Grow With Soul: Ep. 76 Using Stories to Create Valuable, Memorable Content With Kayte Ferris
Today I’m going to share more detail about my approach to content creation, how I think about it and how I try to make it valuable and inspiring. My approach to content has changed over the last couple of years, both because content trends have changed, and because I’ve developed as a writer and learned more about what makes people tick, and click, when it comes to my content. So in this episode I’m going to share more about the story of my content progression, and the major change I’ve made.Here's what I talk about in this episode:
Major changes I have experienced with my content creation process
Discovering that people learn best when they work something out for themselves
Being selfless with my content creation for my audience’s benefit
The power of stories
How I use my experiences to help educate others
Learning that connection creates conversion and stories create connection
Links I mention:
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Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 76 of Grow With Soul. Today I’m going to share more detail about my approach to content creation – how I think about it, and how I try to make it valuable and inspiring.
My approach to content has changed over the last couple of years, both because content trends have changed, and because I’ve developed as a writer and a creator, and learned more about what makes people tick, and what makes them click. So in this episode I’m going to share more about the story of my content progression, and some of the major changes that I’ve made.
So for those of you who don’t know, I started my blog as a lifestyle blog in the summer of 2016. By the summer of 2017, I was transitioning it into being a business blog before we moved to Wales, and I left my job in the summer. So, back then, it felt very much like everyone was producing and consuming How-To content; podcasts and blogs and emails that taught skills and mindsets in a very, very practical way. Of course, I was at the start of my business, so I was really, really tuned into the How-To stuff at that time, but it also was the peak of ‘demonstrate your expertise’, and ‘serve, serve, serve, sell’, and ‘give all your good stuff away for free’ advice and rhetoric.
I always wanted to teach with my content. Go through my 2017 and 2018 blog archive, and you will see How-To after How-To after How-To. There are a few reasons for this:
It was the obvious way to demonstrate my ‘expertise’, as all the experts were telling me ‘what better way to show what an expert you are than by giving someone the method and the instructions to do something?’ Being fairly new to the scene as it were, I was keen to stake a claim in the marketing space as someone who was really valuable and had useful things to say.
I wanted to be valuable! I knew that if I wasn’t providing value with my content, then I was just more noise on the internet. I needed people to pay attention. And for me, value equalled teaching, because that’s what I was finding valuable. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would find something that wasn’t a How-To valuable, even. I thought anyone sharing that kind of content was obviously missing a trick.
Honestly, it was my ego. I was living off positive feedback, particularly at the beginning when there were no sales to live off. Whenever anybody said that what I’d written was useful, or made sense, or it worked for them, it was like receiving a gold star. I wanted to show off how much I knew, how clever I am, and the best way to do that was by talking about everything I knew in almost a textbook style. That might be a little bit harsh on my early writing, but it was super, super factual.
Typically, I can’t remember the exact situation or where I heard it, but at some point I heard someone say that people learn best when they work something out for themselves. The fact that the moment of hearing that information escapes me suggests that I probably dismissed it as inconvenient at the time, but somehow it really latched onto my brain like a limpet, and it wouldn’t let go. As I went about creating content and products, it kept popping up in my head as a little reminder.
Now, I didn’t like the idea at all. It felt unnervingly selfless. How would people know it was me that helped them, if all I did was help them work it out for themselves? How will they see the value in what I do, and what they paid for, if it’s not obvious what I actually did? People are paying for results and for answers and helping them to figure it out for themselves feels like a cop out. As with most things that we resist, the real issue was ‘how do I even do it?’ That little parasite phrase had stuck with me because, deep down, I knew it was true, and I wanted to help people in the best possible way. One of my core principles is to make sure people can have sustainable long term methods that work for them. I didn’t know if I was a sophisticated enough creator to make a thing that helped people work things out for themselves.
I began to realise that I was learning through stories. Watching Brené Brown’s Netflix special, I worked out the lesson in the story about swimming with her husband a few minutes before she got to the punchline of that story. On podcasts when people were sharing their journeys, I could join all the threads together to the big turning point that was coming in the story before they described their own realisation. It’s like watching a murder mystery programme, when the killer is revealed and you were right all along; you just feel like this superior criminal materemind, and you get that same proud feeling when you work out the lesson in the story. And that happiness, that feeling, that pride, only serves to solidify the knowledge in your brain.
The other link with murder mysteries (and I didn’t realise there’d be this many when I started this metaphor) is that it’s enjoyable. Stories grab our attention, and they pull us in, and they entertain us, and crucially, for our marketing, that keeps attention. You don’t need to be throwing out all the bells and whistles and everything that you know, because your reader and your listener will just want to know what happens next.
