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Why Do Some Stories Flop and Others Fly?

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Stop me if you’ve heard this story before!

Explorers with advanced technology and great ambitions set off for a foreign land in pursuit of highly valuable resources. These explorers encounter a native tribe with a spiritual connection to the land around them. The two sides quickly arrive at an impasse. An explorer with a deep sense of empathy encounters a native who seeks to understand her tribe’s new adversaries – eventually sparking a love interest.

The explorers’ disinterest in the traditions of the natives, paired with the discovery of the budding relationship between the protagonists, leads to a heated battle. The male protagonist suffers great harm at the hands of the leader of the explorers, but he drives back the invaders and earns back the respect of the natives.

Do you know what movie I’m referring to?

Were you thinking of Disney’s 1995 classic Pocahontas, which came up short in comparison to its predecessors of the early 1990s when it came to box office and critical success?

Or maybe you were thinking of James Cameron’s 2009 epic Avatar, a project that spanned 15 years from conception to release and became the fastest movie to gross $2.5 billion in sales.

By and large, these movies share the same story arc despite different settings, characters and special effects. So if the story was the same, what made Avatar such a monumental success compared to Pocahontas? And more importantly here – what lessons can you take away when telling the story of your staffing company?

Don’t Give Up on a Good Story

Is your company engaged in an ongoing blogging campaign? Looking to past posts that generated a high number of pageviews or had a greater average time on page can bring to light certain topics that your audience was engaged with. However, if a topic you found compelling and an accurate representation of your company didn’t fare as well, it might not mean that it was an entirely bad idea. Pocahontas didn’t spawn the idea for four sequels and a theme park world, but Avatar did.

Consider the Packaging of Your Story

James Cameron wanted to release Avatar in 1999 after finishing another critically acclaimed epic, Titanic. Instead, Cameron opted to wait until technology provided the means to tell his story the way he wanted to. Bringing in actors on stilts in 10-foot-tall blue costumes with ponytails would have been a far less compelling manner to bring Avatar’s Na’vi to life compared to the motion capture and editing software popularized in the 2000s.

Say your staffing company has an engaging blog post about optimizing websites for voice search. Do you want to repackage that blog post as a video, an infographic or a Slideshare? Maybe a podcast would be a better way to showcase a topic centered around audio. Maybe five years from now, Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant will have their own native content format that could be an even better fit!

Start With the End in Mind

A strong content marketing strategy starts with identifying measurable, targeted goals and coming up with a strategy and a set of tactics to achieve those goals. Integrating your core story into every piece of content should start early in that goal-setting process.

Looking for content geared to your target audience that tells the story of your company? Or are you looking for an industry-leading social media program to take your storytelling to the next level? Haley Marketing has a team of experts ready to help your company tell its story in different mediums.

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Get our best marketing tips—one idea a week. You’ll also get invites to our webinars, and exclusive offers on our products and services.

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