What are the best storytelling techniques for great content?

So you’ve got a killer content idea – possibly involving drones and fireworks and a celebrity cameo and a cover of a deep-cut Beatles track… Hey, it’s your budget! – but what’s the right format and where should you be posting it to achieve ultimate exposure?

To work that out you need to ask yourself a few questions…

• What are you trying to achieve?
• Who are you trying to reach?
• Where is your audience hanging out?
• What narrative techniques will resonate with them?
• How long do you want the campaign to live?
• Oh, and how much money do you have to chuck at it?

Very Tall work with many clients with a variety of pocket depths and, in our experience, you can have as much success with a well-placed GIF as a big-budget moving-image project.

If, for example, you want to tell the story of a music scene you can just as effectively reach your audience with a deep-dive written editorial, a targeted social video, an illustrated infographic, a short film or any other number of possible formats.

However, it’s key that you know what media best engages your audience. Oftentimes, the best tack – budget willing – is to cover numerous bases to ensure maximum reach.

So let’s say you want to put out a ‘Brief history of Grime’ story tying into a new event/release/product. From the same information pool, you could create a 60-second social video post to encourage sharing with a ‘read more’ link through to your company site and a more detailed feature on the same subject. To encourage evergreen usage, you could turn your feature into an infographic and post on your socials or simply upload the social clip to YouTube / Vimeo and re-share from there.

The main intention is, of course, to reach as many people as possible (ideally for as little spend as possible), so consider partnering up with another brand/company. Or, if you have limited reach on your own socials or website, give away the content as a limited-time exclusive to third-party in exchange for backlinks and/or a paid promotional spend.

In a nutshell, there are countless ways to get your story out there and you don’t need a lot of money to make it happen.