As marketing strategists, we stress the importance of repetition. Retelling your story – through traditional and digital media, advertising and face-to-face sales – is the only way to ensure your value points are heard, understood and remembered.
My role at Media Relations is to help clients retell their stories by writing media-grade content which they can use on their websites, in social media and in other promotional channels. No writing job is too small! Sometimes clients will just ask me to squeeze as many value points as possible into one paragraph with a limited word count. So I write one really succinct paragraph which tells their story.
Mack turned $5,000 into millions by re-telling his story
Here’s a real-life example of why retelling your story, and your value points, is so essential. In 1981, Jim McIngvale arrived in Houston, Texas with $5,000 and a dream to open a furniture store. In the years since, McIngvale – now better known as “Mattress Mack” – has grown his Gallery Furniture into the most profitable furniture store, per square foot, in the country (some sources say in the world).
Our writing team communicates clients’ key messages in all content they create. Similarly, and for decades, Mack’s heavily promoted message has been: guaranteed same-day delivery. Giant billboards around the city advertise Gallery Furniture with a single word several feet high: “TODAY”. A larger-than-life figure, Mack has woven his same-day delivery message into hundreds of interviews and speeches each year, for more than 30 years.
Yet unbelievably, he recently quipped that approximately 50 percent of the people entering his store are completely unaware that Gallery Furniture offers same-day delivery!
“If you’re going to be in the marketing or advertising business, if you’re going to be in sales, you’ve got to tell your story over and over, and over and over, and over and over again. Then you’ve got to tell it one more time,” he advises. “Facts fade but stories last forever.”
This is why we place such a strong emphasis on helping our clients retell their stories. This extends way beyond press releases. Some of our recent media-grade writing projects have included:
- Revising and updating staff biographies to better reflect a company’s values
- Speeches and presentations
- Dossiers and brochures
- Realigning existing web content with a company’s new vision and mission
- Creating web content for a client entering a new market
- Ghost-writing pre-written articles to submit to digital and print publications
