You may not think of your blog as communicating a narrative, but it is essential to think of it as something that tells a story. Creating a compelling narrative is the only way to create an emotional connection to your readers and that’s the only type of connection that really matters.

We may like to think of ourselves as rational decision makers, because that supports the narrative that our conscious self is in control of our actions, but a brief study of the modern science of decision-making, which was a part of my masters degree, or a simple observation of the world around us shows the falsity of this idea. We make decisions based largely based on a subconscious thought process that is largely emotional.

The idea of being in control is a very powerful frame that is at the bedrock of many marketing messages. When Google brings their self-driving cars to market they will face a very interesting marketing challenge because of this. A self-driving car, when evaluated rationally, is superior to a regular car–it’s safer, more fuel-efficient, and the more of them that are in use the faster and easier it will be to get from point A to point B in a car. Personally I’m excited about the possibility of using a smart driving car, because I hate driving, but everyone I’ve ever talked to can’t stand the idea.

For most people, they can’t connect with the idea of the self-driving car because the technology is saying “you will not be in control” and that is incompatible with the personal narrative that we’ve built around car culture. Cars, especially American cars, are constantly being marketed to us as the ultimate symbol of freedom, of being in control of our own destiny.

I look forward to seeing how Google’s marketing genius solve this problem, but that’s not the point of this post. This post is about using your blog to tell a story about your product, and that begins with framing. Framing your message in a “compatible narrative” is a necessary step with connecting emotionally with your reader. Connecting emotionally is not optional, or a nice bonus, it is the only way to reach your target audience.

Framing Is Everything

In what had to be last week’s best article on marketing, How To Market a Boring Business, Ryan Holiday talks about the power of framing and how to turn your product’s message into a story your target audience can relate to. In the article, which is full of great advice for marketing any business, boring or not, Holiday writes “a lot of businesses seem boring because they’ve chosen to frame and sell themselves exactly the same way as their competitors.” More importantly he talks about framing your business model to match your business’ narrative.

As an example, Holiday writes about how Toms Shoes gives a pair of shoes away to a child in need for each pair purchased. This creates a narrative in which the “consumer is the protagonist in a heroic story of helping poor children worldwide.” That’s a common story that everyone can connect with and it transforms Toms Shoes from just another shoe company into a company with a mission, a mission that resonates with consumers.

This popular model is taken even further by online eyeglasses retailer Warby Parker who donates a pair of glasses for each one purchased. Their narrative integrates well with the rest of their product, which is a service where they send you multiple pairs of glasses and you choose which ones are best for you and send the rest back. They don’t just donate glasses to people in need. They give them to “low-income entrepreneurs” that sell them at a low cost to others in need. The philanthropic part of the Warby Parker narrative, which is about empowering the less fortunate, works perfectly with the narrative of empowering you to choose your own eyewear that they are selling .

Reading about the power of framing is exciting to me, as I’m a big fan of the cognitive linguist, George Lakoff who has written extensively about how, because of how our brains work, proper framing is the most important part of any argument, since it allows for the strong emotional connections. Lakoff argues that many of us are trapped in an enlightenment-era mindset that causes us to think that humans make decisions based on rational decision making, but as he and Mark Johnson write in Philosophy In The Flesh, “most of ordinary human thought-thought carried out by real “rational animals”-is metaphoric, and hence not literal. It uses not only metaphor but also framing, metonymy, and prototype-based inferences.”

From Frame To Narrative

Framing alone is not enough. Your frame is the beginning of a narrative. In his book The Political Mind Lakoff writes that “narratives are frames that tell a story. They have semantic roles, properties of the role, relations among roles, and scenarios. What makes it a narrative—a story—and not just a mere frame? A narrative has a point to it, a moral. It is about how you should live your life—or how you shouldn’t. It has emotional content: events that make you sad or angry or in awe.”

This series on content strategy is framed by my desire to have a more useful and better read blog. The frame is the desire for success. Frames are used to build a primary metaphor, in my case it’s a journey to success. As Lakoff point out in The Political Mind, “primary metaphors trigger connections of “spreading activation” to other metaphors in the brain that share common metaphors, creating powerful connections, in the literal sense between the narrative and the reader.

For example, this series is framed by the idea of putting yourself in control of your success. The narrative I am telling is the journey from just another blog no one reads to trafficked authority site. Taking my readers through the steps of the journey is what makes it into narrative. If I was doing a better job, I’d be sharing more of my steps and struggles along the way. I started out with between 0 and 30 page views a day and now I’m getting 50-200 a day, which is good for 6 weeks or so of work, but I’m struggling to stay on topic and be consistent with my content.

The more I share the steps along my journey and talk about the steps I’m taking towards building success, the more concepts related to the metaphor of “building success” it activates related metaphors in the brains of you, my reader about success and the more you will connect with what I’m reading. The more you connect the more you will come back for more, creating a powerful feedback loop that leads to both of our success. That after all was the point of all of this.
Have you thought about the narrative structure of your blog? Is your content connecting with your readers on an emotional level that can influence their decisions?