Category: Selling

More than ever, it is becoming essential for businesses and brand owners to invest in a narrative that helps them sell. According to recent research, brands that tell compelling brand stories are likely to have a 20% increase in their brand value.

However, this is not achievable without effective business and marketing plans in place. To implement and maintain these plans, you need to stay on top of

The needs of consumers change over time, as they move through the different stages of life. When this happens, their buying behaviors also change. Marketers and business owners need to anticipate the customer’s next buying stage, as well as the most common needs within each stage. This can be mapped out for short-term changes, such as living in a college dorm. Long-term changes are a little more obvious and easier to anticipate, such as getting married or having a baby. Flexible and timely approaches such as brand storytelling, enables businesses and consumers to make the most of the storytelling opportunities.

1. Customer-led storytelling

Review and product-rating sites are popping up everywhere. Consumers are more likely than ever to share their feelings, opinions, and thoughts about their latest buying experience with their circle of friends. In fact, research shows that more than 91% of individuals trust information from their peers, rather than directly from mainstream media. For marketers this implies that they offer a platform for consumers to tell their stories. Customer-generated stories can help improve brand engagement, establish trust, and bring brand attention to a broader audience.

2. Data-driven storytelling

Businesses are incorporating more data into their storytelling plans and marketing campaigns. Providing meaningful info and examples, along with data statistics that are relevant to the story, adds an element of authority and of accuracy. Business brands benefit by creating engaging, data-driven stories, which intrigue readers and tend to draw the attention of potential consumers. Stories, which discuss solutions to a problem, also benefit by making the story stand out from similar content.

3. Mini-ads

Traditional advertising is facing a tough time in the wake of digital marketing. As a result, many businesses want more inventive, fresh ways to connect with customers as well as deliver their messages effectively. Mini-video ads are super options for businesses that want to increase brand/logo recognition. While video marketing is extremely popular, audience attention spans are short. Make sure your videos match your viewers’ attention span to the purpose/goal of the content.

Facebook targets marketers with six-second ads and YouTube tried out the ‘Six Second Story Challenge’. If your media isn’t viewed to the end, consider using mini-ad stories to drive engagement with an overwhelmed audience.

4. Immersive storytelling

Businesses are increasingly connecting with their prospects and customers through Virtual Reality (VR), through which brands can pass information to their audience. With Pokémon Go having recorded an unfathomable success (being downloaded more than 65 million times by US users) and IBM planning to a launch a new VR app, there is no doubt that brand storytelling has a different future; one full of inspiration, engagement, and education.

Business will likely, earn more leads by using VR to immerse their target audience in experiences centered on their story. Brand storytelling, at its core, is a powerful way to develop a higher level of emotional-engagement with your target audience.

As technology changes and advances, consumer needs and behaviors also change. It becomes necessary to find new ways to tell your brand story to your prospects and consumers, in ways that guarantee you maximum results. The bottom line is that only the focused, emotionally stimulating and an exciting brand narrative is likely to get you the results you envision.

Brand storytelling is a great approach to use in order to introduce and market your business. Stories cut through all the communication pathos and to the soul. Science proves that storytelling can cut through the neocortex of our brains, hitting us where it matters, in the limbic brain, which houses memories, visualizations, and feelings. Storytelling is a great marketing tool in that it elicits emotion. Stories are ideal in making sense of complication information, and the king of storytelling is video. If you need any convincing, check how much Hollywood is making in a year or even check the visitor statistics of YouTube.

Tips for Effective Storytelling Using Videos

Video has become a significant avenue in marketing. However, it is not as impactful if you do not have a clear purpose or direction in mind for the video. You can only benefit from telling a great story via effective videos. The ideal videos for marketing should evoke emotions, target and address the audience’s needs, desires, and pain points, as well as offer an actionable solution. Here are a few tips to give you ideas about how to use videos successfully to tell your brand’s stories.

• Follow a definite video storytelling process

A successful video story follows a definite process. It should have a plot, purpose, people, place, audience, and distribution channel. The plot sets out the storyline that you will follow. In determining your purpose, focus on the reaction you want to get from the audience. A great story should involve characters that your audience can relate to emotionally and understand on some level. Also, choose a distribution channel that has a higher probability of reaching a broader audience.

