Content Queen Mariah

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225: HOW to actually tell a story and market like a journalist (Storytelling Queen)

Mariah MacInnes

If marketing as a small business owner doesn’t align with you… why not try this! 

Be the JOURNALIST! 

Call yourself the journalist for your business where you share with your audience, be curious and push the boundaries in your industry. 

How do you do this? 

Let me share with you on this podcast as I teach you how to tell stories and market like a journalist. 

If you LOVED this episode, make sure you share this on your Instagram stories and tag us @contentqueenmariah. 

✨ ⁠⁠⁠LEARN ABOUT THE I AM/WE ARE CONTENT QUEEN CAMPAIGN⁠⁠⁠✨⁠

KEY EPISODE TAKEAWAYS 👇

  • How to tell stories 

  • How to market like a journalist 

  • The foundations you need to stand out in your industry 

SHOW RESOURCES 👇

If you like this episode, don't forget to share it to your Instagram stories and tag me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @contentqueenmariah⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!

Other than that, enjoy - chat next week 💕

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

This is episode  225, and I'm talking about how to actually tell a story and market like a journalist. Stay with me. Welcome to the content queen podcast. I'm your host, Mariah entrepreneur, storyteller, digital nomad, creative content, bootcamp founder of content queen. I'm here to teach you how to share your unique story.

Create content and market your business with strategy through the channels that work for you. Each week, I'll deliver a story to help you connect to a powerful strategy around marketing, business, content creation. Also be joined by amazing sales and entrepreneurs. We're here to share their own journey along with actual steps, help you take your business to a whole new level.

Through amazing storytelling, powerful line marketing and content strategy. Let's do it.  All right. Hello gang. So if you're with us along the I am we are content queen campaign journey, we are up to the third queen, which is the queen, the band. Now  this is an interesting part of the journey because queen kind of encompasses a few things.

There is this sort of uniqueness of Queen being the band that kind of like really disrupted the industry when they were sort of, um, in their prime or, you know, building up towards their prime and they created Bohemian Rhapsody. So really with Queen, I want you to try and harness that energy of, you know, disrupting your industry and being seen and standing out.

Now, another way that I really relate to Bohemian Rhapsody, the movie is the story and the journey and how You know, we really were captivated by that movie if you've seen it. And so I incorporate a bit of storytelling into this queen energy because it is really about uniqueness and storytelling and how we can Be unique is to tap into the stories that we have  So I really wanted to teach you storytelling in this episode, but from the landscape of a journalist.

Now, if you don't know my background, I studied journalism. I wanted to be a journalist since I was in year nine, when we did a project creating our own magazine. Mine was called Campari because my friend at the time, she'd just gotten back from Italy and in Italy under the age of  like from 15, you can drink or something like that.

So she was drinking these Campari cocktails. I think she was about 16 at the time.  While she was away. So she loved that we, and she was really in this, um, Italy energy. So we called a magazine Campari and I just loved the element of writing and sharing stories and research and everything like that. So I was like, I want to be a journalist.

And that was when I. really sort of started my career path. So I had that intent. I did all the English classes that were needed, um, and got the score and got into Deakin University. So I started my journalism degree. I absolutely loved it, but as I was doing it, I picked up a couple of public relations units and, um, I really loved that as well.

I loved learning about the people that we were trying to capture and all those things and journalism and PR really, they kind of work together.  So I decided to do a double major and I could do that after my first year and then I picked up a lot more PR.  Subjects were a lot more expensive than journalism ones.

And, but my main passion and love was journalism. I did, um, before I even started uni, I did like free volunteering for local, uh, sporting club. I wrote in the local paper. Um, I just loved it. I loved sharing things. sharing news, sharing stories, sharing people's stories. So my first internship, um, I applied for two.

I got both. I did the first one at, um, the channel nine news, uh, which was a little bit different because it wasn't as hands on because obviously it was TV and they weren't going to put me on TV. It was very interesting to see how newsroom works. And then I did it at a local newspaper in the sort of suburbs of Melbourne called Leader Newspaper if you are, or I think it's in any suburb in the city.

I'm pretty sure Sydney have one and I'm not sure about Brisbane. If you're from any, any, um, suburban areas or in a city, please tell me if there's a leader in your area in Australia, of course. And I wrote for the local paper. Now this was a much more hands on experience because I got to write my own stories.

In the end, I wrote roughly. four to five stories per day. And the, you know, full time journalist was writing about five to six and my stories got published. I actually should share some of these on social media. I will actually. Um, so I was published in the local leader and I interviewed people and I shared their stories.

