintain and even boost your ranking . What is good content? Algorithms are constantly changing which can make identifying good content seem like a daunting task. But there are some key principles that don’t change. So here’s three questions to ask yourself to determine whether your content is good: Is it relevant to your target audience? The age old rule for marketing is ‘know your audience’ and the same goes for content. You need to make sure that the content you’ve created is relevant to the audience it’s for. Which is what the search engines are looking for – they’re delivering the most relevant content to their users. Even if the content is ultimately selling your product or service, you need to make sure that it adds value to the audience. Is it original? There are billions of content pieces out there now so of course it is difficult to be completely original. But it is important to put your own spin on someone else’s idea to keep your content original. It’s also important to make sure that the exact same content hasn’t been posted elsewhere. This is especially important if working with AI platforms like Bard or ChatGP as these platforms mine the internet for answers to your questions. Always remember that whatever they produce, it won’t be original and it could be from out of date sources. Search engines hate duplicate content so publishing duplicate content will have a negative impact on your rankings and could see your website being downgraded. Is it focused? What we mean by that is, is it part of a bigger strategy? Moving away from just thinking about external factors, the content needs to be beneficial to your business. It should be helping you reach your business goals and align with your company’s objectives. Being part of a bigger strategy also means that it is not just a stand alone piece of content as, like with all marketing activity, consistency is key. How good content can help your business Unlike other ways to market your business, content can support your customers through every stage of the customer journey. Being such a versatile tool for businesses means that it can help your business in a variety of areas. Here’s just a few of the things we have achieved for our clients as a result of improving their content marketing: Less bounce rates and longer website session time By creating good quality content, target consumers are spending more time on our clients’ websites. Increasing their engagement with consumers and working to convert them into paying customers. Improved brand awareness Establishing a strong content marketing strategy has meant that our clients have improved their brand awareness. Making sure that the content that they put out reflects positively on their brand and firmly establishes brand messaging Built better relationships with customers Content marketing isn’t just about obtaining new customers, it’s also about improving your business’s relationship with existing ones. By creating engaging and consistent content, our clients have built better relationships with their customers. It’s these customers that become advocates for the business and ultimately refer new clients to you. Start reaping the benefits of a good content marketing strategy now. Get in touch with us to find out how our team of experts can help you achieve your business goals.
Introducing Constructive Marketing
All businesses need to evolve and move forward… It’s exciting times at our HQ in Lancing. No business should ever stand still and for us, as Seaside Creative, we recently decided to rename the company and become Constructive Marketing. The name might be different but not everything is changing as, for the most part, we’re the same company offering the same expertise. We’re even keeping a beach hut in our logos as people love them so much. Why change the name? Seaside Creative started as a small agency offering full service marketing expertise, mainly to SMEs in the local area. In the beginning we worked for a wide variety of clients covering; retail, care, restaurants, hair and beauty, pharmaceutical, property and construction. This was mainly because the Seaside Creative team provided different services to different industries – such as photographing a production line and then writing technical articles for construction firms – sometimes on the same day! Lockdown was hard for the agency, just like it was for most businesses, with many clients pausing services for significant amounts of time. But it did give us time to really assess what worked best. What we realised was that the industry where we had supplied the widest variety of expertise and achieved the most success for clients was construction. It was also one of the few industries that continued to thrive during the Pandemic. Seeing this as an opportunity to grow the business, we decided to focus our efforts on becoming known as a specialist in marketing for companies involved in the construction industry. Fast forward to today and the agency now has over a dozen construction clients from across the South East. With a growing reputation as construction marketing specialists, it made sense to change our name to better reflect that. We still have clients that are not in the construction industry, which is why we think the name ‘Constructive Marketing’ works really well. The meaning behind Constructive Marketing When deciding to change the name of the business, we wanted something that was both positive and appealing to those working within, as well as outside of, the construction industry. The great thing about the word ‘constructive’ is, while it alludes to ‘construction’, it also means ‘to have a useful or beneficial purpose’. This is exactly what we aim to be for our clients, regardless of what industry they’re in. Why now? Knowing that we have been beginning to specialise in construction for the last 2-3 years may make you wonder why we’re making the change now. In truth, although focusing on construction has been creeping up, it has only really been the majority of what we do within the last year. So, in the background, our name change has been something that’s been on our minds for a while. We were just waiting for the right time to do it. Although, as most people in business will agree, there isn’t ever really a ‘right time’. Now was as good a time as any! Moving forward So, from now on, we’re Constructive Marketing. A diverse team of marketing experts ready to help you with your marketing needs. Could we help you? Give us a call on 01903 686858 or email us at info@constructivemarketing.co.uk to get in touch with the team.
