Narrative Content: Storytelling Over Time

Deane Barker is Director of Strategic Engagement at Staffbase and a CMS Critic contributor. 

Back in 2008 or 2009, marketing suddenly got obsessed with stories and “storytelling.” 

Two books came out — Start With Why and Made to Stick — that promoted the concept. Simon Sinek mentioned it in a TED Talk. Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach wrote Content Strategy for the Web, and suddenly we were all “storytellers.”

I mean, literally. Seemingly, everyone added “storyteller” to their LinkedIn bio.

I had a snarky joke that went something like, “If you have ‘storyteller’ in your job description, then you don’t really have a job.” That was kind of a crappy thing to say at the time, but to be fair to me, the whole thing felt like a giant marketing fad.

Yet, fifteen years down the road, it’s stuck around… in its own way.

The “storytelling” we ended up with was more of a perspective change, or a different way of authoring content. We went from generic content to a more human-centered format. Like everyone suddenly started writing a classic five-paragraph essay, trying to hook people with a distinctly human vibe.

(You still see this on LinkedIn, which I swear has developed its own style of writing so distinctive that an LLM could re-write War and Peace into something you’d put in a post: “Natasha grew up and Moscow burned and this is what that teaches us about B2B sales!”)

What I don’t think we ever got to was true multi-part, narrative storytelling.

You know, the kind when someone consumes content separated by time and sometimes format, but mentally threads them together into some broader construct? We never got the Lord of the Rings trilogy where it was planned as three parts separated by time, or even the open-ended Star Wars canon where each installment keeps pushing the story into new territory.

The concept of “stories” inevitably spilled over into CMS and web development. We got things like the Snowfall experience from the New York Times. New content tools started including “story” into their names: Storybook, StoryChief, StoryStream, etc. I remember Magnolia releasing a “Stories” feature that turned out to be an early block-based editing tool.

Again, these were all great, but we were just telling “stories” within the context of singular content. We weren’t explicitly creating anything larger.

Sure, we were hoping to sweep customers up into ideas of “brand storytelling” and such, but that was more a marketing aspiration than an actual construct. As such, “storytelling” began to overlap into mushy territory – a “brand story” wasn’t much different than simply a brand perception, and any concept of “narrative” became marketing spin for message discipline and just saying the same things in different ways to encourage the consumer to perceive your logo in the way you wanted.

We still weren’t very good at telling stories over time. What were we missing?

Defining “Narrative”

But let’s baseline for a second —

What do we call multi-installment content? What do we call multiple content objects, published separately, usually over time, connected to each other in some way, meant to combine to form a larger construct or tickle a larger cognitive nerve?

I call this a “narrative.”

Sure, we could call this a “story,” but as I explained above, that word got a little co-opted. So, for the purposes of this… ahem… story, I’m going to claim that “story” is a writing style. When you create a bunch of content — intentionally or otherwise (more on this below) — that's intended to be associated in service of a larger goal, that’s a “narrative.”

“Narrative” can be a tricky word, because it’s both an abstract and concrete thing. Abstractly, it gets used to refer to a lot of marketing initiatives, and the background perception someone has of your brand.

However, I’m far more interested in the concrete version: a series of separate content artifacts, the sum of which is meant to be greater than the total of the parts.

1 + 1 = 3, hopefully.

As a content industry, are we any good at supporting narratives?

I just don’t think we are.

We certainly pay lip service to this at the planning level. We have lots of tools for content planning and editorial calendaring. I worked for a CMS vendor with a highly regarded “content marketing platform,” which is the (really dumb) category name given to content planning tools.

Today, I work for Staffbase, an intranet and internal comms vendor, and we have an editorial planning system that enables you to create “campaigns,” plan content related to each one, schedule it out on a calendar, etc.

So, as an industry, we absolutely encourage this approach and venerate it as the foundational basis for everything else we do. But we seem to crash and burn on the actual implementation details or the CMS features.

Last year, I worked with a (different) company on their thought leadership initiative. I wanted to publish a series of blog posts around a theme and group them together. I wanted each installment to have a little table of contents that showed all the installments in the broader narrative, oriented the reader to where they were in the narrative, and gave them links to the other installments. 

Additionally, I wanted a “Narrative Landing Page,” which was a branded index page just for the posts in the series. It would give some context, provide some visual branding around the theme, link to all the posts, and provide a navigational target (a URL basically) that sellers could send to prospects to refer to the concepts of the broader narrative, rather than any specific installment.

The web team had no idea why I wanted this. It was like I was speaking a different language –

“…well, you can sure write a blog post. And we have a page that shows them all.”

“Wait, you want your own little home page for just these blog posts?  I mean, are you going to write them all at the same time or something?”

