Did you know that messages delivered through a story can be up to 22 times more memorable than just facts? 

I'd say no wonder given that stories provoke emotions, refer to our own experiences (when planned and told well) and so engage our subconscious minds. 

In our information, channels and apps overload era, that's a pretty significant number for businesses to consider when they are trying to engage with consumers or any other stakeholder group. Good stories can clearly sell. 

A lot of companies jumped on the bandwagon of storytelling or should I say on content creation as we saw the benefits in terms of SEO and user engagement.

But as the mass of content grew bigger and our attention spans got shorter, that focus on quantity versus quality is not doing you a favour anymore. 

What businesses, PR and marketing professionals alike need are fewer, but better stories that can capture hearts and minds at scale. 

We call this break through storytelling that can cut through the noise. 

Planning for this is easier than executing on it so let me help you with that. 

Last week, we covered the first part of Brian Halligan's and Dharmesh Shah's keynote at our HubSpot INBOUND conference from two weeks ago.

After learning from Brian about how to get from startup to scaleup, today we'll look at what Dharmesh, HubSpot's CTO and co-founder, shared on how to grow better consistently by looking at the three key functions - marketing, sales and customer service - and how they should be creating a delightful customer experience at each key stage they take care of - attract, engage and delight.

Dharmesh started with a personal story of how he got to spend a whole dinner with Elon Musk. 

As the evening was progressing, Dharmesh asked Elon an important question, namely "How do you work towards solving really big problems?"

Here's how Elon explained it:

"Let's say you're trying to get your company from point A to point B. Every person on the team is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors." 

Now Dharmesh was a bit puzzled and of course, got to do some thinking around this.

Let's look at this a bit.

“PR should reinvent itself; we are still rooted in conventional ways of thinking. If we don’t do it, we will die out like dinosaurs.”

This is one of the quotes that come to my mind when I think about the PR industry. The quote was by Iwona Sarachman, PR director at AmRest sp. z o.o., and was noted during an executive debate hosted by PRWeek last year which discussed the evolving relationship between marketing and PR.

Traditionally, PR has always been associated with media relations or publicity—writing press releases and pitching them to journalists to get coverage in newspapers, magazines, TV, or radio programs.

The more modern version of this in the digital world is influencer relations or simply pitching bloggers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, or anyone who’s influential online.

However, PR is so much more than just media or influencer relations. If done right, PR can encompass all media types within the PESO model—Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned.

But the PR industry is not fully there yet. We are still rooted in conventional ways of thinking and doing; still stuck with old habits; still using phone and email and avoiding technology.

In today's digitally driven world, if I can't find you as a brand online, you pretty much don't exist. 

Even if I spot your store on the street, I'll probably check out your website and your social profiles to vet you. 

That's the world we live in today and if you are not highly visible online, you won't make it far. This is why SEO (or search engine optimisation) is so important.

Especially for small business owners, SEO is not only a buzzword but also a term whose meaning is easy to understand but hard to implement. I would add PR professionals to this group as well because not many of them have expanded their expertise to SEO even though SEO today is primarily driven by relevant, quality content - and content is what PR pros do best.

At HubSpot, we preach a lot about topic clusters. But as a beginner in SEO, before you get to topic clusters, you really need to understand the basics of SEO.

Here's where a fantastic infographic from SEO Jury comes into play. (I suggest studying it yourself or giving it to your new hires too.)

16 SEO FAQs You Need to Understand [Infographic]

This is a guest post by Joseph Payne from CouponsMonk. 

From research to playing with words, you make efforts on each and every blog posts. But do you earn enough inbound links on it? Does your hard work pay off?

Be it an article or video content in blog posts, earning inbound links is a prerequisite to succeed in SEO. This is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website and engage readers. But most of the marketers lag behind in creating attractive content. 

Content is a crucial thing that can either make or break your marketing strategy. In order to survive in this cut-throat competition, it becomes part and parcel to focus on content creation. 

It’s time for you to craft blog posts in such a way that it drives skyrocket traffic to your site. As a result, it would greatly impact your marketing strategy, improving your brand values and your SEO ranking. 

Getting smart with the strategy simply means understanding your audience thoroughly and creating content accordingly. When content is created while considering the audience, then i's apparent that you can significantly engage readers. 

Here are some key ideas to take into consideration when revamping your content marketing strategy in such a way that it can earn better inbound links.

5 Types of Blog Posts That Earn Inbound Links