Knowledge Is Power!
Having a lot of knowledge in our field is great for us, but it feels even better to share that knowledge. Which we do through various talks that we put on at different events. Just recently, we spoke to South East Construction attendees about how to make the most out of exhibiting. We also run training sessions for clients to improve their in-house capabilities. Including social media training for groups so that staff can better understand how social media works for businesses and how to plan and formulate good content. Just recently we built a new website for a client and our web designer, Liam, made sure that the client was completely happy with how to make changes themselves. While we can of course look after everything from social media to websites, we understand that sometimes it’s best for those things to be predominantly looked after in-house. Running training sessions that work for you The main aim of our training sessions is to make sure that you and your team get the most out of them. Which includes delivering them in the way that you would like; whether that’s in-person, virtually or a mixture of both. In some cases, virtual training sessions are the best way to work. Which was especially the case for one of our clients based in Suffolk! Other times, attendees prefer to be in the same room and have a more hands-on experience. Whichever way you or your team want to work, we will accommodate you. Making sure that everyone comes away with a few key takeaways that they can start implementing into their work straight away. A recent attendee said, “I had a real light bulb moment” which is exactly what we like to hear. The approach we take with our training sessions is often hands-on, we love to get the people attending interacting and trying out the skills they are learning right there and then. If you’re looking for training across any marketing sphere of expertise, we can most likely cover it. Our sessions are delivered bespoke to clients’ needs. What’s your marketing pain point? We’d love to help you! Give us a call on 01903 686858 or email us at info@constructivemarketing.co.uk.
Is Marketing Really The Most Stressful Job In The World?
And if it is, what are some easy ways to give your online presence a boost? April is Stress Awareness Month and according to careercast.com research, when asked to rate their job stress out of ten 78% of marketers rated it at seven or higher. So it’s no wonder business owners find it extremely difficult to run their marketing alongside their day-to-day job. One of the main things business owners are always trying to do is use their marketing to improve their search engine rankings. So what are some easy wins that small to medium business owners can do to maximise their SEO efforts with the least amount of stress? Here are our top three: 1. Replace images on your website One of the easiest ways to give your SEO a boost is to do some small updates on your website and replacing images is a good place to start. We recommend doing this every six months to make sure your images are up to date and to give Google a nudge to rearrange your site’s ranking. Although stock imagery is okay to use, adding authentic images of your own work or staff is best. If you don’t have any photos of your own, give us a call on 01903 686858 to speak to our team about how we can help. Top tip: On top of replacing the images on your site, make sure that the new images you add have ALT text. Search engines can’t see images so using ALT text describing the image is the only way to get that image ranked. Adding new images without ALT text will flag up as an update, but adding ALT text will also allow the search engines to understand what your image is and show it in relevant search results. 2. Make sure you’re using the right title tags While websites need to be created to be helpful to your target consumer, it’s also important to make sure search engines can read your website too. We’re certainly not saying to ‘keyword stuff’ or use other black hat SEO tactics, but what we are saying is to make sure your website is formatted correctly. The main thing to do is use Headings properly (known as H1’s, H2’s and H3’s) in the right way. These are the three main types of title tags. Although there are more, generally speaking, you’ll only ever need the first three: H1 – A title and the biggest of the title tagsH2 – A smaller heading used to title subsectionsH3 – An even smaller heading usually used for subheadings Why are title tags important for SEO? Title tags are crucial for SEO as they allow search engines to understand what content is the most important. Which, in turn, enables it to understand what the webpage is about. Since Google’s new algorithm update, it is focusing more on producing helpful results to users. Making sure that your website uses title tags correctly will help Google place your website in relevant search results. So setting aside some time to go through your website and making sure that all the right headings have the right tags could really boost your website up the search rankings. Top tip: Where you can, make sure that your H1’s include a focus keyword. 3. Update and republish old blog posts There’s a lot of pressure now to always be creating new and unique content but when it comes to SEO, this isn’t essential. In fact, re-using old content can be just as effective if you spend just a small amount of time ‘top and tailing’ it. What is top and tailing? Top and tailing simply means to write (or re-write) the start and end of a piece of written content. In this context, it means to give it a refresh and potentially make it more current. In other circumstances, you may ‘top and tail’ a piece of writing to make it more effective: Top and tailing an old piece of content will take less time than writing a whole new piece of content and it can still be used as if it’s new. So, by all means, republish it as a new blog post and talk about it through your marketing channels. If you feel it’s appropriate, you can explicitly say that the ‘new’ article is an updated version of a previous article. Just like we did with our networking blog post. If you’re finding that you just don’t have the time to try these quick wins, it might be time to ask for some help with your marketing. Which is where we come in! Give our marketing experts a call on 01903 686858 or email us at info@constructivemarketing.co.uk to find out how we can help.