One person I actually interviewed was Was the founder of the resilience project. Um, and it was just, you know, now he's quite big Hugh and he, you know, does keynotes and everything. And I interviewed him and shared his own story. I loved it. And I loved the format of writing it. It was quite simple journalism writing.

So when I went into my first job in internal comms, the first bit of feedback I got from my boss was let's add a little bit more fluff. So I've combined my PR and my journalism together in this episode. To really help you start to share stories like a journalist and be inquisitive and be, you have that flair for sharing.

So when you start thinking like a journalist, then you have a new ability to connect with your audience, tell stories, be curious, create this uniqueness in your business. So if we, and even, you know,  Things like creating social media hooks or carousels or all these sort of captivating scroll stop, stopping staff is things we learn in journals.

We learned how a paper was structured based on how people read. So you learn all of these things and why things are placed in certain spots. And, and so it's, all these skills are quite tangible for social media content. And they do say journals make very good marketers because we have this research, this.

inquisitive nature. So I'm going to break it down into three sections that is going to help you think like a journalist. To market like a journalist, which gives you a bit of a different edge in your business as a marketer, because you are the marketer for your business. If you're not outsourcing, even if you are outsourcing it, you know, even my clients, they have,  they still are in on the marketing because they're small business owners, they're entrepreneurs, they're involved.

So no matter what, even if you do outsource, you do want to learn a little bit of marketing skills along the way.  So the first one is how to tell a story and what to write. How to do it. And a lot of the times we have marketers saying, you know, tell more stories and I'm like, of course I say it, but how, how do we do it?

So the first thing I want you to do is to create your own story bank. So this is an exercise that I've taken my clients through. It was one also shared by Petra on our episode. I'll put the link in the show notes. It's sort of how she describes it and how I've done it with my clients as well is you break up.

It could be five, it could be 10 year intervals in your life. You start to note down key moments and stories that happened, even if you don't even know they're relevant. Like I just shared my year nine, uh, Magazine love and how it got me into journalism. I'm a marketer, but everything starts to make a different, that starts to make sense.

I even last year did an episode on AI and the story that I used was when I worked at Kmart and I learned self serve checkouts and how someone was saying, aren't you afraid a machine's going to take over your job? And the story I shared was exactly the one I feel about AI.  And the answer that I gave to the gentleman that asked me if I thought I was going to lose my job, so start creating this bank of stories, things that happen.

Now, you'll start off with big milestones, big things that happen in your life, but the more you get the hang of it, the more you start to see little things that come up in your life. The lunch that you had with an entrepreneur to you. Three years ago now, which I share still to this day, you know, those stories that just come up or things that happened on your weekend, something your kids told you, those little stories will start to come in, but start with the big ones first, start with your story bank and then try and update it as much as you can.

Could be in a notes on your phone somewhere that, you know, if you're out in the go and something comes up, you can write it down because what you will learn is life is content. Things come up.  And then you'll start to learn how to bring in analogies and things that come up in every day, you know, even a simple story of me starting to go to the gym and the fact that, you know, right now I'm lifting quite small weights than what I used to, but I'm building up and I've already increased my weight.

Now, I could relate that back to being a content creator for your own business, how you just have to start where you're at and build on more weights as you go. You know, stories like that, that just come out of nowhere from things that you're doing and things that happen around you. This takes practice, just like going to the gym, just like anything, right?

So the first thing is create the story bank, then create your style of storytelling.  Be curious with how you share stories with your friends and family. What sort of language do you use? What sort of, like, how do you do it? What's your style when you're writing, when you're speaking anything, you know, when you're talking to camera, what is your style and start to create stories around how you communicate.

Now think about, yeah, how you share stories in your everyday life. Forget business, go back and Think about how you communicate with your closest best friend, how you share stories with them, and then bring that style into how you share them for your business. You don't have to put on a mask and be someone else.

You know, we get so much more out of you being you.  And then what you want to do is once you've got these sort of your style and your bank of stories, you start to blend it into your content. So you start to bring in processes in, in ways that you can do that. Now we have a whole podcast on storytelling formulas.

I have a resource. Taking you through different storytelling formulas. DM me on Insta if you want a copy of it and I will send it to you. But basically you want to start blending it in. So it could be, um, you know, a testimonial or a case study. How can you make that more of a story rather than, you know, the words that your client gave you?

How can you, when you're starting to share a tip or a lesson, how can you blend in a story with that?  This is how we start to do it.  This is how we start to incorporate stories into our content. As I said, it takes practice and we have a whole episode on storytelling formulas in the show notes. We have a whole PDF on this, so DM me if you want the copy, but that's how we tell stories.

