Brand storytelling can be a powerful tool in digital marketing. This strategy involves creating and sharing a company's story. Digital storytelling builds trust with a business's target audiences, encourages customers to act, and personalizes its brand. Brands must find new ways to connect with their target audience and promote their products or services. Consumers are more informed and connected than ever but more skeptical of marketing messages. When creating an effective marketing strategy, marketers must think narratively.
What Is Brand Storytelling?
Brand storytelling, or digital storytelling, is a marketing strategy for connecting brands with their target audience by using a creative narrative across various channels. As brands compete for customers' attention in an increasingly noisy marketplace, many now utilize brand storytelling to communicate their product's essential features, origins, and utility to consumers.
Brand narratives often incorporate some form of entertainment or can be told like a storybook with distinctive characters, themes, places, and additional features. These stories may be historical, referencing the business' humble beginning up to its current marvel. Or they may include dialogue detailing the highs and lows that occur when manufacturing new products or promoting a new service.
Historically the role of a brand has been to build a unique image or identity, focusing on its products or services. Today, many marketers are shifting their focus towards building emotional bonds with audiences by branding their company’s story.
The goals of this narrative approach towards branding include engaging your audience and boosting awareness. These goals are best accomplished by focusing on your company's story and creating an authentic emotional connection between your customers and your brand. For example, by telling the origin of your business and how it ended up where it is today, you can create trust and kinship between your customers and the brand itself.
Digital stories combine components of marketing and communications to produce a charming narrative. Using customized storylines to humanize your brand and demonstrate its core principles is the goal. Digital stories have immeasurable value as a consistently effective technique to reach people through the internet. Customers are more likely to remember your brand if you can tell them a story about it.
The Importance of Brand Storytelling in Marketing
Vision and narrative should guide marketing and branding efforts. Many marketing materials are written in the style of ad copy or marketing ploys. Storytelling begins with empathy, moves on to the pain areas, and tells the audience about the brand, product, or service. It's essential to provide a story behind your content to make it unforgettable and relevant to your audience.
Techniques for Brand Storytelling in Digital Marketing
Here are some practical ways to include digital storytelling in your marketing efforts:
A/B testing
Randomly testing several variables, such as a page on a website and individual page components, is known as A/B testing. Discovering the page or page element that has the most "click-throughs" is the goal of this experiment. A click-through occurs when an advertisement has sufficiently piqued the viewer's attention to prompt them to click on the link and go to the next page.
Data-driven storytelling
Using digital data to create visually engaging narratives can help your ads stand out in crowded advertising spaces. A story or ad doesn't always have to depend solely on words. Keeping up with the fast-paced world of digital marketing requires you to use all the data you have at your disposal to tell compelling stories.
Show — don’t tell
A tried-and-true strategy for enticing readers, show—don't tell, is creative storytelling at its best. When the author doesn't explicitly state a character's thoughts or feelings, the reader must interpret and experience the thoughts and feelings on their own. In marketing, the principle is the same. Instead of using a sales pitch, you might tell a narrative about your product or service to assist your audience in better understanding its worth.
Maintain a consistent story
Changing the story while trying to sell a product or service to a customer is not a good strategy. The ad's message should be clear and consistent from beginning to end. This might be seen as bait-and-switch or deceptive advertising. These are simple ways to lose the confidence of consumers.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Telling Your Brand Story
While many organizations attempt to humanize transactional and marketing experiences with their customers through digital storytelling, their good intentions often lead them into traps. Here are some of the most frequent mistakes they commit.
Using an excessive amount of jargon
Your narrative loses its relatability if it's overloaded with technical industry terms. Jargon should be reserved for your feature sheet or training presentation, not your blog posts. Your brand's narrative should be simple enough for everybody to grasp. B2C communication needs a high degree of clarity.
Missing the fundamental elements of a story
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. A story usually begins by describing the current situation, then explains how the status quo was challenged and how this led to improved conditions. Be sure to include characters that your audience can relate to. When they can see themselves in the story, that's when they care.
Not having a story that’s all yours
What makes your brand narrative unique? Providing extra details will engage your audience. You may have faced the same problems as your customers at some point, so you started your business to help them. To make your brand story distinct, remember difficult times and the feelings you experienced.
Using the wrong perspective to tell the story
To tell their brand's narrative, most organizations begin by focusing on themselves. Brand stories require an audience (better known as prospective consumers) who ought to perceive themselves as heroes. If you don't include that perspective, it’s not truly a brand story.
Connecting to Customers Through Your Values
A narrative is more powerful than a list of keyword phrases. Customers want to know your values. If they believe in your company's values, mission, and vision, they'll care more about your company. Digital storytelling is about bringing the audience into your world. When used in marketing, brand storytelling builds connections and loyalty.
With the help of brand storytelling professionals like Fifth & Cor, your marketing plan will surely leave a lasting impact on your target audience. Get in touch with us now to learn more.