• Choose your story idea wisely

Many marketers’ videos fail to tell stories that resonate with the audience, while also providing or marketing a solution the audience craves. Contrary to popular belief, if you want your video to be effective and in high-demand among your target audience it’s not enough to have a good distribution channel and the right settings. The story you share must relate to info, issues, and solutions your audience wants. In addition, it should also be presented in a way that motivates them to follow one of your action suggestions, which is based on a goal you set for the video and your business.

• Showcase brand’s expertise

Your prospects and customers come to you to help them solve a problem related to the topics you cover. Sharing expert information in your field not only educates your audience; but, it can also help to establish your authority status in the industry. However, it is important to talk to your audience on their current level of understanding, without talking down to them or so far beyond them that you overwhelm or confuse them. In either of these instances, you may lose viewers and/or sales, if you misjudge the audience’s level of knowledge or what they want.

• Offer a better explanation to a trend

Is there a trend in your industry that is creating a buzz? If so, take the opportunity to start a conversation. Find out what they think and feel about the subject. You could provide a more in-depth explanation about the trend as well as how it relates to the audience and your brand.

• Create inspirational videos

Creating an inspirational story is a great way to engage with your audience. It gives them interesting info, while providing the opportunity to share it with friends, family, and others in their broad circle of acquaintances. This is a wonderful way to address difficult or complex issues, which have a high level of negative experiences and feelings associated with a problem. Provide hope and inspiration in the form of tips, role models, and more, in order help your audience make it through the tough parts to find success and happiness.

There are several ways to use your storytelling ideas in a video to convey information. Regardless of the idea you choose, it is important to create a relatable experience. In addition, make sure that you get personal in your video storytelling; it will boost your audience’s feeling of connectedness.

Did you know that there are successful brands out there whose leaders and marketers hate selling? It sounds confusing and ironical in at its best considering that the primary goal of any business to make money through sales. For most people, the idea of bothering people, to convince them to buy a product or service they are not interested in is a complete turn-off. So how do you make sales without feeling guilty that you are bothering people?

The truth is that you do not have to be sleazy salesy to sell and that is why most brands have embraced the art of storytelling. It helps businesses establish trust and build loyalty, while at the same time opening doors and connection lines with prospects. To succeed in marketing through storytelling, you must be aware of the right places that will give you maximum returns. This article highlights some of the best places for marketing through storytelling.

1. On social media

There is a tremendous growth of social media platforms nowadays, which makes social media a great place to target your customers and prospects. The best thing about marketing through storytelling is that it needs no definite beginning, end, or middle –just something that presents the significance of your brand in the life of your prospects and customers.

For instance, you can document people’s lifestyle in connection to your service and product on Instagram. Such an approach does not aim at selling your brand but present a picture of the lifestyle the brand promotes. Sharing pictures and videos in support of a lifestyle that your prospects ascribe to, or one where your brand reinforces the certain beliefs shared by your customers helps build loyalty.

2. In email marketing

Email marketing is a great approach that ensures information is delivered at the target’s mailbox. You can deviate from the traditional and utterly boring approach of marketing by using stories. You do not have to give the features and the benefits of a product you just launched. Instead, you can create and share engaging stories around your brand.

Derek Halpern provides good examples of how marketers can and should use storytelling in email marketing, as well as in other areas of business and life. Upon the launch of his online course-building software, he shared email stories of how people relied on courses to grow their business.

Specifically, he was able to weave a story that included the objections and obstacles that people overcame. Reading these emails at your convenience, made the experience and information seem more personal to each individual reader. In addition, it allowed subscribers to see the exceptional value of his product, as it related to the readers and the similar issues of the characters in the storyline, which the reader might face.

3. On your blog

At times, storytelling is just that simple –telling your audience a story. It could be a story about the origin of your business or anything about your customers. Some marketers use stories to give their blog posts an interesting angle. It is the same concept preachers and teachers use to explain a given concept or subject.

You can use the same approach to fascinate your readers! The use of stories in blogging is considered a great approach to create interest, set the mood, and help the readers connect with their related experiences before you get into the details of the storyline.