The how is a tip and a lesson. Sorry, a tip and a story, a story and a tip off the back of it, or a piece of education. It could be like the hamburger, you know, you start the story, you give the value and you loop the story at the end, which is kind of what I do with this podcast.  It's all about finding the style that works for you and what type of formula.

There's also a really, um, one I use and I've shared, um, a few times. Yeah. Is when I'm sharing some kind of story, some kind of lesson, anything, always go hook, build up value, call to action. So in the hook, I'll captivate someone quickly, like a newspaper headline. I'll build it up a little bit. So that's when I could probably sprinkle in a bit of story.

I give value and I might end it with a bit of a story, and then I give the call to action. So that's kind of the how. And as I said, I can give you more in the storytelling formulas.  The second part is how to market like a journalist. So you're probably thinking like, why wouldn't I just market like a marketer?

There's a few things that journalists do that is a little bit different to marketing. And of course, like connection with audience is one of them that we kind of both, like both have been similar. It both have in common, but a connection with an audience as a journalist, it can be quite broad, right? So obviously as a marketer, you're kind of niching narrowing it down,  but it's like that saying that your teacher said when you're writing your school essay, right?

To me, as if I have no idea what you're talking about. Now, of course, it depends on where you're What kind of platform, you know, send in an email, is it on social media and where that person is in their journey, but this is when we can eliminate any jargon and just connect on a human level, you know, um, and try not to have this like completely bias kind of, um,  I guess.

way of sharing, right? It's just, I am talking with you. Of course in marketing, you know, there are moments where you're going to be a little bit more biased. You're going to really, really share your opinion.  And that is totally fine. But connecting with your audience from a journalism perspective is really just kind of telling the whole story, painting the picture, showing them and like, through the journey and keeping them engaged from the start to the end.

Of course, we don't expect everyone to read everything as a journalist. So we want to keep things really relevant at the top and the bottom. And that's kind of what we do when we write, you know, social media caption and things like that. But basically when you are connecting with your audience in the mindset of a journalist,  you're really thinking about that person.

Um,  As if, you know, they don't know you, they don't know what you're talking about. And this is really top of funnel when you're creating top of funnel content.  Obviously, as you further down the funnel and more people know you, you can kind of go more into the marketing and the sales aspect. But if you really want to concentrate on top of funnel and bringing new people into your world, it really is at that level of keeping it simple.

As if they have no idea what you're talking about. And this can be hard in, in things like marketing. In things like if I'm talking marketing, if I'm talking finance, if I'm talking law, if I'm talking business, some things can be really complex and if people are just starting out or they're at a different level to you, they might not know what you're talking about and that's one thing I guess I've really tried to bring over from that journalism is keeping things simple with marketing and content.

Yes, there's a lot of jargon, there's lots of things out there to make marketing complicated, but I try to keep it simple. Because I try to market like a journalist. So it's this connection with your audience on a level that really is,  you know, not trying to confuse people, not trying to expect them to know it all.

It's really trying to be at their level, trying to connect with them at the level they're at.  and, and meeting them there  and not thinking, you know, you're better than them. Um, and we don't, but you know, sometimes people can get really overwhelmed and think, Oh my God, I can't reach out to that person because I feel like they don't think I'm an idiot asking this question.

Right. So really having that approachable type of vibe.  Um, and then, as I said, just keeping it as simple as possible. And the third thing is we want to bring it all together. So.  Journalists ask questions, be curious with your audience, DM them questions. Not from a selling perspective, not from, and a little bit more of a marketing perspective, but just to be curious, just to try and understand.

You know, you think about if you watch a press conference or you see an on a news report, they're always super curious. Sometimes they might not ask the nicest, best questions. Um,  and I know sometimes journalists do definitely have a bad rap in some countries. I get it,  but a lot of them are just trying to be curious.

And of course it depends on where you're from and, and at what news place you work for and all the things like we're not, we're not going into that, but really be curious with what your audience needs and wants. And marketers do it, but I think, you know, obviously from the benefit of,  You know, them, their business and sales and stuff like that, which of course we want to, but being curious and generally being curious to try and understand it builds that connection that is just that little bit deeper  and then research, research as much as you can, not only just about your audience, about your industry, about, you know, what's happening around you, maybe not just directly in your industry, but, you know, second connection or third, second degree and third degree, like what is happening around you that you can bring in deeper, To the work you're doing.

How can you diversify it? So in journalism, if we are trying to research, you know, a story, we're going to go deep as deep as possible. We might not use it all, but we're trying to gather as much information to get the full picture. And this is where you can start doing that in your industry. And if you go second and third degree and, and not into a way where it takes off all your time, but, um, really just understanding your different elements of what you do and outside of the scope of what you do, for example, is.

