Tag : storytelling

M3 Publishing > storytelling
9Dec
marketing challenge pitchMarketing Challenge: Could You Become Pitch Perfect?
By In Marketing Strategy

Marketing Challenge: Could You Become Pitch Perfect?

At our Marketing Challenge Breakfast events, we focus on real life marketing issues and use the actual problems that our attendees face as the basis for problem-solving discussions.

At our most recent event, held at The St James’s Club, in central Manchester, our guests had a lively, roundtable discussion looking at how to re-position an events and destination management company.

Why focus on one business’ issues?

Because, by looking at what kinds of issues are involved, and with the help of our marketing partners, we can help shed a light on various aspects of business and marketing strategies.

Making it real makes it more immediate, and accessible, for our attendees.

 

Our Marketing Challenge events are multi-faceted, not only looking at one business as a case study and discussing possible solutions, but also involving everyone attending looking at how they present their own business offering

 

Striking the Right Pitch

Another major aspect to the Marketing Challenge event is encouraging attendees to think differently about how they market themselves, and even what marketing means.

For example, what do you understand content marketing to mean?  Is it restricted to material you publish or broadcast online or in print, or can it encompass your own, personal business interactions?

What about when you pitch yourself to others? How can you stand out from the crowd?

Our answer: storytelling.

 

We encourage attendees to look at different ways of talking about or introducing themselves and their business; to focus not on job titles, or overused ways of describing their service or product but using a story about the value they bring to their customers

 

What challenge did the customer face? What was the result of your help? How did this impact their business?

The idea is to boil this down to something very concise, little more than a strapline, that can hook listeners in.

When we ask our event guests to perfect their own individual story as a pitching device, we’re really asking them to create and draw on their own content, as a valuable, personal marketing resource.

 

Are You Pitch Perfect?

Our Marketing Challenge events focus on how both business and marketing strategies can work in real situations. It’s not cold and theoretical. Ultimately, it’s about people coming together to learn from each other.

If you want to attend a future Marketing Challenge event, please contact us.

Read more about our recent Marketing Challenge event by visiting Marketing Challenge Event Champions Differentiation





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31Oct
differentiationWhat is the Lasting Impact of Differentiation?
By In Content Marketing

What is the Lasting Impact of Differentiation?

Differentiation can give your business a competitive advantage with prospects and customers, but only if you choose the right kind of differentiation and you have the right marketing strategy to achieve it.

For many companies, their focus is on making minor adjustments to products to try and differentiate them in the marketplace. This is very much a “new and improved” approach.

However, it is unlikely to yield lasting results.  In fact it can become a one-hit wonder, and end up negatively impacting how target audiences perceive your brand.

There is a way to look at differentiation differently and to use dynamic content to turn it into something with lasting impact.

 

Raising Awareness and Changing Perceptions

If you tell your story powerfully and differently enough, it can help to attract your target audience while building your credibility.

This is differentiation through strategic positioning, using content marketing as the means to achieve this.

 

Good quality, properly targeted content has the potential to engage and connect with audiences and help build and shape a brand’s personality

 

This is likely to have a more lasting impact than individual product differentiation because it is about your entire brand and what it represents to your audience.

What does this involve?  It means shaping narratives that are appropriate to your target audience, and that identify with their issues, needs, fears and pain points.

 

It is crucial to creating powerful story arcs that emphasise your expertise while focusing on what your audience wants to know

 

It is a measured, consistent process of disseminating information about you, creating a positive impression of you that stays in the minds of your audience.  It is not a hard sales message, nor is it to do with publicising your achievements.

What will differentiate you is depth. The more your audience feels it knows you, the more it will feel it can trust you, and, ultimately, buy from you.

 

What Could Differentiation Mean For YOU?

M3 Media Publishing hosted one of their regular, dynamic breakfast workshops in Central Manchester, which explored how differentiation can help your business to thrive.

For more information about these events, or to book your place, please watch the video below or click here.





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13Jul
storytelling legacyStorytelling: What is Your Legacy?
By In Content Marketing

Storytelling: What is Your Legacy?

“What do you do?” How common is that question when you’re networking, or in most conversations?

And what is your answer?

Take a pause here, because you can answer that question differently, in such a way that you make people take notice.  This is about the power of storytelling and leaving a legacy that lingers in people’s minds.

This is what we explored in the most recent of our Marketing Challenge workshops, held at The St James’s Club, Manchester.

 

Contains No Nuts

Marketers will reiterate that when you promote a product or service you highlight the benefits, not the features.  The features are not always what your prospects and customers need to know. What they need to know is how what you offer them will make a difference to their lives.

That is why marketing consumer goods is all about marketing lifestyles, aspirations and emotions.

Effective storytelling follows a similar principle. You miss out the nuts and bolts and focus on the stuff that resonates emotionally.

There are two key elements here: pain and legacy.

 

Pain and Legacy

Start with the pain:

  • What problems do your customers and prospects have?
  • What issues keep them awake at night?
  • What could their long-term consequences be without your involvement?

Are they failing to maintain their profit margins, or suffering a high staff turnover? Are their energy bills too high, or their distribution channels too restricted?

Knowing and understanding these pains can be an initial attention-getter.

