These days, the digital marketing space is flooded with content from thousands of brands. While it’s easier than ever to publish your content online, it’s becoming more difficult to make it stand out. With so much information to sift through, audiences have become conditioned to skim through and dismiss anything they find uninteresting. So, how do you grab your audience’s attention? It’s simple. Tell them a great story.According to Harvard Business, organisational psychologist Peg Neuhauser found that “learning that stems from a well-told story is remembered more accurately, and for far longer, than learning derived from facts and figures.” So, if you can convey your brand message with engaging storytelling, your audience will be far more likely to remember it.Well-told stories traditionally have three acts: the set-up, the action, and the climax. Using this classic structure, we’ve come up with three great tips to help you harness the power of storytelling in your marketing strategy.
Act 1. The Set-Up: Know Your Brand’s Story
At the beginning of any good story, you first need a set-up. You should build a world that’s unique and interesting to invite your audience into. Likewise, when creating your marketing strategy, you need to have a clear story for your brand.Craft a narrative for your brand that connects with your audience emotionally while still providing information. Every brand’s story is always entirely unique to them, so it’s a useful tool to help yours stand out. Reveal the genesis and history of your business, highlighting how you created your product or service and why. Communicate to your audience what your identity and values are. Highlight what differentiates your brand from all the others. What can you provide your audience with that’s special? Emphasise that you started your brand to provide your audience with great experiences. Research shows that emotions drive purchasing more than logic, so consider how you want your audience to feel every time they engage with you.
Act 2. The Action: Focus on Your Audience
Once the world of the story has been set-up, most of the action occurs in the second act. This is when the hero of the story experiences its most important events. In your marketing strategy, the hero of the story should always be your audience.Rather than centring your product or service in your marketing strategy, you should always make your audience your focus. Frame your storytelling so that your audience is the hero, while your brand is there to support them in their story. This means when writing copy, always focus on sentence structure that positions your customer as having the active role in using your product or service. You should also engage your audience with empathetic language. Rather than just explaining to them what your brand does, demonstrate that you understand what they need from you on their individual journey. On your social platforms, you can also post User Generated Content that spotlights your audience and their unique, personal stories about using your brand. By positioning your audience as the hero of the story, you’ll establish a trusting relationship with them, which will make them more likely to return in the future.
Act 3. The Climax: Leave Them Wanting More
All the action of the second act finally leads to the story’s climax. A great climax ends at the perfect moment, leaving the audience satisfied, but still wanting more. So, when implementing storytelling techniques in your marketing strategy, you don’t have to give everything away all at once.A benefit of storytelling marketing is that it avoids overwhelming audiences with too much information. It’s ok not to reveal every detail in each story you tell. Instead, you can withhold some information to build intrigue and suspense. You can create content that tells a story in pieces, released like episodes in a series. This can be an especially effective strategy for the lead up to a major event or product launch. It’s important when implementing strategies like this to have a content calendar planned well in advance, as you’ll need to keep your release consistent to maintain engagement. When audiences become emotionally invested in the story, it triggers a desire for closure. If it’s executed effectively and consistently, this strategy will ensure they continue returning to your social platforms and engaging with your content, as they’ll want to find out how the story concludes.
Speaking of, that brings us to the conclusion of this article. We hope you’ve found every act of it interesting and useful. Try implementing some of these techniques in your next marketing strategy to tell your own unique stories. If you need further assistance in creating your narrative, why not get in touch? We’re always here to help.
