When Should You Use Storytelling in Higher Ed Marketing? It Depends on the Attention You've Earned
By John Azoni, founder of Unveild— a video production company for higher education.
TL;DR:
Full-on storytelling isn't always the right move. It depends on how much attention you've earned. If you're interrupting someone, like with a flyer or a paid social ad, get to the point fast. If your audience chose to be there or has nowhere else to go, like a podcast, a clicked-on student story, or a video at an event, you have room to tell the whole story. Before you create your next piece of content, ask yourself how much attention you've actually earned.
When Should You Use Storytelling in Marketing? It Depends on How Much Attention You've Earned
A Lesson From My Daughter's Babysitting Flyer
My 11-year old was working on her first project of middle school last week. In her computer class she was tasked with making a flyer for a company she was to come up with.
She decided to go into the babysitting business, and thus, “123 Ellie!!!” was born (with three exclamation marks… this was intentional I’m told).
She had the right idea. Not a lot of words. Just the important stuff - the price per hour, her availability, her contact info, and an AI-generated logo that she made in Canva.
Why the First Draft Didn't Work
She showed it to me. I saw the multiple colors of body text, and multiple fonts, and smiled because I also was in the 6th grade once.
And then of course I gave her a lecture on marketing psychology because I have to make up for how bad I am at helping her with math.
“Everything has equal visual importance here and overall there’s just too much information on the page. Your contact info is buried at the bottom, your availability is too detailed, and your hourly rate is getting a bit lost. People have to burn too many mental calories to decide if they should consider contacting you or not”.
She said, “wow dad, you are the smartest person I know.”
In my head she said that. ”We” decided to scale it way down.
The Fix: Lead With the Essentials
$10/hour
Contact for availability
Contact info: _____
“Now at the bottom you can write whatever detail you want because if nobody reads it, they’ve already gotten the important info. So talk about your philosophy of babysitting, what your interests are… and then— oh, philosophy means like… what you think makes a good babysitter.”
Storytelling Has a Time and a Place
You might have expected my advice to be “StaRt WitH EmOtioN… TeLL YoUr sToRy…”
But here’s the thing you have to remember about this buzzword of storytelling. There is a time for it. And that time is not all the time.
How Much Attention Have You Earned?
It comes down to the amount of attention you’ve earned.
-Do you have their attention for a few minutes? Great. You can get to your point in a roundabout creative way.
-Are you trying to interrupt people with your marketing message? Get to the point. You haven’t given them a reason to care about your story yet.
The Time I watched all of a 6-minute Video
As I sat in church this past Sunday, they played a 6-ish minute video about this guy’s story of coming to our church. It was long. And it felt long.
And I thought, “this is the perfect example of forced attention allowing for storytelling.”
400 people watching that video had nowhere else to be. So yeah, take us on a journey for 5 minutes before you get to the point. Tell us all the narrative details.
Same with a podcast. That’s why I go on tangents with guests on my show. I tell stories from my life, they tell stories from theirs, and mixed in is a bunch of value about content creation. Because I know when I sit down to consume a podcast, I’m ready to invest for the next 45 minutes or so and I want to know who these people are, and I want to be entertained in the midst of receiving the value they bring to the conversation.
When You're Interrupting: Flyers and Ads
But a flyer is different. Someone is standing over the garbage can with their pile of mail ready in a split second to throw your ad away. They don’t care about you. They care about minimizing the time they’re spending sorting mail. They’re looking for only what’s important in that pile in that moment. So just tell them the important stuff.
Direct response copywriter Jay Abraham puts it this way:
“Sometimes the best copy to sell a horse is ‘Horse for Sale.’”
How to Apply This to Higher Ed Content
So before you make your next piece of content, ask yourself one question: how much attention have I actually earned here?
A paid social ad interrupting someone's scroll? That's the mail pile. Get to the point.
A student story on your admitted students page that someone chose to click? They're curious. You've got a minute or two to take them somewhere.
A video playing to a room full of families at an event? That's church. Tell the whole story.
A Postscript on 123 Ellie!!!
As for 123 Ellie!!!, her computer teacher told her she has to put more detail in her flyer, so maybe take this whole article with a grain of salt.
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