During my recent trip to South Africa, I found myself in a room on Saturday afternoon with somewhere in the region of 60 to 80 people for what was billed as a 'Marketing Masterclass'.
I'd been asked to come to South Africa to speak about dental business, a subject which I am delighted to talk about and am very passionate about, but they'd also asked me to do an extra session on marketing, which seemed to tie in beautifully with the dental business sessions I was doing, except I don't really consider myself a marketer.
I am, though, right at the very heart of me, a storyteller.
I see the world in stories, and I have the ability to convert almost anything into a story or an anecdote due to the fact that I retain a senseless amount of seemingly useless information.
And so, for the marketing masterclass, I had a tonne of slides provided by the genius that is Tom Reason from his marketing degree and all the work he does in marketing at the clinic and also some I had invented myself some years ago.
And so I packed those slides into a presentation and stood at the front of this 'masterclass' waiting to speak after an introduction.
I'd asked if I could have a whiteboard so that I could write down suggestions from the crowd, but they were unable to provide me with one.
So, I picked out a member of the audience who appeared to have a pad and pen and asked them if they would be the 'whiteboard'.
And so, I started to ask what people wanted and what they wanted to know about marketing and that old trick where I said, "You've all paid money to be here, so what is it you wanted to leave with?".
It just turned into a storytelling session (I had worn my Scotland football top to tell the story about me being Scottish), and I discussed the concept of Storybrand, which is a concept of branding using stories.
I realised that what people want is connection and stories about what we've done and what has worked and what hasn't worked; therefore, I started to use that, and the results were quite staggering.
The amount of engagement I had immediately after the event in the room and the amount that I've had by email since is like nothing I've ever experienced before.
And so, it seemed that it worked.
It seems that what people want is not a slide of schematics telling them how to provide social media advertising but something that tells a story of what may be good, what might be bad and what isn't.
As a footnote, though my storytelling skills are best utilised in the story, I tell myself about myself. So I have the opportunity, but also seemingly the motivation to turn many of the bad stories in my life into better stories, which I think gets me out of bed in the morning.
Blog Post Number - 3553
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