Brand, Meet Story: How to Create Engaging Content to Win Business and Influence Your Audience

by Heather Pemberton Levy

Think of the last great article you read or the last great speech you heard. Chances are, if you remember one key message, you also remember one compelling story. That's because the best content starts with a story. When it comes to marketing, the best business content starts with a story the audience cares about, not the brand's message about what it wants to sell them. In Brand, Meet Story, Heather Pemberton Levy describes the Story Comes First method, a practical approach that combines techniques from journalism and fiction writing to help brands tell stories that put the readers' interests first. Whereas most brand marketers create content to sell their product, service or technology, the Story Comes First method turns this approach on its head to create content with the "human moments" that truly engage an audience. Filled with examples from Levy's experience creating content marketing programs, trade books, and hundreds of articles for a variety of B2B and B2C brands, the book shows readers a step-by-step approach to create content designed to deliver business results. Brand, Meet Story explains the key ways to uncover what your audience cares about and how to turn brand messaging into stories that matter. Levy inspires readers to develop a compelling voice that will carry the brand tone and values across all channels, and helps them turn their ideas into engaging, story-driven content their audiences will read, love, and share.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction

114 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 30, 2017

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has a lot of great ideas for driving customer engagement through content.

[Cecilia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to learn how to create better, more engaging content like they said this book would help me do. Not be told (emphasis on the 'telling' over 'showing') for 100 or so pages why storytelling works. I mean, unless you're completely oblivious to content marketing (in which case, are you marketing under a rock?), this is a waste of time.

Also, the author told a lot of her own stories but couldn't get me to care about them. Very unoriginal and uninteresting.. and very ironic.

[Jeffrey Ning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brand, Meet Story empowers you to think like a journalist, liberates your stories, and captures the moments by using Story Comes First method in content marketing. Consider this book as your arsenal of viral marketing for contents to influence your audience.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not only valuable to marketers but to anyone who want to tell a story. It's cleverly written and has great examples.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard the author in a webinar on marketing and thought that the book would be good. The book is really slim; I thought that I would get more out of it.

[Natalia Jusionis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyed the book. Some great tips for beginners and solopreneurs to get ideas on content creation.

[Heather · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quick, easy read that generated a few ideas for my own line of work, but not a groundbreaking contribution to branding and storytelling.

[American Partners · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written, decently informative, but could probably have been done in a blog post.

[William Brophy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book now!

If you seriously are considering a content marketing strategy or already have one that isn't exactly working then you MUST read this book today! Its an easy read and chock full of examples to help you out. Don't forget to print out or hang up the appendix for reference next time you outline content!

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brand, Meet Story is exactly that which the title promises. It's much shorter than I expected when I first stumbled across it but this book is proof that we don't always need long books to adequately cover a topic. Levy presents her ideas in a straightforward manner, employing her own methods in how she organises the book. Most ideas on content creation and how the audience relates weren't new to me but I liked how they were consolidated and linked up to outline the process of branding.

Ultimately, it takes time to develop a skill, which Brand, Meet Story encourages readers to do by providing a cheat sheet at the end. Levy prompts readers to apply her methods and to keep referring to them in future. The focus on active learning is bound to make this a useful book for many, regardless of their (lack of) experience in branding, and marketing at large.

[Jay French · Rating 4 out of 5]

You might have had this happen to you. You are giving a presentation at work to persuade co-workers to install new software and change your work processes to use it. You start off describing the software, its features, how it looks. As you begin to answer questions, you realize that you are no longer in control of the meeting, and it degenerates into concerns about icon colors. You never get to discuss the impact this change would make on people, and you can’t tell if they figured it out by themselves. I’ve been there. It’s a problem of order. “Brand, Meet Story” suggests turning around the order in how you persuade people. Instead of starting by thinking about the product, start with the need, and tell a story about how that need could be filled. While you might be more familiar with your product and brand, people really don’t care about that, they just want their needs fulfilled. Aim at that.

The book is excellent in what it covers. It makes its case and describes how to write using the framework that I described above. It makes a counter-intuitive claim that adding detail to a story helps a person identify with the story, and I think that's correct. The book’s website has a very simple one-page worksheet that lays out this framework, good with or without reading the book. While the book is aimed at writers, I believe it is also a good starting point for presentations, videos, and demos. While I have taken corporate classes to teach demo and storytelling skills, I found this a useful book in giving that simple framework that you can base your writing on. I also found the examples mostly interesting.
I listened to the audio version, and for spending only 2 hours, I feel I learned quite a bit. While some business books don't seem to work well on audio due to complexity, this one does works well.