While the proclivity for storytelling has been with humanity from the beginning, the ways in which we tell stories has a long history of adaptation. When it comes to branding, staying on top of the evolution of storytelling is more important than ever: brand stories have the capacity to stir people  to action, but only when they’re strategically deployed.

That’s where Mainland comes in.

As the parent company for PR firm No Limit Agency and digital publications 1851 Franchise and ESTATENVY, Mainland doesn’t just talk the talk—it walks the walk. How? By leveraging interwoven content channels across historically insulated channels like PR, digital and social media, and then deploying an integrated strategy to give a brand’s story the legs it needs. That’s why the company’s logo is a soaring hot air balloon: Mainland takes the ‘30,000-foot view’ idiom and makes it a storytelling reality.

“Mainland is the connection of technology to content,” said Mainland CEO Nick Powills. “Over the last 10 years, we’ve gone from traditional PR to a world of social media and now digital advertising, which monetizes social media. The way the content pathway has shifted—that is, away from traditional gatekeepers like radio, TV and print—means that there are no longer multiple touchpoints for a consumer. Mainland solves that by combining the best of marketing with the best of technology.”

Powills elaborated by explaining that the best way to understand what Mainland does is to interrogate the now all-too-common term “content marketing.”

“From an industry standpoint, the buzzword term within the last four years has been ‘content marketing,’” said Powills. “That used to mean blogging, and for a lot of brands still, they reroute you back to a blog linked to their website. But there’s a key word missing there: marketing.”

Brands by now have figured out the need for “content marketing” (that is, the solve for this very problem), but they often don’t know how to deploy it. Similarly, in the interest of cultivating third-party credibility and in response to client demand, PR agencies have leaned into the claim that their services include content marketing, but they often fail to define just how they understand the term. And because PR and marketing organizations tend to defer to outdated methods when it comes to how their represented brands engage social media—meaning they stick to tired signal-boosting promotions and community moderating—they’re often stuck spinning their wheels instead of innovating.

Users don’t want to listen to a brand’s voice on a blog because they view it as self-promoting and inauthentic, Powills explained. Traditional blogs, then, miss out on the critical marketing component—meaning the absence of a narrative arc targeting consumer action—but overt marketing turns off the modern day consumer.

Conventional approaches won’t cut it when it comes to today’s content-savvy consumer, according to Powills.

“On social, brands that say ‘Eat my pizza’ instead of ‘What do you want to see on your pizza?’ don’t drive engagement. On blogs, ‘Here’s what we’re working on’ instead of ‘What do you want from our offering?’ don’t drive engagement. When you don’t have engagement, you’re not moving the needle toward your targeted action, and your consumer will become disinterested and drop off,” said Powills.

One way to keep consumer engagement high is Mainland’s strategy of brand-aligned, cross-channel messaging that’s value-rich for the target consumer. Powills explained why.

“In this world of algorithms, social media platforms read our preferences based on our user behavior. Because in a world where we’re no longer fed the things we want to be fed, we will disengage,” said Powills. “Think about newspapers: lots of people will go straight to the sports or lifestyle sections. There’s an order in which we like to receive information, so once social evolves to that point, it becomes the tool of the future. At Mainland, that’s what we’re trying to do.”

This means that Mainland is focused on developing quality content that drives engagement and keeps brands top-of-mind for consumers, as opposed to the numbers game that many brands and PR thinkers utilize.

“Human beings are conditioned to think life is a popularity contest—we think ‘thousands of reads on my content, that’s winning!’ But that’s not winning,” Powills said. “Winning is getting our content to the people that most benefit from reading it. Mainland works to only deliver content to the people that care about it, that stand to benefit from the content because it offers them something of value. It’s not a numbers game. If we learn anything from the way social media is moving, it’s that if people get what they care about and not garbage, they’re engaged and they take action.”

Because of this, Mainland crafts, curates and deploys brand content tailored to the consumer’s needs and interests. Such a people-centric approach, as opposed to conventional brand- or organization-centric lenses, means that compelling human stories emerge. And when it comes to the status quo, that’s disruptive.

“We’re disrupting traditional storytelling in the way we’ve invested in technology,” Powills explained, “but our main disruption is that we are going back to the fundamentals of what social platforms were built for: real stories.”

To this end, Mainland’s PR arm, No Limit Agency, secures earned media coverage for clients by finding the human stories that drive brands—which, after all, are comprised of and exist to serve people. With a high-value content approach applied to marketing, and a high-value human-interest approach applied to media outreach, Mainland thus integrates the best practices across the board.

That approach is paying off. Just ask Scott Thompson, Chief Development Officer for Level 5 Capital Partners and swim instruction franchise Big Blue Swim School.

“Mainland's ability to tell the compelling Big Blue Swim School story using the right social images, digital ads and content as an emerging brand to educate our target franchisee is amazing,” Thompson said. “Mainland helps us look like a five-year old brand even though we started franchising just six months ago. Mainland is strategic in helping us nail our messaging on multiple channels to attract and convert our potential franchise partners into engaged prospects.”

Amy Przywara, Chief Marketing Officer for supplemental education franchise Sylvan Learning, agreed with Thompson’s endorsement.

“One of the biggest reasons that Sylvan Learning has partnered with Mainland is the human element in everything they do. Brands don’t sell brands; people sell brands. You remember a story about a human being in the news, not ‘There’s a new store in the mall,’” Przywara said. “So much in our world today is focused on digital, but we still crave human connections—you still want to know that you’re doing business with someone, as opposed to an electronic device or a faceless brand in a shopping center. The storytelling approach of the human component to our supplemental education business—which is all about people’s journeys to success—coupled with all of the different channels being used makes Mainland’s approach really powerful.”

Brands today have the unique opportunity to cultivate meaningful relationships with their consumers, Przywara emphasized, but only if they come from an authentic place.

“Our job as a franchise brand is to educate people on the opportunity to franchise with us and ultimately to help them make empowered, knowledgeable choices. ‘You won’t remember what someone said, but always remember what they made you feel,’ is something I come back to. So building that relationship digitally first, through impactful storytelling, that’s what grows that trust,” Przywara said.

Mainland has its eye on continuing to deliver people-focused stories to the right people through its integrated storytelling strategy across channels.

And from 30,000 feet up, Powills said, “It’s a beautiful view.”