People remember how you make them feel, not what you tell them
Everybody loves a good story. They evoke emotional responses, allow us to experience and learn, and connect us with one another. For brands, storytelling represents an effective way to engage with an audience, while simultaneously increasing their presence online. Thus, it is not surprising to see how the popularity of visual storytelling, such as video, has surged in the recent years, and many (including us) have written about the importance of video content on brand engagement.
With so much online content passing through our screens every day, it is time to look at why stories are considered so valuable, and how businesses can utilise this approach as a part of their content marketing strategy.
A story can make your brand memorable.
A narrative can help us make sense of an experience. For a brand, telling a story is a great way to explain to your audience who you are and what you do, and how your product or service can help solve a problem or a pain for the customer. By telling a story, you can help build associations in the consumers mind, allowing your brand to be in the consumer’s consideration set when making purchasing decisions. For example, a memorable origin story highlighting the brand purpose and uniqueness can be a great way to differentiate from the competition. As humans are largely visual creatures, visual storytelling, such as video content is a great storytelling medium, as it can stimulate better recall. Check out the Dollar Shave Club team tell their story, wrapping together their origin, and also how they are solving a genuine problem for their customers:
Connecting with your audience’s emotions can have notable business benefits.
According to a HBR article, understanding the emotional motivations behind customer purchasing can be profitable. Fostering feelings such as belonging, thrill or freedom, can drive consumer behaviour and result in deep and meaningful customer-brand relationships. A recent example of utilising customer emotions in brand messaging could be the “It’s coming home” tweet from British Airways during the 2018 World Cup semifinal-stage. With a picture of a BA boarding pass for “football” from Moscow to “Home”, BA aimed to foster the feeling of connectedness with the English football fans. With nearly 10K retweets, the twitter post can be argued to be a success, raising both brand awareness as well as telling a story of the emotion of the nation.
Storytelling can boost both customer engagement and loyalty.
Storytelling is a pathway to customer engagement. With engaged customers, a brand can benefit from customer referrals and brand advocacy, resulting in increased awareness. These in turn, can contribute to brand loyalty and improved returns. Overall, the more engaged customers tend to be more satisfied with your product or service. They are also less sensitive to changes in price, and are more likely to spread your brand message both online and offline, making them highly valuable. Amazon, Google, Apple and Netflix are all examples of brand loyalty leaders with highly engaged consumers. While representing different industries, they can all be regarded as examples on how engaged consumers impact profitability, and more specifically, how investing in the consumer experience can result in consumers having a higher willingness to spend.
How to get storytelling right?
Brand stories need to be both authentic and engaging. The aim is to foster participation, such as retweets, likes or comments, as well as showcase the personality of the brand. Here, consistency across the various communication platforms is important, as you want to give your audience a clear picture of who you are and what you represent. Know what motivates your customers, and produce relevant and timely online content to show your expertise. Use social media analytics to optimise the online environment for emotional connections. Besides this, regularly measure your impact, as it can help you learn from your customers. Remember that when engaging in visual storytelling, good quality audio and video are highly important.
“People remember how you make them feel, not what you tell them”
Storytelling should be considered an important piece in your overall content marketing strategy, as it can help your business create meaningful customer connections that translate into brand engagement and loyalty.
DIGITALPARADE
At DigitalParade, we specialise in social media. Our services include audience and influencer insights, channel and content strategy creation, social media measurement and community management. We help our clients define what the best channels are for them to participate on and connect with their audience, and how to build and maintain the ‘best’ followers to offer them the best chance of conversion and advocacy. Learn more about how we can help you connect with your audience hello@digitalparade.com
