3 Rules For Storytelling In Marketing

“Storytelling in marketing” has been a buzzword for the longest time.  Compelling stories never fail to attract. I tell stories of homecooks, their passion and their recipes as a part of social media strategy for my other side project SecretIndianRecipe. The “story” content gains 3 times more reach than other types of posts.

Advertising agencies thrive on their ability to tell compelling stories.

There is no doubt that a video is one of the best channels to tell your brands story and statistics show that posts with videos attract 3X more links than text-only posts. An article on hubspot stated that 65% of senior marketing executives believe that visual assets (photos, video, illustrations and infographics) are core to how their brand story is communicated.

Today, brands big or small realise the value of storytelling in digital marketing. This has led to creation of some amazing short films that trigger strong emotions among their consumers. This  short film by Cartier is one of my favorite. It was released in 2015 and since then garnered over 6.8million views on YouTube alone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9AZUAYLFKg

The question is, when it comes to digital marketing is storytelling alone enough? What about “Storyselling”? With invent of new technologies have “storytelling” strategies changed?

I had an opportunity meet Alex Hoehl, Managing Director of Arix Solutions– His company helps IT firms “sell better”. An industry veteran & expert, Alex has held leading positions in Europe and APAC for SAP in Sales & Management.

When asked for his thoughts on “storytelling in marketing” and how does he think has it changed in the last few years, Alex explained,

Storytelling is an ancient old way of sharing knowledge, explaining new facts and convincing people. Especially the evolution of technology has massively changed the way marketing stories are told these days. We have so many more different media such as video, animations, comics, With today’s technology it is very easy to combine different media to create  an appealing presentation of a story. That means in return that not only for the story itself needs to be strong – also the media production should be professional enough to support the story and to keep the attention of the audience. 

With the new technologies marketing can react also much faster to market trends and feedback. With website analytics you can monitor very detailed how your story telling content is viewed and you can get very quickly an idea e.g. if a video is too long or if viewers are losing interest in the video at a specific moment. This allows marketing to react even faster to the market and develop adjusted and new content.

Alex went on to explain his three important rules of story telling in marketing

a) Be Relevant:  No matter how great your story is, if the audience cannot relate to the story or the story is not relevant for the message you want to bring along, its a waste of time. Therefore be careful when choosing which story you are going to tell so that the audience can connect with it and understand your message.

b) Be authentic: The most powerful stories are the ones that you are passionate about and that are “you”. The audience will immediately realize if you just re-tell a story that you read before or if your story really touches your own passion and even better, if you lived through it yourself. Being authentic will captivate your audience, keep them attentive and your message will be much better received.

c) Have a structure: A good story lives from your emphasis and also little details that make it authentic. Still you need to be careful that your story is not loosing its focus and where you want to go with it. Especially when telling (vs writing) a story people can get getting carried away with details, jumping through topics  and side stories that are not relevant for the audience. It’s therefore important to follow a structure that the audience can follow easily and that there is not too much information that distracts or even confuses your audience.

 

Tags: digital marketing, marketing, storyselling, storytelling in marketing