“I can’t give you a tag just for that. Or a category.”

“Wait… so, you’re gonna write these like once a week? And each one should automatically link to the other ones? And you want a little home page just for them?”

And so on. It’s like no one had thought of this before.

There are multiple breakdowns here:

• From a content strategy perspective, we’re not considering the value of multi-installment, narrative storytelling.
• From an information architecture perspective, we’re not designing “aggregation levels” or “aggregation objects” for content. We tend to consider the entire “flow” of date-based content, without considering the need to carve up “sub-flows” within it.
• From a CMS implementation perspective, we don’t plan for these things in our navigation or content aggregation structures.
• And from a CMS feature perspective, I’m not sure vendors are considering this much either. (To be fair, a lot of this can and should be done at the implementation level, so we might let vendors off the hook…)

Narrative Types and Architectures

All narratives are not created equal. There are lots of gradients.

Narratives can be open-ended or closed-ended. A closed-ended narrative is like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It was designed to be three parts, and we all knew that going in. An open-ended narrative is like the Star Wars canon: we have no idea when this thing will end — every film comes out of nowhere and just tacks on new stories to an ongoing narrative.

Closed-ended narratives can be open or closed. An open narrative is one that’s not done yet: we might clearly state this is part two of three, so everyone knows there’s one more coming and it’s a work in progress. A closed narrative is all finished: there were three parts, and they’re all published.

(Logically, an open-ended narrative can’t be closed. If this were possible, then it really wasn’t open-ended to start with. The most basic quality of an open-ended narrative is that it never closes.)

Narratives can be intended or ad hoc. We might start out by saying that we’re going to produce more than one installment about a subject. Alternately, maybe we just produce a lot of content, and over time, a narrative emerges from the series. At first, Woodward and Bernstein were just writing about some incompetent burglars who broke into the Watergate building, but as they peeled back layer after layer and published story after story, a narrative clearly started to emerge.

Sort of related: Narratives can be direct or indirect. A direct narrative is content that specifically lines up to tell or support a larger point — the point or purpose is explicitly formed. An indirect narrative is a grouping of content that is clearly related, but the narrative point is mostly left up to the reader. Different readers might come to different conclusions and narrative conclusions.

Narratives can be sequential or arbitrary. A sequential narrative needs some explicit order to make sense — it builds on a point, every installment layering on top of the previous installments. Coming into a sequential narrative in the middle can be problematic. An arbitrary narrative is one in which the order doesn’t really matter. The content is all related to or supporting a specific point, but there’s no particular order in which it needs to be consumed.

So far, these types are all cognitive. If we drill down into more concrete navigational concepts, we can flesh them out even a little more.

Sequential narratives might be unidirectional or bidirectional. If we write something, then later expand on it, then we logically have Part 1 and Part 2.  While writing Part 2, we’re clearly aware of Part 1, so we can link back there. However, what about Part 1 itself? Did it know there was a Part 2? If not, then we have a unidirectional narrative where only one part links to another. If we go back and update Part 1 to refer to the Part 2 that didn’t exist when it was being written, then it becomes bidirectional.

Narratives may or may not have an aggregational level. Do the parts of your narrative bolt onto some larger structure, or are they only self-sustaining? Let’s go back to Part 1 and Part 2 from above. Even if that’s bidirectional, meaning they both link to each other, do they both have a navigational unit “above” them? Does that little two-part narrative have a “home page”? If someone wanted to send a link to the conceptual narrative as a whole, could they? Or would they only be able to send a link to a part — hopefully Part 1, I guess — and hope the recipient figured out there was more than one installment?

The aggregation level may be explicit or incidental. This gets a little vague, but an explicit aggregational level is one that is designed to link to all the parts. It’s the “parent” of all the parts. An example might be the “series home page” I mentioned above. An incidental aggregation level groups content that is related enough to form a narrative — likely ad hoc or indirect — but doesn’t “own” them. For example, a tag or topic page. This has links to a lot of content that might form some kind of indirect narrative (“Articles about the 2024 Election” for example), but all those content objects might also appear as parts of other narratives (“Articles about Donald Trump”).

So, there are a lot of shades of gray here. When we say “narrative,” we mean some grouping and optional ordering of content that forms a larger story, but the specifics of that run the gamut from:

• A planned series that investigates a finite topic
• A tag page displaying content tagged in a specific way
• An ad hoc series of blog posts that keeps pushing a topic further, each one referring to the prior installment

Once we’ve conceded that this comprises a whole lot of types of content and relationships, what can we do about it?

Questions We Need to Ask

Beyond general narrative acknowledgment and analysis, we need to start digging deeper to see how we can handle them better. Looking at our narrative content, let’s start asking these questions –

What is the “aggregational value” to the narrative?