Up here in my local town is Gloster’s Pottery, and Myfanwy shares the trials and tribulations of running the shop and the workshop on Stories. If you are listening, Myf, I don’t mean this to sound like I revel in your discomfort, but your stories are kind of like my favourite soap opera, and I watch them every single day; weather it’s a kiln exploding (which I don’t think actually happened), whether it’s the stray cat, or its new glaze experiments. I always want to know what happens next. Honestly, I went for lunch with a friend pre-lockdown, and she asked if I’d been keeping up with the electrics at Glosters.
And if you’re thinking this all sounds a bit silly, remember this: in between the soap opera instalments, there are ad breaks where they show beautiful pottery, and the work they’ve got for sale on their updates sell out in minutes.
You may also remember that at the end of last year I had Elise Baha Cripe on the podcast and one of the reasons I love to follow Elise is her simple narrative way of teaching planning. On Instagram, she shares the story of a project as it unfolds, and you want to find out what happens next. Will the things she thought were going to go wrong actually go wrong? What will this idea that you’ve seen in a plan look like in reality? What will happen at the end? It’s done so simply in just a few words and an image on a story slide, but it just hooks you in. I’ve learned a lot about planning, and the mindset side of projects from Elise through this, and I’ve bought both her book and her planner.
Another reason why stories are useful for teaching is that they’re easier for us to follow. In early human development, we learned together as communities through storytelling, so our brains are literally wired to follow and learn through stories. This was brought home to me while I was reading Jia Tolentio’s essay collection called Trick Mirror. The first chapter of the first essay is a very literary one. Exactly how the writers want to write, with super smart sentences, and it’s pure idea wrangling. But that also meant it was quite hard to read, and I kept zoning out, or missing something and had to go back up the page to remind myself where I was. And actually, I can’t even remember what it was about.
But in subsequent essays she brought out the stories. She told the parallel stories of her upbringing in a Texan mega church, and the history of the development of ecstasy in an essay about the nature of faith. She also told the story of how she’d been on a reality show as a teenager, and flicked between her memories of the show, and conversations with her cast mates now. I remember being eager to see what happened next as I skimmed through the dialogue, and I began to realise this was a tale about being careful of what you wish for. I read these two chapters much more easily, I understood them, I felt smart, and I remember them.
And isn’t that what we want from our marketing content? To hold attention, to make our customer feel good, and remember us?
People routinely tell me that the coaching episodes here on the podcast are their favourites, and that they get so many takeaways from them. I always thought this was because it’s more unusual to hear people in the messy middle (or the messy beginning) on a podcast, and because the episodes are really practical. And I’m sure that is a part of it, but I realised very recently that they’re the episodes with the most story in them. We follow a narrative story arc from where they are in the beginning to where they’re going to be by the end, and we want to know what’s going to happen to get there. What will they explore? What revelations will they have? What will they decide to do at the end of the episode?
When I look through my course content or I think back to client calls, I realise that they’re littered with stories. The playbook is really a story of stories, about my experience, and what went really badly and what went really well. In basecamp and campfire, I tell the stories of other brands and how they started, or how they use their content. I use the stories of former clients to help others in a similar situation, and often I get people to write out their own story as an exercise in working out their purpose and what they really want.
So, for all my initial reticence about helping people figure a thing out for themselves, I realised that that’s what I’ve been doing all along by telling stories. And I could see that it’s true – the students who figure something out for themselves not only felt amazing, but they stuck with it. I could have taught them, I could have said ‘oh do this’, ‘write this down’, but they wouldn’t have learned the lesson. Now, when I sit down to write and plan content, I no longer think ‘what can I teach’, but ‘what story can I tell’. It’s not actually natural for me yet, because I have so indoctrinated myself in the How-To regimen, that it does have to be a very conscious intention for me to do this. When I am planning ideas or outlines, I always remind myself to think of stories to illustrate points. Even as I wrote the script for this, I was constantly putting in notes for more examples, and reminding myself to put the story before the punchline, because I wanted you to figure it out and learn it for yourself.
One thing I’ve found helps me is to keep records of examples of stories that I can pull from, just on my phone I jot down anything that I might be able to use to teach through my content in future. I find I quite often make the link in my brain between X thing happening and Y lesson, so I just need to hone the muscle that remembers to write it down.
Thinking in terms of stories and not lectures also helps to stop everything being about me all the time. Even though I was writing more about myself, I wasn’t thinking about myself, I wasn’t thinking about how I could share my knowledge or my values; I was thinking how I could help someone see their own potential or situation through a story. I stopped worrying about expertise altogether, because I just needed to be able to prompt people and give people the pieces they couldn’t get to themselves.
Earlier, I said I used to feel like I’d got a gold star, and someone said my content was useful. Now, the biggest compliment is when someone says ‘it’s as if you’re in my head’. I want my content to connect with people, I want it to stick with them emotionally, not just cerebrally. I want them to be able to read their own situations and problems and dreams in my content, so they can figure out what to do next. I want them to remember how they felt and what they went on to do. I want them to connect with me because one day they’ll buy something, or one day they’ll share something, or they’ll tell their friends. Connection creates conversion and stories create connection.