Creator Stories - by Prewrite.com

Trent Anderson

Topics include: the art and science of storytelling (duh!), content creation, and the business of creativity.

  1. 02/06/2021

    Can Storytelling Shorten Your Sales Cycle?

    After the demo, what's next?  It's time to end the endless cycle of checking in sharing generic marketing content while you are in working the middle funnel. Join us for a very special ShiftHappens to explore the intersection of value drivers and strategic narratives, to help you craft "value stories". Stories win hearts and minds, and value is expresssed in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. How can we start combine the two? Join ShiftHappens on Thurs Dec 10th to explore marketing myths, define value drivers, and craft better stories to engage stakeholders. Featuring a round table workshop with Meghann Misiak,  Sales Strategist at The Path to President's Club. Trent Anderson,  Chief Operating Officer at Prewrite. Chris Ortolano, Account Strategist at Outbound Edge. Topics include: Defining Complex Problems Working with Champions to define "value" Collaborating to co-create "value stories" Walk away a template to stand apart from the competition with account specific value stories to increase stakeholder engagement. The Path to President's Club  enables B2B Sales Teams to increase close rates & ACV through value-centric sales training, coaching, & proven frameworks. Prewrite helps Marketing and Sales leaders craft a business story library to deliver stories that add value and capture the imagination. Outbound Edge develops sales process templates and diagnostic content for AM's to  increase stakeholder engagement via Account Growth plans.  Outbound Edge is a certified Membrain Partner.

  2. 12/08/2020

    The Art of Storytelling Essay [BONUS: Storytelling Exercises]

    The Art of Storytelling: Finding Your Story   We all know people who are gifted storytellers - people who can captivate a crowd with their tales. While most of these people are charismatic and have a flair for language, they also have one important quality that you don't see: they know what makes a story worth telling.   All good stories have a few elements in common: they contain interesting characters, who are involved in dramatic situations, and they all have a point, or a controlling idea. No one will be enthralled by a story that lacks these key elements.   You may already have a sense of what makes a good story, but you may not be sure where to start when crafting a story of your own. Do you start with an interesting character? A dramatic moment? An intriguing idea?   A good story should have dramatic characters and a good dramatic idea. However, when you're writing short-form content, there's a third possible starting place: the dramatic moment.    Longer-form content give you more time to explore character, to develop plots and subplots, and to suggest ideas. But in the short-form content, you need to be economic and find a quicker route to your story.    A truly dramatic moment has everything a good story needs - interesting characters in compelling situations, who are wrestling with a big idea. If a moment strikes you as dramatic, and you learn how to unpack it, you'll have all the important elements of a good story. Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XDnNwZaSmPI Follow on Twitter: Twitter.com/trentanders0n

  3. 11/27/2020

    How to Monetize Your Audience (6 Key Questions You MUST Answer)

    It’s one thing to build an audience — it’s another to monetize your audience.   There are infinite products and services you can sell, but success in doing so ultimately hinges on one thing: Alignment.   The audience you target, products you offer, and ways you position them must be in alignment with each other.   To ensure your efforts to monetize your audience are not mismatched, consider the following six questions…    1. Will you monetize an audience of the many or the few?  2. Will you sell to an audience seeking a solution or an audience who doesn’t know they have a problem?  3. Will you teach people how to do something or do it for them?  4. Will you sell something that earns or costs?  5. Will you target new money or existing spend?  6. Will you sell to people once or on repeat?

  4. 11/24/2020

    How to Effectively Use Storytelling in Your Webinars

    The death of webinars has been greatly exaggerated.   Every once in a while, someone declares webinars “over” as a viable lead generation and nurturing format.  But how can they be when nine out of 10 B2B professionals say that webinars are their preferred content type?  So maybe it’s not webinars that don’t work. It’s a tendency toward broad, boring, and overlong webinars that turns people off.  What’s going to get that 90 percent of people to show up and stay engaged with your webinar? Yup, storytelling.  Here’s how to use it:   5 ways to set up your webinar for storytelling success   1. Pick a hero. Choose one ICP to target with your webinar. It may seem more efficient to hold 1 webinar that appeals to multiple target audiences but by trying to appeal to many you end up pleasing no one.   2. Pick a niche. Now that you have the hero, focus your webinar content on one pain point your hero is interested in using or solving. Ideally, it’s one you offer.   3. Pick a point of view. Stories have conflict. So if you’re just showcasing how your product works, that’s a demo, not a webinar. Take an interesting stance. Go against an industry norm. Ask a polarizing question.   4. Pick some ‘action points’. Like a page-turning book, your webinar needs cliff-hangers and foreshadowing. Ask questions you don’t answer for a slide or two. Introduce a startling statistic or attention-grabbing graph. Tease some info that you’re gonna touch on later.   5. Pick a format. How you present your webinar is going to inform how you tell your story. Single-presenter webinars are the most common and the easiest way to control how you tell the story with a detailed script. But if you opt for multiple presenters, it’s still possible to keep your story flowing. Structure your webinar with a clear beginning-middle-end Plan your webinar for free at prewrite.com