If you are a marketing mentor or a marketing, you're somebody marketing. Like if I would also be searching sales and looking at sales and business strategy, and I might even go in, you know, start learning a little bit more about finance. So when I'm working with a client as well, I can start to understand the whole picture.

I can start to understand everything. And we have an episode about that next week with three amazing guests. First time I've had more than two people on the podcast. Um, well, more than. To including me as the host. So we're going to have four people on the podcast,  but really starting to understand the areas outside of what you do and researching.

And then the last one is pushing the boundaries. You know, I said this like uniqueness journals will always push the boundaries to start to learn more and understand and ask questions. So don't be afraid to push the boundaries in your industry. You know, you can shake things up. Of course we want to have a level of, you know, Giving the whole picture.

So that's when, you know, a journalist will be show you both sides of the story. You can do that with your audience as well, and then push the boundaries on what you think they could get value from or questioning things that are happening. And that is really a, um, embodying a journalist, um, in doing that and really just trying to shake it up and  get people to think curiously as well.

So a journo will always try and get people to question things. So. That's what you can start doing. If you are in the beauty industry and there's a lot of crappy products out there that don't, you know, use organic  products or they don't look after the skin of their client, they just want to make money, you know, how can you share that in a way that of course is respectful, but really starting to push the boundaries on beauty.

Your industry shake things up  and in your way, you know, it doesn't have to be being super controversial, but just getting your audience to question things as well. I think it's very important and sort of putting it back on them to do their own research, to be curious all the things  Putting them in the position of being a journalist as well.

And that's how you kind of do that. So  to sum it up basically to market like a journalist and how to actually tell stories, we want to first learn the how to tell stories process, have our style, have our story bank, blend them together, use some of those formulas, you know, some of them, including the, um, Story and then lesson lesson or tip educational piece educational piece and lesson then blended together I have a storytelling formulas guide if you want it The second one is marketing like a journalist connecting and meeting your audience where they're at Painting the picture and keeping it simple and then bringing it together being curious put your own Journalist hat on and go out there and research but then with that knowledge really Push the boundaries in your industry and bring on that uniqueness like Queen did, um, when they were,  you know, in, in a really interesting and different time of creating music.

So I'd love to know how you're going to put your journal hat on to be a better marketer. You know, it's always very interesting. And, and basically, you know, my career path, um, from doing those internships and learning more about journalism and then going into an internal comms and being in PR and did really show me a lot about marketing because in internal comms, you're like a in house journalist because you're sharing the news with all your, with all the employees.

And we had about 800 employees and some people just didn't care. They just wanted their paycheck. They wanted to leave and that's fair, but I had to get them to care. So then I had to create a strategy. So I created a whole internal comm strategy included video, a lot of content creation. So then I started to put my marketing hat on, but first I had the journal and the PR background.

I think it really did help me see things a little bit differently, open my eyes up to keeping things simple and digestible, but also super relatable to the person and help me connect with them. Cause I was able to bring those skills in and it doesn't mean you can't.  I think sometimes marketing just can take a different approach and maybe that approach is storytelling, journalism, that kind of thing rather than being a marketer.

Maybe you want to label yourself the journalist of your business where you're just sharing with the people and journal journalism takes an element of marketing, you know, how a newspaper is structured. All those things is, a form of marketing. So maybe you want to relabel yourself. Maybe you want to be the journalist.

Maybe that makes you feel a little bit better. I would love to know  how that lands with you. And if you love this campaign, I am, we are content queen. You can check out all the other episodes on our landing page, which is sales. contentqueen.  com. forward slash  let me get it for you it'll be in the show notes but it is forward slash content queen campaign and it'll be in the show notes you want to check out all the other episodes our last queen next week the queen of cards as i said three guests It's going to be epic with really amazing business owners that are leading the way in what they do.

And we're going to talk about not just marketing, but other areas of business that come together, that make the royal flush in cards and bring your business together. I think it's a perfect way to finish off this campaign, but if you have any questions about  how you can kind of tell more stories or be this marketer, this inquisitive, curious, boundary pusher, DM me and, um, or reply to any of my emails.

If you're on the email list, let's have a chat about it, but be a content queen or king. And remember that developing your strategy and story develops your business. Thank you so much for joining me today and please don't forget to share this with all your business and entrepreneurial friends. You can do this by adding it to your Insta stories and tagging me at contentqueenmariah or just tell them about it.

If you rate and review on whatever platform you're listening to this on, help me get this podcast out there and share my message. Follow me on Instagram and TikTok. Let me know any topics you want me to talk about. I'm planning out June, so I'd love to hear from you and I will talk to you soon. Bye. 

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