People’s attention spans are getting shorter, so even if you have the most helpful information there is, there’s still no guarantee that your audience will read your piece. But there’s one thing that readers crave nowadays—human connection—which is achieved via storytelling.
Why bother telling narratives when you can just deliver your content in a straightforward manner? Well, you can only effectively deliver stories when you have already made your audience aware of your brand through straightforward introductory ads. It goes to say that both these go hand in hand with reiterating your brand.
Knowing the value, identity, and audience of your business whilst you make your content prevents you from bringing out directionless posts, which could greatly put the credibility of your brand at risk. There are yet many other factors to take into account when you embark on the storytelling path as your content and digital marketing technique.
Benefits of Storytelling in Content Marketing
Before we give you what it takes to have epic narrative content, get to know first the importance of this strategy in content marketing. Here are why you should embark on a storytelling marketing strategy:
- Leverage Over Media Fragmentation
Consumers already have lots of media choices to use, such as radio, television, mobile, online, print, and many others, known as media fragmentation. This is one of the difficulties content marketers faces when trying to reach their target audience. However, storytelling works perfectly on some platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat, where users tend to look for experience, not products, especially when the content comes alongside a captivating photo or video.
- Gaining Consumers’ Trust Through Consistency
As your business grows and you offer different services or products, being consistent with the way you promote your brand helps you to still connect with your audience. Consistency paves the way to gaining your audience’s trust as they feel like they really know you.
- Audience Remembers Your Ads
If you can recall the ads that stuck with you, almost always, they were good stories. For long, science has proven that people remember stories better than straight-up facts. We are naturally socially driven, and empathy helps us connect with story characters, which is why we feel more driven to take an action.
Notice why charitable organizations stick with storytelling almost all the time, and true enough, when crafted great, we respond in empathy, motivating us to make donations in the end. Facebook and Instagram Ads works perfectly for that.
- Potential to Go Viral
Compared to the regular marketing style of simply delivering information, stories have a wider reach as they get more shares than the former. Genuinely engaging stories fare better on the internet, and even if they don’t go viral immediately, at least they get more shares.
How to Craft Better Stories for Content Marketing
Now that you know exactly how marketing delivered via stories is better than regular ads, let’s delve into the strategies on how you can improve storytelling:
- Audience as the Hero
The secret to making your content appeal to your audience is making them the hero in your story, not your business. If you focus only on your business or what interests it, for people, it will just appear as hype and repel your ads instead of relating to it.
Although this doesn’t mean you stop telling stories about your business or organization but that you take care of delivering them in a way that your audience can feel that they live in them. Making them the hero of your story will make them want to hear your story till the end.
- Understanding Their Buying Phase
There are three basic buying phases for consumers—know, like, and trust. The goal of your stories is to bring your audiences’ mind frame to the next steps. Each customer will be at different phases. For buyers at the knowing phase, you need to make sure they know your business exists and that you can solve their problems. Make your content as short and interesting as possible, as your audience may not have enough attention for you yet.
At the like stage, consumers already know about your business and what you offer to solve their problems. However, there are many other businesses providing solutions to the same problem, so how would you be worth their time? And plenty of other concerns. You can outstand from other competitors when you come up with valuable, vulnerable, and authentic content in which you can show your good, bad, and ugly sides. Showing vulnerability paves the way for your customers to like you and get into the next phase.
Now, onto building customers’ trust. When consumers already like you and see the different ways you solve their problems, you’ll need to make them know you can deliver what you promise. At this phase, it helps to share success stories from your previous clients and portray them as heroes. Make your audience put their feet into the shoes of someone who had positive experiences with your help.
- Consistent Story Framework
Frameworks are different story perspectives that help consumers get out of their usual paths of thought. For example, the crossroads formula in which you separate each buyer’s journey stages into questions and then match the questions with the different hero’s journey stages. Since not everyone has a natural knack for storytelling, it’s better to stick to the same story framework so that you don’t have to reinvent every time you craft stories.
- Visual Storytelling
Don’t just stick to one medium, such as if you’re just using text or spoken word. Use visuals as well, as they are much easier to process and be remembered. You can use screenshots with annotations, charts and graphs, memes, or quote images.
- Bigger Goals
You can also use the strategy called Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), which is using a bigger, measurable goal connected to your story as you portray what impact you want to make to the world. With this strategy, it’s easier to talk about your business, builds something bigger than it, and give more meaning to you and your team.
Storytelling is a great content marketing tactic. If you strive to master this craft, you are sure to reap more audience reach and sales conversion. You can also seek help from Legend DigiTech to make marketing tasks easier for you.