4. On a website’s about us page

The about-us page of your website is a great place to hook your site visitors with your brand story. Nevertheless, most business’ about – us pages are just a turn-off because they narrate everything the company does and your superiority. This page should be about your brand story and help you leave the mark in people. If anything, that’s the only way you can set yourself different from the rest. Copyblogger and Moz’s about-us are great examples of how businesses can market themselves through storytelling.

There is no limit to where you can apply the storytelling approach to market your brand. The secret is to ensure you use words, emotions, and examples that profoundly resonate with your audience. The more they “see” themselves in the storyline, the more likely they are to feel a connection with you, your brand, your solutions and much more.

Stories are a significant part of human culture and the art of telling stories is timeless. With the introduction and advancement of technology, storytelling has become a great marketing tool. Brands use storytelling to capture the attention of prospects and customers, as well as engage with them for improved sales and ROI.

Using stories in marketing is prevalent on social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat. Visual storytelling is becoming one of the top methods of marketing for businesses and their audiences. It often uses images and other media that’s associated with visuals.

Marketers frequently implement images within their stories, as well as in their storytelling campaigns. However, if you aren’t familiar with storytelling for your business, you may have difficulty recognizing when you are on the right track and when you need to make changes. The following info will help you get and stay on the right path for your success.

Using Images to Succeed In Storytelling

Storytelling using images requires the adoption of the right images and emotion-evoking message. Here are a few life hacks on how to use images successfully in storytelling.

1. Identifying good storytelling images

Before you use images to tell brand stories, it is important to identify and understand what should be considered when choosing images for storytelling. To make sure your images are relevant, motivate, and inspire think about the story idea and theme, the mood the audience currently has, and the feeling you want to leave them with, at the end of the story.

• Idea: There is no denying how challenging it can be to illustrate a concept using images. However, an image that captures a given action can save you here. Abstract images, as well as, symbolism are often used when telling stories through images.
• Mood: Image backgrounds are used to express the mood in a given photo. In case a dramatic effect is needed, blurred backgrounds are the best. However, it is important to have a close relationship between the subject and its background.

Since emotions and feelings are important, it’s very important to use images of people with feelings they can relate to now, such as fear, disappointment, frustration, etc. If you offer a solution to the problem causing these negative feelings, at the end of the story, use pics of people with confident, happy, and inspired expressions.

• Theme: Images you use in storytelling should follow a given theme. It makes it easy to tailor your message well to the audience you have in mind. Leave a few clues to allow your audience to develop ideas around your story.

In addition, the message you convey should resonate with the theme and your narration, whereby you’re let your audience into what happened before the current situation.

2. Use a variety of images

Variation is essential in photography and storytelling. While deciding on which images to use, it is also important to consider your story’s pacing. You can achieve this by using diverse and quality images. For example, depending on the need, you can opt for a portrait, a close-up, or even a medium shot.

3. Avoid redundancy

Usually, using many images does not guarantee you the most engagement. All you need are the relevant photos. Every photo you use should serve a different purpose. Your goal should be to elicit some action from the viewers. Avoid anything that does not have any overall effect.

4. Use emotional images

A great story should evoke the right emotions. Emphatic stories often attract positive responses to any CTA. Emotions are usually conveyed through facial expressions. In addition, images showing the subject’s action can be a great bet when it comes to expressing emotions. For example, in a case of a lost boy, an image showing tears-streaked face, clenched fists, and red eyes can evoke the necessary emotions.

Using images to tell a story is similar to storytelling via a film. You should ensure that several factors align, as well as adopt the right tricks and tips to ensure that your story moves your audience. The implication is that not every image you find out on the internet, or you shoot is suitable for storytelling.

Every savvy business owner and marketer understands that their success ultimately depends on the business’ existing and potential customers. This is why it is very important to keep customers interested, happy, active, and coming back, frequently.

However, some businesses, particularly new ones, are not aware of how important it is to engage with customers on a more personal level, in order to accomplish everything else. Unfortunately, if a business focuses primarily on pushing sales pitches to their prospects and customers, the business may lose customers quickly.

Successful businesses make their audience members feel appreciated and important. The key to creating a continual flow of customers is to build a solid relationship with them through a variety of connection points. Create engagement platforms, which enable customers to learn valuable info from peers, brand experts, as well as get to know you.

This is easily accomplished by using storytelling methods and techniques, which appeal to each audience segment. Let’s look at a few things you may want to consider and include as you plan your engagement strategies in your marketing plan.

