What Inbound Marketers Can Learn From the Movies

Social media strategist Carmen Hill believes that like a good movie screenplay, branded content takes a compelling story and breaks it down into individual pieces. The art is to take these pieces and tell the story while moving toward a larger vision.

Hill says a great movie has three parts: the setup, the conflict, and the resolution.

Likewise, a good inbound marketing process has three parts, mirroring those of a movie: discovery, consideration, and decision.

If content strategists think of their customer as the hero in a movie, the analogy starts to make a lot more sense. The strategist needs to identify the customer, provide her with a resources (content) and eventually a triggering event that will cause her to act, and then stay with her through the resolution or
purchase decision.

Hill says the character’s development is important, but perhaps more imperative is the building of a story around that character. She points to IBM’s SmartCloud website as a perfect example of a story progression, showing how there is a scene built around the customer at every level of the decision-making process.

As Hill puts it, this interaction is the popcorn of the content strategy story. It’s that part that is addictive to consumers and keeps them coming back for more.

“We can’t forget our spreadsheets and sales funnels just yet, because the details have to be managed somewhere. But we’re developing new ways of creating, searching for, and consuming content every day. So the job is to create content that people crave.”

Image courtesy of Erica Swallow

Tags:

Get better at your job right now.

Read our monthly newsletter to master content marketing. It’s made for marketers, creators, and everyone in between.

Trending stories