Why do we want the consumer to “zoom out” to a wider lens and see the narrative rather than a single installment?

We might want to do this simply out of pure altruism or empathy to our content consumer. Hopefully, we want them to understand the bigger picture and want them to be able to connect at a deeper level.

But we often want them to understand the scope of our expertise. We want them to be confronted with a range of content we’ve generated around a particular subject. We want to plant and expand an idea in their head about the types of problems we can address and the range of value we can provide.

We might want a way to increase our “offer surface.” With an aggregational level, we have another navigational link for SEO, to send to prospects, to include our marketing pitch, etc.

Finally, we can now link to singular concepts, instead of having to choose which installment to link to. Often, you want to link to the idea of something, not any specific manifestation of a part of it.

Once we understand what we want from a narrative, we can make better decisions about how to handle it.

How do we make an aggregational level?

This usually means: How do you create a navigable URL (or the equivalent in whatever medium you’re dealing with) to which you can refer people?

In most web CMSs, there’s some concept of an arbitrary page. You should be able to just create one and type out a bunch of links.

But, this kinda sucks, and we all know it. This is what you have to do when your system is narrative-ignorant.

Ideally, you’d be able to group and order content inside the CMS. Imagine holding down CTRL, clicking on seven content items, and saying, “Create a series out of these seven articles.” Maybe you’d drag them into a specific order, but at some point, you’d have a navigable content object that represents the aggregational level. To this, you can edit, add content, etc.

I feel pretty strongly that the aggregational level should be a content object itself. It needs versioning, preview, permissions, URL management, etc. — every content service that your CMS provides to everything else. This content type just happens to link to a bunch of other content objects.

And that’s a key point: how do we get the narrative to become content? In doing this, we get a lot of practical benefits, but we also get the psychological benefit of understanding the narrative as its own conceptual thing. Once we think of it that way, we’ll find lots of ways to incorporate that in other content and campaigns. Our expertise about some particular topics goes from implied and aspirational to concrete and manifest.

So, can you do this in your CMS implementation?

Note that I specified implementation. Most CMSs have the tools available to do this, so the question becomes: did the information architects and developers who did your implementation foresee this type of content?  Did it occur to them that you might want to do this? Was this in a use case anywhere?

If you didn’t explicitly state you wanted to be able to do this, you’ll often be out of luck and have to resort to the manual method discussed above. This is a use case that’s usually not considered out of the box, and requires some forethought, configuration, and template development.

Information architects: Start asking narrative questions during planning. Will your users ever want to do this? Don’t depend on them to tell you — push the issue, then evangelize it as a specific, clear use case to your implementation team.

How do we orient or direct a consumer to the aggregational level?

Assume that a consumer doesn’t wander into our narrative at the aggregational level. Instead, they wander into an installment.

Hopefully, for a sequential narrative, it’s the first installment. In that case, no worries, and we’ll talk to them at the end about the existence of future installments and the aggregational level where they can get an overhead view.

But if they wandered into the middle of it, the problem is a little more pressing. We might want to get them “up” before they consume that content. This is Part 43… maybe point them back to Part 1. Let’s maybe walk them backwards through the parts, or elevate them to the aggregational level.

Assuming your CMS can put together some type of structured aggregational level, then we have a bunch of incidental benefits. The automation provided by a link graph is your friend here. If Part 1 and Part 2 are grouped into a narrative, then they should know that and automatically render navigation within themselves, either to the aggregational level or to all the different parts in it. Additionally, you can provide contextual meta about the narrative as a whole: how many installments are there, which one is this, where is the consumer in the relative scope of the narrative?

If you can’t do this in your CMS implementation, then it gets trickier. If every installment is ignorant of its place in the narrative, then you need to manually massage the content. Everything either needs to include a link to the aggregational level, or links to the other installments, which can get to be a lot of work, especially if the narrative is open-ended. You might find yourself editing a lot of content every time you add something new.

How explicit are we about the mechanics of the narrative?

Do we explain the existence of the narrative in content-centric terms (“Learn the background of the story here…”) or in informational architecture terms (“This content is part of a series. You can view the series home page here.”).

This gets into a larger issue of whether, when, and how we break the fourth wall of content. To what extent do we peel back the curtain and show the consumer how we structure content, and orient them to the navigational concepts in the site?

With an indoctrinated user, this is easier, because they can be trained on and become accustomed to architectural and navigational features. You can refer to “Learning Paths” and “Media Toolkits,” and this will make sense to them. They’re natively aware that they’re moving through a planned environment of information structures.

