Photo credit: Jon Ragnarsson

As a storyteller in both my personal and professional life, I used to struggle mightily with story development. Whether crafting a clever marketing campaign or a chilling mystery novel (my moonlight job) there was always that looming question: how to begin? For a long time, in both my job and my life, I made the common mistake of writing my plot first. In a mystery novel, that meant murder, interrogation, trial, verdict. In my marketing campaigns, it meant taglines, offers, colors, ad placement…charting the “flow” that the story or campaign would follow.

But in both instances, things went haywire. I had writer’s block. My dialogue was wooden. I struggled to figure out a logical sequence of events. Why? As my writing teacher kindly pointed out with me, it’s because every great story begins with great characters, and everything else flows from there. Without a sense of the character’s and their motivations, you can’t craft a cohesive plot. As they say in stories, aha! Once I started concentrating on characters first, really digging deep to get to know their hopes, their fears, their fantasies, all I had to do was ask myself “What would a feisty old codger like Gracie Lane do in this situation?” or “what would Henry Mason, the eight-year-old town know-it-all egghead, think about this?” and the plot basically wrote itself.

Reboot your list marketing muse

And of course the same applies to marketing campaigns. Great marketing campaigns begin with great characters, and too often this crucial ingredient gets left by the wayside. Luckily, like good fairies in a fairytale, new technologies are emerging to make discovering your characters as easy as a wand-flick of the wrist. These new tools are created to increase targetability, which is really just an industry term for really good, juicy, full-fleshed characters you need to create riveting marketing campaigns.

You may think you are using targetability now, but most likely you’re not. The traditional marketing tools out there allow for only a very surface level of targeting, the equivalent of a one-dimensional character in a badly written novel: the shrew, the hero, the damsel, the villain. These are characters sure, but hardly the stuff memorable storytelling is made of. There’s no layers, no complexity.

Targetability offers a trove of character traits

With Marketfish targetability, we go way behind one-dimension. Our dynamic search tool offers unlimited “character trait” selects, so you can continue shaping your marketing campaign until your characters become fully developed. Think female small business owners living in Detroit raising two kids alone. A middle-aged CEO who makes $150,000 a year and owns four vacation homes. With this level of dimension available, the stories begin to easily shape.

That’s the biggest secret of storytelling: the more targeting you do, the less writing (and re-writing) you have to do, because everything flows so perfectly from those rich detailed profiles. So next time you go to craft a marketing iniative, don’t forget to ask yourself “Does my campaign have character?” Even the prettiest language and the perfect plots won’t resonate without real people at the core. With them, your campaigns will shimmer like straw into gold.

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copywriting, list marketing, marketing campaigns, targetability