Marketing and its little brother advertising are all about storytelling. It doesn’t matter if you are talking about a display ad for a magazine, a Web-video for your website, or your complete website, if it doesn’t tell a story then it’s not going to do the job. When people asked us what we did, we used to tell them we were a website design firm that specialized in audio and video, today we tell them we are corporate storytellers. If you aren’t telling your story you are not going to meet your marketing goals.
If you want to know how to tell your corporate story well, or even if you want to hire someone to do it for you, you at least need to know what makes a good story; and the best place to learn is the home of storytelling, Hollywood.
Over the next little while, when time permits, I’ll post a tip on how to tell your corporate story with a few ideas lifted from Blake Snyder’s book, “Save The Cat.’ Blake is a successful Hollywood screenwriter and his books provides a lot of inspiration for aspiring screenwriters, but if you are like me and see marketing as the Art of Storytelling, then you can learn a lot about how to create Web-marketing videos and complete marketing websites that effectively deliver your marketing message and help you meet your business goals.
Movies are made up of scenes or ‘beats.’ The average movie has about forty of these scenes. In order to organize these scenes, screenwriters describe each scene on a 3×5 index card with color-coded notations. The important thing for us as crass commercial business people intent on selling our products and services is that each card is a story in and of itself. Think of each card as a commercial or a specific product or service you sell. If you string a bunch of these together, one for each product or service, you have a multimedia website that tells your marketing story.
In ‘Save The Cat’ Snyder refers to colleague Robert McKee who has a technique that he uses that you may want to consider next time you are thinking of initiating a marketing campaign. McKee uses two notations (+/- and >