1. Create emotional connections

We cannot stress how important it is for businesses to create a robust emotional link with their customers. However, for this to happen, you need to understand the audience you are targeting. Building such connections is a great step in increasing consumer loyalty. Therefore, present yourself as a person as opposed to a case of a faceless corporation.

For example, always introduce yourself when making any communications, use images of real team members on forums and social media. You can as well have a brand ambassador, who will be the face the audience identifies with your brand.

2. Build a forum or a community

Online forums and communities have been in existence for long, and they offer an excellent platform for direct engagement between brands and their customers. You can engage them through discussions, questions, updates, or even share information that could improve their present state of knowledge and expertise about a given product or service. The implication is that you need to be aware of your customers’ needs, tastes, preferences, and pain points so that you can tailor your engagement in such lines.

3. Engage them through contests

Everybody loves free stuff. You can capitalize on this by creating a contest that targets your customer segments. This approach not only serves to attract the attention of potential customers but also prompts them to continue interacting with a reward, long after the contest ends. An example might be “member only” coupons.

Another great activity to consider is inviting customers to share creative photos and tag your business on the photo. Make sure that the compensation you offer is something worth their time, such as a free one-time service or bonus products.

4. Embrace technology

Technology presents business owners and marketers various tools that they can use to achieve the necessary engagement with their customers. For example, social media has become a rich platform for customer engagement. It is advisable, however, to be ahead of the technology curve always if you are to succeed in your engagement goals since technology changes almost each day.

5. Hosting events

Events such as a local meetup or a webinar offer you an opportunity to meet and engage with your customers and prospects. Such events not only act as a meeting point but also a source of peer-to-peer knowledge. In addition, events bring peers together such that they share the feeling of being a section of an exclusive community.

Customer engagement is an essential element in marketing. It helps create a group of loyal customers, while you get to know the changing needs of the customers. This enables you to plan and provide tailored solutions you can add to your product line. Regardless of which engagement method you use first, your success lies in how well you understand your customers, communicate with them, as well as how thoroughly you meet their wants and needs.

Storytelling is a significant marketing tool that guarantees the necessary response to a call to action. However, this can only be the case, if the story is tailored to the needs of the customers and if it is delivered well.

While you may have a great story idea, it could fail to attract or hold the audience’s attention just because your body language doesn’t send the consistent message you want. How then do you deliver your story without worrying that your audience is getting bored? Read on to learn a few tips on how to master your in-person storytelling approach.

1. Focus On Your Body Language

Your body language means a lot when it comes to differentiating a static and dull presentation and one that is engaging and dynamic. You need to master all the various elements of effective body language when delivering your story in person. These include the right posture, eye contact, gestures, position and movement, and facial expressions. All your presentation aspects like the tone and content should align with your body language if you are hoping to win the audience.

2. Emotions Spark and Connect

In stories, emotions trigger related memories for the listener, which help you connect with them. Create heart-wrenching scenes that pull the strings of your audience’s heart. It could be getting scared, happy, sad, or even content but the bottom line is that you should aim at sparking the right emotions. All your figures and facts will never matter until you develop an emotional connection with your listeners. A simple way to achieve this is to think and settle on an emotion that you intend to communicate then offer the necessary supporting information.

3. Incorporate The 5C’s Of Effective Storytelling

A great story should contain 5 mesmerizing elements, called “The 5 C’s of Storytelling. They are:

• Circumstance details help to set the stage with potentially familiar background information about an underlying situation.
• Curiosity about a “teaser,” problem, solution, situation, etc. compels your audience to keep listening and connect with the story on a deeper level.
• Characters in your story resonate with readers in a “me too” way when the audience can picture themselves in the same situation or feeling the same way as the characters.
• Conversation between the characters in the story brings the story to life. In turn, meaningful, memorable phrases and concepts make listeners want to quote and share the content with others.
• Conflict provides the hook that keeps the audience following the storyline from learning the problem to finding a solution or outcome. Keep in mind that in business storytelling, it’s best to have a “happy ending” to the story.

Start by laying out circumstances and fill the scene with crucial information to set the readers in the mood. Make use of curiosity to make the listeners want to hear more of the story. Your audience will only listen if your story has something to be curious about. Include your characters and their conversations in your story. Engage the listeners through dialogue and use conflict to build the story.

