Get Ahead of the Marketing Race with Storytelling & Faster Page Speed

Marketing is a race and we all want to get ahead of the game. But effective brand marketing is not only about knowing what works now, but also preparing for what’s coming in the future.

Here are upcoming trends to consider when planning out your marketing strategy.

How to Use Storytelling to Effectively Market Your Brand

At Pubcon 2016 in Las Vegas, Brent Csutoras, SEJ’s Chief Social Media Strategist, sat down with Katy Katz, Content Director at Inturact, to talk about how storytelling can be used to effectively market your brand.

Here Are Some Key Takeaways from Her Interview:

• Storytelling is telling authentic stories about your brand. You can make it more effective by telling stories about what’s going on inside your brand or things that are going on with your customers. Personalizing experiences and talking more about the stories really helps.
• The way to tell good stories is to read more and write a lot. Practice writing and doing different types of writing exercises. Storytelling can add spice to your content, even if it’s just little bits interlaced between your analogy. It can help drive emotional connection.
• There are three steps to telling good stories:
  • Speak to a real persona or target audience you’ve defined.
  • Have a beginning, middle, and end — a plot line you can think of that could have a big impact.
  • The end of your story should drive your point and your call to action.
• You can create a storybook for a more visual feel. You can also create outlines to see the flow of your story. Make sure you have something to hook people in and get them interested in what you’re saying.

For more storytelling tips, explore the following resources:

• Why Marketing Revolves Around Storytelling
• 5 Storytelling Methods to Captivate Your Audience
• 7 Tools You Need for Visual Storytelling

Improving Page Speed: From Concept to Implementation

In this interview at Pubcon 2016 in Las Vegas, Jenny Halasz, President of JLH Marketing, shares a few insights on improving page speed and the steps to take along the way.

Here Are Some Key Takeaways from the Interview:

• Start by developing a road map for what you want to achieve and how to go about that. Have an ideal goal and put in everything you want to do and develop for that goal. Then break it into pieces and prioritize what you want to implement now and what you want to implement later.
• You won’t know that page speed is a problem until it is really a problem. Ideally, your page should load in three seconds or less. But an improvement in page speed from 23 seconds to six seconds, for example, is progress. You can correlate that with improved crawl rates, improved indexing rates in terms of the number of pages actually showing up in search results, and improved positioning for some key terms.
• If your load time is six seconds, but your page renders at two seconds then you’re doing a really good thing. You’re making sure that search engines and users can see the content. The page may not be fully loaded and there may still be scripts loading in the background, but as long as render is complete, you’ve achieved the goal.
• Improving page speed is more of a journey, a constantly evolving process. You’ll see small improvements coming along with the changes you’re making as you’re making them.

For more information on improving page speed, explore the following resources:

• The Complete Guide to Speeding Up Your Content
• 11 Ways to Boost Page Load Time
• Fast Page Speed Equals Higher Profits: An Interview With Fili Wiese

Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Screenshot by Rina Caballar. Taken November 2016.