Then it’s about following it up with the legacy part:

  • What changes have you enabled your customers, similar to the prospect you are addressing, to make?
  • What are the long-term benefits of your involvement?

Boil this down to something concise and it is far more effective than simply telling people what you do.

 

Practical Aspects

While much marketing should be common sense, like all deceptively simple things, it can be hard to tell your stories well.  It’s as much about developing a mindset as following guidelines or rules.  This is what the first part of our recent Marketing Challenge event looked at.

 

Our Marketing Challenge events are informal and friendly, but focused.  They are events with a purpose, enabling guests to attract, connect and educate their target audiences

 

Guest were given a storytelling structure, then we lead them through a dynamic, involving workshop where they developed their legacy stories.

Our aim is to ensure that guests leave with something that not only can they think about, but which they can use to improve their own marketing and engagement with customers and prospects.

That’s our legacy. What will be yours?

 

To read more about July’s Marketing Challenge event, please click here.
To discover more about the Marketing Challenge events or to register for a future event please click here.

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31Jan
content - wordpressContent: How Can You Convert it into Business?
By In Content Marketing

Content: How Can You Convert it into Business?

Content is a serious marketing tool that can generate considerable sales results.  It is not a luxury or an add-on to your core business if, or when, you have the time or resources for it.

Content adds substance to a business’ online – and offline – presence and does so in such a way that it attracts interest.   It engages and, ultimately, helps to convert people into qualified prospects.

 

Attraction and Retention

SEO can get you ranked higher on search engines and it can encourage clicks onto your web pages.  Once you have attracted your audience to you, does your content keep them interested so that they don’t simply move onto something else?  Online attention spans are notoriously short.

Content works strategically.  It enables you to allow people find you online and, once they have found you, to want to find out more about you.  This provides you with opportunities to engage with those prospects.

 

M3 Media Publishing’s methodology is to combine high quality, powerful, content with psychological insight and the use of social media and other channels to distribute it, to attract customers

 

The essence of great content is storytelling.  This can make your brand and your business stand out from the competition, while exploring the kinds of issues and problems your customers have.

M3 Media Publishing’s sector-specific, authoritative, digital magazines publish stories that highlight business leaders’ expertise and creates powerful third party recommendations.

 

The Legacy of Successful Content

Peter Knight, is an expert property consultant, with Knight Morris.  He explains how the M3’s approach has helped his business.

“I wanted an innovative, creative and cost-effective way to raise my company profile,” he explains. “The results of my strategically-placed articles, in M3’s digital magazines, have exceeded my expectations.”

 

“M3 Media Publishing’s articles, coupled with engagement, offers an excellent return on investment.  One piece of business per year is all it has taken for us to surpass our spend with them”

Peter Knight, Lead Building Surveying Partner at Knight Morris

 

“The original content has allowed readers to explore issues that affect them and seek out my professional help and advice,” concludes Peter.

To discover how content can generate business for you, please call 0161 922 8571 or visit m3publishing.co.uk.

 

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3May
M3 and All Survey StorytellingCan Strong Storytelling Accelerate Business Development?
By In Content Marketing

Can Strong Storytelling Accelerate Business Development?

We talk a lot about the value of storytelling when it comes to engaging with an audience because we know that it works.  And storytelling has real power to open up business opportunities.

Uncovering the Asbestos Threat

All Survey is a business specialising in conducting asbestos surveys. Gemma Voaden is lead asbestos surveyor with All Survey and in this role she has built up a clear picture of the scale of the issue.

At a recent M3 Connections event, she told a story to illustrate her work and how asbestos is a potentially widespread threat. A chain of charity shops asked All Survey to inspect its stores but felt pretty confident that they were in the clear. Gemma and her team went in, and discovered asbestos in 176 of the shops. Three had to be immediately closed for safety reasons.

When she recounted the story, it clicked immediately with her audience. M3 developed and published the story and distributed it through social media.  Gemma continued to use it as a perfect example of the value in what her business does, and how asbestos surveys are very much in the public interest.

 

On the Accelerator

All Survey is one of 80 enterprises involved in the Entrepreneurial Spark business accelerator programme in Manchester. This is being run in partnership with NatWest and KPMG.

The programme recently ran a pitching competition called Acceler8 and All Survey was one of the winners. Gemma’s business is well suited to strong storytelling because it’s key subject matter, asbestos as an ongoing, hidden threat, has the potential to be immediately intriguing.

Gemma’s pitch was a bid for financial assistance in marketing All Survey so that her message about asbestos can reach key decision-makers.

“Asbestos is still around and it’s a deadly, hidden killer that kills over 5000 people per year in the UK today”, warns Gemma.  “We want to set up the first UK Asbestos Register to reach more people with this message”

 

Future Storytelling With M3

NatWest has awarded All Survey a cash prize for its successful asbestos pitch. This will help All Survey to continue its work with M3 in developing its marketing message.

 

“The team at M3 Media Publishing know about storytelling and we have compelling stories to tell”
GEMMA VOADEN

 

“Alongside Entrepreneurial Spark’s help in focusing our energies, we’ll be able to move that much closer to realising our goals”, concludes Gemma.

 

If you would like some assistance in getting your stories to your audience please contact us.  Alternatively, if you fill in your details below, one of the M3 team will get in touch.

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