4. Hook Your Audience With What Matters

Every storyteller looks forward to ‘Good story… can we hear it again?’ question. However, such a statement only comes after you deliver a story that matters to your audience. The secret is in understanding your audience’s needs, tastes, and problems and working your story ideas around such issues. The story does not have to be long provided it carries information that the listeners what to hear.

Storytelling is a powerful tool that can help evoke the necessary emotions and boost customer engagement and loyalty. However, it takes a lot of effort including how you present the story for it to attract the right attention and response.  Having a clear plan, adopting dynamic and engaging body language, and offering the appropriate conflict or challenge often translates into a winning story.

Over the years, there has been a significant shift in digital marketing towards visual social media networks such as Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat. For marketers willing to grow their brand, it is essential to target audience in such media platforms and the internet in general. Storytelling is a significant element of modern marketing. Brands that have mastered storytelling art have a competitive advantage.

While the essence of any story used in marketing differs, the end goals are almost the same – engaging with the target audience in a manner that guarantees the business improved engagement, conversions, high sales and better ROI. Your story should have a target audience, the right message and a medium. Here are some aspects you need to master storytelling for your brand.

1. Start By Understanding Your Audience

While you may have a message in mind that you want to pass to your prospects and customers, it is not just any message that will give you the necessary engagement and results. Your message has to align with the needs and pain points of the audience that you are planning to target.

Learning about your audience is the first step towards mastering effective storytelling for your business. The rationale is that get to know what their tastes and preferences are so that you can customize your story around such aspects for a higher chance of success.

2. Establish Your Purposes For Telling The Story

A marketing story should have a definite purpose. Usually, many marketers miss the point by being overly promotional and salesy. The modern customers are millennials who do not fancy anything that promotes a brand. If you are too promotional or salesy, your story will have low engagement. That is why it is necessary to establish your story’s purpose.

Your sole purpose should revolve around offering solutions to some of the problems your prospects and customers are facing. That is the only way your audience is likely to associate with your brand. However, make sure that you have a worthy character to help in creating a memorable aspect in the audience. A great approach is to use the audience themselves as the character as evident in the case of Nike’s Find Your Greatness.

3. Craft An Engaging Message

A winning marketing story is not about your brand. It should contain an emotion-evoking message. Make sure that the story you have in your story hooks the audience. All the elements of the story should resonate. If it is a piece of music included, let it have the same effect on the audience as the video and the message itself.

Avoid using computer-generated voices. Remember that you want to relate with your audience as much as possible and the only way you can achieve this is assuming human characteristics in every aspect of the story. The storyline should express pity, pain, as well a catharsis, which are the essential elements that define a great story.

4. Be Persuasive

While you are trying to be overtly promotional, your end goal is for your audience to take some action. Whether it is to subscribe to a certain program or buy your products or service, you need to put in the extra effort that will make it hard for them to deny your call to action when you drop it. Therefore, your story should motivate the audience as this guarantees a positive response.

Storytelling is an effective and powerful way to generate leads. However, you will not get engagement if you keep telling your audience about things they already know. Share issues they do not know, and which can have a positive impact on them.

Remember to use a call to action that most people will want to take. Your story should carry a positive voice and be empathic. This triggers trusting feelings in your audience.

Storytelling is an age-old concept, but the concept is relatively new in marketing. This can be attributable to the fact that marketers did not see its scalability worthiness. However, the growth of the internet has changed everything – it has become easy for your target audience to follow up any story that you share, and second, it is not a must for marketers to tell a whole story in one go.

In spite of this, people have mastered the art of ignoring anything that does not excite them. As such, it is necessary for marketers to avoid certain mistakes that might cost their effort in marketing through storytelling. This article highlights some of the common mistakes that you should be aware of when adopting storytelling as a marketing approach.

1. Too Much Focus On The Features

A great brand story does not focus on the bells and whistles related to the features of an offer. The best brand stories are based on benefits, interests, values, wants, and needs of the customer, which enhance their life in some way. App.net emphasizes offering clients a solution to some problems they were experiencing such as mistreatment, inadequate or lack of privacy, and challenge the status quo.

