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Whether leaving for vacation or a job in a new city, departures can be stressful, exciting, and full of conflict. Use this prompt to reimagine a departure today in your writing time.
I’ve been working on crafting more emotional scenes, and in reviewing some old journals, I stumbled upon an entry about the ways we’re always leaving. Days later, that phrase kept popping up in my mind. I started a list of departures and quickly found enough emotional material for more scenes than I have time to write.
I think there are two qualities about any departure that make them great for writing. See if you agree and try this prompt with me today!
1. Departures require action
As I made my list, I started with the big departures. My family moves often due to my husband’s job, and we have faced far more grief-filled departures than I care to count.
But we’ve also run away on fun trips, left boring parties, and been evacuated in the dead of night when a wildfire careened too close to our house. Each experience required action, a must for compelling fiction.
Consider the ways a departure requires a character to act. Vacationers have to pack, plan, and board the train or plane. A spouse leaving a relationship makes a series of choices followed by action. A thief escaping a scene of his crime requires different action.
If characters are stuck, make them leave their status quo life and see what happens.
2. Departures hold emotion
Departures are also rife with emotion. I just finished reading Lori Gottlieb’s book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, and in it, one of her patients plans the most remarkable funeral for herself. It reminded me of the inherent tension in departures– how they can hold both hope and grief at the same time.
In writing, it is easy to assign one emotion to a scene, when there’s often far more happening below the surface.
Even the happiest of departures can be full of emotion. I’ve been sitting in an airport preparing to board for what should be a relaxing vacation while tied up in knots on the inside due to guilt or something that feels unfinished at home. Departures are an opportunity to embrace and convey a range of emotions.
See if you can assign more than one emotion to each departure on your list.
Where Will Your Characters Depart?
What departures have you experienced recently? What departures stick out in your memory as major events in your life? What departures might occur in your stories? Take some time to make a list.
Now that you have a list, any one of them could be built into a scene that helps you practice action and emotion. Give it a try!
Why do you think departures are such powerful vehicles for story? What are your favorite departure scenes in books, tv, or film? Let us know in the comments.
PRACTICE
Choose a departure from your list and write a scene about it. Consider what emotion might be expected in that scene. Then, complicate it with another emotion or two.
Marketing continues to become more complex as marketing professionals have more and more marketing tactics available. Marketers need to think about content, website, mobile, SEO, SEM, programmatic advertising, video, podcasts, webinars, email, automation, personalization, data, social media, account-based marketing, affiliate marketing, eCommerce, engagement, live events, syndication, gamification, retargeting, AI and more.
As marketing continues to evolve, the technology needed to support marketing continues to evolve too.
What Is a Martech Stack?
The martech stack is the group of technologies that markers use to execute, analyze and improve their marketing across the customer lifecycle.
What Is Martech Stack Optimization?
Martech stack optimization is how you build your martech stack to optimize your marketing efforts. What technology do you need? What are your objectives? How do all of your technologies work together? Do they work together? What investment should you plan for? And more.
To understand the importance of martech stack optimization, you need to understand the growth of marketing technology in the past 10 years.
To understand the rapid growth of marketing technology, look at the Marketing Technology Infographic that is published by Scott Brinker, the Chief Marketing Technologist, each year. The infographic has had such rapid growth that it is now called a Supergraphic (a well-deserved title change).
The Supergraphic started in 2011 with 150 companies and has grown to 7,040 companies in 2019. Yes, that is not a typo – 7040!
To help marketing professionals with martech stack optimization, Ascend2, a research-based marketing firm, fielded the Martech Stack Optimization Survey. 265 marketing professionals participated in the survey.
With so many marketing technologies available, it is easy for companies to have a martech stack that is complex and highly inefficient. Too often, multiple Marketing Technologies (or the MarTech Stack) become a junkyard of underutilized and disparate tools. The purpose of optimizing this set of tools is to make difficult marketing processes easier and more efficient.
The Ascend2 survey helps answer the question: How will marketers optimize their martech tools in the year ahead?
Here are a few noteworthy findings for the Asend2 research study on martech stack optimization:
Finding #1: Status of Martech Stack Optimization within Marketing Departments Today
It seems that marketers have recognized and are slowly taking action when it comes to addressing how marketing technologies are utilized and managed. Only about one-in-five marketing professionals (19%) have an operational strategy in place for optimizing a martech stack. However, another 58% report being in the development or implementation phase of optimization.
About one-in-five marketing professionals (19%) have an operational strategy in place for optimizing a #martech stack.
Finding #2: Key Priorities of Martech Stack Optimization
Marketers are tasked with strategically implementing the appropriate marketing technologies in a way that produces significant results. Making an overall marketing strategy more efficient is a top priority for 55% of marketing professionals implementing a martech stack optimization strategy. Improving customer experience is also a key objective for 51% of marketers surveyed.
Making an overall marketing strategy more efficient is a top priority for 55% of marketing professionals implementing a #martech stack optimization strategy.
Finding #3: Martech Must Improve Improve Ease of Use
Many marketing technologies are only as good as what the user puts into them. In order to best optimize marketing, over half of the marketing professionals (52%) report that implemented martech need to improve ease of use. Increasing utilization and adoption of technology can lead to improved performance.
Finding #4: Data Insights and Analysis Is the Most Important Feature of a Martech Stack
When implementing a martech stack, some features are more important to marketers than others. Access to data insights and analysis is the most important feature for 51% of marketing professionals surveyed who see the value in using data to optimize. Ensuring the seamless integration of systems is also of significant importance to 46% of marketers.
Finding #5: Martech Stack Optimization Is an Important Investment
Marketers clearly see a benefit to dedicating resources to martech stack optimization, as 86% report that they will continue to invest or are planning to invest in the year ahead. About half of those surveyed (49%) describe this investment as moderate, while 22% say they will continue to invest significantly in optimizing a martech stack.
Conclusion
Before your martech stack looks more like a bowl of spaghetti than an optimized tool for marketing, take the time to build your strategy and determine what you need to be successful for the year ahead. To find out more about martech stack optimization, download the entire Ascend report.
It’s a big question. “When should I invest in conversion optimization for my website?” Even though I’ve been preaching the benefits of CRO since 2006, I don’t consider it an obvious decision. Instead of telling you what I think, I asked a competitor to tell you, just to keep me honest. We have answered the […]
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