Why Marketers Need To Be Good Storytellers
The art of storytelling is something that goes back thousands of years. What began as the simple use of verbal instruction to facilitate survival, evolved with the use of imagination and shadows thrown up by the fire inside cave dwellings. The first documented story known by historians is the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating back to 2700 BC. With storytelling so ingrained into who we are, it’s no wonder that we respond so well to them. Most of us have childhood memories of being read stories, particularly at bedtime, and even as we get older, hearing someone tell a funny story about their day can keep us gripped. Forbes released an article at the start of this year which stated that science shows that humans have massive capacity for sustained attention and storytelling unlocks it. Which is why it’s so important for marketers to be good storytellers. Just as it says in the Forbes article; ‘although it was debunked, the statement that -humans have an eight-second attention span-, scared marketers’. Now, one of the most talked about things in the marketing world is how quickly can we get our message across to avoid losing the consumers’ attention. The fact is, while short and ‘snackable’ content becomes increasingly popular, you can keep your audience hooked for much longer with a good story. Why is storytelling important in marketing? While we now understand that good storytelling can keep an audience gripped, why is it important in marketing? Well, the main aim of telling a story is to get a message across and it’s the same with marketing. If marketers can hone their storytelling skills, they’ll be able to retain the attention of their audience and ultimately get their message across in an effective way. With the audience being able to recall the information too. Giving your information in the form of a story helps people retain the information and recall it later. A study was conducted where students had to remember 12 words. Half of the group had 2 minutes to simply study the list while the other half had 2 minutes to create a story that contained all of the words. 93% of students who created a story remembered the words, while only 13% of students who tried to just memorise the words could recall them. How to use storytelling in marketing Trying to find a way to incorporate storytelling into your marketing efforts can seem hard at first. After all, you don’t want to be starting your next Instagram post with ‘once upon a time’! Here are some simple ways you can start using storytelling in your marketing to create a better connection with your audience and ultimately ensure that your message gets across to them: Write case studies Case studies are a great way to showcase the amazing work that you do as well as how you helped find a solution to a client’s problem. Case studies also lend themselves quite well to storytelling as they can be written in a way that allows you to explain, from start to finish, how you helped a client/ customer. Why not begin with, ‘x client first got in touch with us and explained that they had y problem’? From there, you can talk about how you suggested a solution and ultimately executed that solution to give them the end result. Which you can then of course showcase at the end of the case study with stunning photos or even a video. Tell your business story At the end of the day, people buy people and consumers love to find out about the people behind an organisation. So telling the story of how your business came to be can be a fantastic way to start building a relationship with a potential client/ customer. Telling this story also provides you with an opportunity to talk about how much you love doing what you do. Helping you to stand out against your competitors. It can also help to establish key figures within your organisation as experts in their fields and even lead them to become industry influencers. Create a narrative When talking about storytelling, this might seem like an obvious thing, but narratives don’t have to be long stories as we typically think. Instead, a short and simple narrative can be all you need to explain your product/ service. This works particularly well when what you offer is something that people may need at a particular moment. Or if your product/ service solved a problem your ideal customer faces. Top Tip: If you do use a narrative, make sure that the main character in it is relatable to your target audience. I.e the character runs into the same problem and has the same thought process as your target audience. This is why it’s so important to know your audience – something we talk about in more detail in another blog post. The reality is, storytelling is a fantastic skill for marketers to have as it allows them to convey their message to the target audience in a way that resonates with them. If you feel that your marketing messages aren’t getting through to your audience, it might be time to change things up. If you’re looking for marketing support, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We have years of marketing experience and are specialists in the construction industry. Give us a call on 01903 686858 or email us at info@constructivemarketing.co.uk.