  5. 11/21/2020

    How to Use Video Storytelling to Increase Sales with Ali Hammoud of Vidyard

    Say you’re selling widgets. You know your widget is 39% lighter than the competition, works 53% faster, costs 13% less, and has 29% more support. Your client is asleep by now. But maybe, three years ago you had a friend who struggled with their widget, who complained about the cost, the size, and how frustrated they were because a widget part broke, and they couldn’t get any support to fix it. So you decided to do something about that. And you designed this better, cheaper widget, and have around-the-clock o-call support, and your friend’s company has now doubled their production capacity. This is the difference between fact-telling and storytelling, and it's even more effective when told via video. Ali Hammoud and his team at Vidyard have cracked the code on effective video selling and video marketing. Now we examine video selling and video marketing through a storytelling lens.  Key Points: "Video storytelling becomes effective when you treat your prospects as if they were archetypal characters in a story." You have to figure out their: * character traits * wants * needs Then you can weave in your narrative.

  6. 11/11/2020

    How to Use Storytelling to Stand Out in Senior Living

    How do you stand out in senior living - arguably the most competitive sales environment today?   According to Jeff Altschul, Director of Sales and Marketing at Arboria of Long Grove, you stand out by using storytelling in marketing and sales videos.

  7. 11/06/2020

    How to Create Content for a Living - 7 Lessons I Learned from a Barstool Blogger

    Do you ever wish you could give a big middle finger to your dead-end, 9-5 day job? No more BS reports, no more infantile coworkers, no more absolute clown of a boss. And instead of all that crap, you get paid to talk about topics you LOVE - baseball, reality TV, dogs, whatever. Well good news, you can ditch the 9-5 and create content for a living.  The road ain't easy, but there are 7 Lessons I learned from a good friend who did exactly that. He parlayed his passion for baseball into a full-time gig with Barstool Sports, the fastest growing and, arguably, most influential new media brand in the world.  In this episode I talk with Dave Williams, aka White Sox Dave, about his journey from dorm room blogger to breaking news on Twitter to leaving his day job to ultimately landing his dream job at Barstool.  You might be surprised to learn of 7 Lessons that stood out through the conversation: Hustle Know your audience Find your voice Play the long-game Failure isn't fatal Seize every opportunity Lean into it Enjoy this story and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe

  8. 10/28/2020

    The Storytelling Formula Our Brains Crave

    Told any good stories lately? No? Well you might want to start. Stories are more than simple fairy tales. Turns out, they actually alter our brains, and can even change the way we think and act. Storytelling is a community act that involves sharing knowledge and values. It's one of the most unifying elements of mankind, central to human existence, taking place in every known culture in the world. Here’s the psychology behind stories, and how you can craft a story for your brand that engages your customers and drives conversions. The Psychology of Stories Your brain is programmed to recognize patterns of information (human faces, letters, music notes, etc.) and assign them meaning (your mother’s face, the alphabet, the Star Spangled Banner, etc.) Stories, too, are recognizable patterns, and we use them to find meaning in the world around us. We see ourselves in them, and the stories we hear become personal to us. Stories are so near and dear to us, in fact, that we even invent them when they’re not actually there. In 1944, 34 Massachusetts college students were shown a short film with two triangles and a circle moving across the screen. They were then asked to describe the scene. All but one described the movements with elaborate, human narratives, including: The two triangles were men fighting as a woman (the circle) tried to escape. The circle was “worried.” The circle and the little triangle were “innocent young things.” The big triangle felt “rage and frustration.” This study demonstrates our tendency to personify abstract shapes and seek ourselves in the objects around us. This is called pareidolia, or “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist.” It’s what happens when you see a face in an electric outlet, or when you see shapes in the clouds. Basically, we’re obsessed with the human story and want to hear it all the time. Why are we so in love with human stories? Because they activate our minds. Stories can activate parts of our brains that give us sensory experiences and influence our way of thinking. prewrite.com twitter.com/prewriteapp twitter.com/trentanders0n

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Topics include: the art and science of storytelling (duh!), content creation, and the business of creativity.

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