With unindoctrinated users, you have to be a little more careful and phrase it in terms that make sense only in terms of what they understand, which might not stretch beyond the specific content or installment they’re consuming at the moment. Additionally, you’re often trying to maintain some facade of … vibe (?). Explaining to them how the content is organized sometimes risks breaking the mood.

I keep thinking about Space Mountain, the ride at Disneyland. It’s themed and evokes a certain vibe. When you ride on it, it’s in the dark, and it supposedly transports you on a journey through deep space with stars whizzing by…

…but when you turn the lights on, it’s just a bunch of steel twisting around inside a building. So, to what extent should we “turn on the lights” to show the consumer where they are and what’s holding everything up? Or do we leave them in the dark and hope they just enjoy the ride and naturally figure it out?

In the future, how do we connect with the consumer about activity in the narrative?

Sadly, there are limited low-overhead ways for a consumer to know when a new installment has been published in a narrative. So, if someone reads Part 2 of something, and they’ve been promised a Part 3, how do they find out when Part 3 is available?

They usually (hopefully) just keep checking back. Clearly, this isn’t great because it requires them to take action, and even when they do, they have to evaluate the state of your content and figure out what’s changed on the site and whether or not Part 3 has popped into existence.

We can help them in a couple ways: We can make sure we promote Part 3 on Part 2, meaning we give them a navigational “anchor” and tell them “come back here to check.” When Part 3 is published, we promote that at the top of Part 2 for all those people that were checking it.

Additionally, some CMSs with DXP/CDP type functionality can help us here. When the consumer comes back to the site, it’s not hard to segment those who had read Part 2 (either simply retrieved the URL, or did so and scrolled to some threshold depth). We can address those consumers specifically, either with a simple banner or a dreaded modal overlay saying something like, “Hey, you were reading Part 2 before. Good news – we published Part 3!”

Barring that, let’s consider some other options –

• RSS would be great-ish. It was literally designed to notify subscribers about content updates. The problems are that it’s still a little niche-y (your grandma doesn’t use it), and we don’t tend to “subset” it. Meaning, you find out about everything in the scope of the RSS, which is usually all updates to the site. What would be lovely is if a specific narrative could have its own RSS feed (like you sometimes see RSS feeds just for the comments on a specific post). But, that would require some specialized work in the CMS to identify specific narratives within the larger flow of the site, and – even then – subscribing to RSS still implies some commitment and cognitive overhead.
• We could get their email address and promise to email them when Part 3 comes out… but, let’s face it: who really wants this? Literally no one wants to see your modal overlay asking them to “Get our content in your inbox!” And we have the same problem as RSS: I certainly don’t want an email about everything on your site. Could we promise to just email them about this one thing and nothing else on the site? Sure, but who is going to believe that?
• We could get them to follow us on social media, but this presents the same dilemma as RSS. Invariably, they’d see all our content. And they just want this one thing. Having to submit to seeing everything we publish is a commitment level they might not want.
• There are some site checking services, some of which have added AI tooling to figure out what’s changed on a site since it was last checked. Additionally, we have to assume agentic AI will advance to the point where someone can say, “Watch this website and let me know what Part 3 of this series publishes.” But we’re not there yet, and it will be a while until this filters down to your grandmother (if she never got around to RSS, is she really gonna jump on an AI agent?).

Ideally, we’d find a way to reach out to them one time and tell them about the new installment, but there’s not a great solution for that at the moment. (I have written about this in the past.)

And here’s the unspoken truth we’re not talking about: A lot of publishers don’t want to just tell you about Part 3. Rather, they want to use the possibility of learning about Part 3 as a carrot to push much more information at you than you really want, and even drop you into some generic marketing flow.

Next thing you know, an SDR named “Blake” has connected with you on LinkedIn, and you’re getting DMs about how he is a big fan and is so impressed with whatever you’re doing at [insert company here]...

Far be it from me to indict your marketing goals, but I wonder if this is counter-productive? The “threat” of a hailstorm of pushy marketing content is likely the biggest reason no one agrees to anything that holds even a whiff of commitment.

Here’s the thing…

Storytelling matters. And it goes beyond a single unit of content – a single page, a single email, whatever.

Narrative matters.

How do we get better at spinning narratives, as opposed to telling disconnected stories? How do we draw consumers into deeper content, and bring them back for repeated engagement from which larger concepts can start to emerge?

The solution is multi-disciplinary:

• Content Strategists need to plan for narrative content of different types and architectures
• Information Architects need to plan for addressable aggregational levels
• CMS Developers need to design navigational and aggregational structures that are usable and clear
• CMS Vendors need to eventually support the same at the product level and bring attention to the concept as a feature of their products.

In the age of AI which is stripping out the intended narrative structure that a content creator intended, let’s fight for ways to put it back.

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