Therefore, avoid focusing too much on your brand’s feature, what it can do and instead share a story that is relatable to the target audience.

2. Tell A Story That Does Not Interest Your Customers

Have you ever told a child a bedtime story then over all a sudden he jumped in to control it to direct the story? The same case is similar to businesses and customers. The audience you are targeting has a story that they would love to hear. The implication is that should you deviate from the story; you are likely to experience reduced engagement and low response or none to the call to action. Avoid persuading people to believe a story that they do not connect with; it will not work.

3. Telling A Story That Does Not Evoke Emotions

How emotional your story is determines its possibility of going viral. Several types of emotions such as anger, excitement, happiness, or sadness trigger your audience to share your content. The best story should be more than just an explanation piece and evoke the emotions that align with the current situation and the message you are passing.

4. Letting Facts Ruin A Good Story

It sounds controversial. We are not implying that your story should be about lies. The gist is that you need to select what information goes in your story as well as how to present it. For example, sharing a press release on Saturday because you just hit a million users may not draw the attention you need so wouldn’t it be better if you did it on Monday and let the excitement flow during the entire week?

5. Inconsistency

Most start-ups and even big corporates make the mistake of inconsistency. Do not promise anything in a story if you are sure you will not honor it. It is advisable to stop the whole idea of storytelling if what you say in a story is extremely different from what you are doing. Your words and actions should align in passing the intended message.

Having a clear concept about your brand’s story makes your marketing quite easy and achievable. Any company focusing on leveraging brand storytelling should plan to overcome the listed mistakes. Do you have a start-up story to share?

A brand story is not just another asset for marketing. It is a guiding principle that the brand should follow and has a significant impact on all organizational aspects. It’s a perfect roadmap and sales pitch. One person might find the answer to the ‘who are you’ question complex, while another might find it simple. The answer depends on how you approach the question.

However, coming up with the appropriate answer should be the sole focus before you think of presenting a product or service to consumers. Let’s look at some businesses and learn more about their brand storytelling to give you insight into things you may want to use to tell your brand’s story effectively.

Airbnb

Airbnb’s focus is firmly on one thing – customers. It understands the importance of customers in sustaining a great product. In the case of Airbnb, the brand is the guests and hosts. This company tells its stories through their gusts and hosts, where the customers share their experiences about the areas that they visit. This focus is so essential for the company that it created a section where they specifically share Stories from the Airbnb Community.

Minnetonka

It can be a challenge for big brands with long, rich histories like Minnetonka to share their stories. They make things easier and better by taking an approach is different from most other brands. It has proven to be a winner for them. In their brand storytelling, they suggest high quality and longevity by associating it with the words, ‘quintessential American brand.’ This is an idea that the company has kept, despite moving into the global arena. Holding on to its grass-roots history is a great way to maintain brand building and is what makes Minnetonka timeless.

Nike

Founded in 1964, the company known as Nike, today, has learned a lot over the years and has obviously mastered the art of storytelling and giving back to the audiences’ communities, no matter where the customers are globally.

One example of their brand storytelling can be seen in their Equality campaign. Nike stands out as an advocate for equality, mentoring, and many more things based on the trail-blazing values of Oregon settlers. This is easily seen via the stories they share about community programs and events they sponsor. Many of these inspire kids and adults through sports, while also bringing people together for personal and social change.

Zendesk Campaign

Zendesk, which is known for effective customer support software, created an ingenious yet hilarious marketing campaign that helped boost the company’s interests, among its target audience. The brand’s ‘anti-storytelling’ approach earns them trust among its users, by having a very human impression, a thing that is not so common with SaaS providers.

In the Zendesk “Alternative” Campaign, the company created a story about a fictional indie rock band that was frustrated by the supposed ‘stealing’ of their band name by a customer support company. Zendesk finishes the video with the brand writing a cheesy jingle on how vital customer service should be to brands.

Data and statistics can help inform and convince the reader of facts. However, when it comes to a compelling brand story, the secret is to tell a relevant story that moves your audience emotionally and capitalizes on a meaningful or inspiring situation or predicament.

Additionally, focus on being clear and to the point, adding examples or other elements when needed. You also want to encourage 2-way conversations, as well as adopt the right tone and voice. Create the right environment to connect with the audience and tell a brand story that keeps them wanting more.