With so much organic and promotional content in the world today, it can be difficult for brands to stand out. Using storytelling in your marketing is a great way to differentiate yourself.
Storytelling refers to using a narrative based on your values and brand personality to promote yourself to your audience.
Using storytelling is a great way to attract more attention, make your brand look more human, and create relationships with your audience. All of these aspects should result in you growing your customer base and converting more sales.
If storytelling is done well, you’ll definitely see better results by including storytelling in your marketing promotions!
Continue reading to understand exactly why storytelling is important to your brand.
The Benefits of Storytelling
Storytelling allows you to connect with your consumers in a more personable way and provide them with additional information.
Some of the other benefits of storytelling include:
Building Brand Identity
Brands today need to have a personality in order to connect with their audience. They need a way to engage with their prospects and appear relatable.
Storytelling helps in connecting with your audience and building meaningful, two-way relationships.
Along with sharing information on products and services, you need to share the story behind your brand and what you sell.
Your brand is created around the story of your business. Playing off of this story has a lot of benefits.
Brand Differentiation
Creating this brand identity through storytelling helps to differentiate your brand and make it stand out.
The market is extremely crowded with products, services, and related content. More and more content is being shared every day so you need to create content that grabs attention.
Stories are individual to your company and are a unique way to help you stand out from the competition. You can use storytelling to simplify information and generate an emotional response.
Unique topics that you can use to form stories include:
- Brand History and Beliefs
- Brand Successes and Challenges
- Customer Stories: explaining their problems and how you helped them.
- Company Life: how you generate ideas, product production processes, background on the founders, etc.
Stories are a unique way to help you stand out from the competition.
Be sure to encourage customers to share their stories with you and get them interacting with the content.
People are becoming more aware of marketing tactics and will not interact with them. Storytelling helps get around this and will make your brand stand out.
Consumers prefer to interact with engaging and entertaining content. You can use more direct marketing efforts once the consumer is interested but need to lead with something more organic.
Helping with Customer Acquisition and Building Loyalty
As storytelling creates a strong relationship with consumers, they are more likely to become loyal and repeat customers.
Along with using storytelling to create an emotional connection, you can use it to start conversations, asking for customers’ opinions, ideas, and feedback. This feedback can then help with future content ideas.
Creating content around your brand as well as the ideas and opinions of consumers will have the best results. Focusing on your audience and their views makes them feel valued and helps them relate to the content.
Storytelling is also effective at expanding your reach which should help in gaining more customers. You can share story content on all platforms such as on a blog, in newsletters, and on your social media platforms as well as through advertising like TV commercials.
Not only should this relatable content get more engagement with your current audience, it should help grow your audience.
Stories should evoke an emotional reaction. This makes sharing of your content much more likely. If followers share your content, it will be exposed to a larger audience who are likely to also relate.
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Increasing Sales
As mentioned, storytelling helps with customer acquisition and makes you more relatable to your audience.
Taking this more organic and personable approach to content marketing shows that you do not just care about getting profits. This will in fact help in getting more sales!
Storytelling allows you to show how you can help the consumer in an honest and engaging way. This makes you more trustworthy and builds a relationship.
Being personable shows that you don't only care about profits which can in fact increase sales!
People like brands that feel more human. Having a story and supporting something can be a big differentiator. As discussed, consumers are likely to choose the brand with a human side over others in the market.
This is in part because many consumers purchase based on emotion. They choose the brand they feel best about instead of the one that logically is the best choice. This is why using storytelling and not just promoting purely informational content is important and should see your sales increase.
How To Create On-Brand Stories
To create successful stories, ask the following questions when planning content:
Who are you as a brand?
How did your company come to be? What are your mission, values, culture? What type of person works at your company?
What do you offer?
What products or services do you provide? How do your products or services provide value to consumers?
Who you do it for?
Who do you help? Using customer success stories is good for storytelling.
Why you do it?
What are your goals? Why do you offer what you do? What benefits do your customers get?
How do you do it?
How are your products or services made and sold? Try showing the process in storytelling content.
What is coming next?
How are the company and your offerings going to change and evolve? Is your vision changing at all?
Use the responses to these questions to form stories that reflect your brand values and connect on an emotional level with your audience.
Keep Stories Personality Driven
You need to include characters in your stories. You need to show a challenge that was overcome to create an emotional connection.
Without these characters and problem and solution template, your stories will not be relatable and it is less likely that an emotional connection will be created.
This relatability and emotional connection is what makes storytelling effective and will make your audience want to connect more with you.
Want to learn more about your target consumer? Connect with your existing customers and reach out to new ones through social media. Learn more in our blog article, The Importance of Social Media For Business.
Keep Your Storytelling Efforts Simple
In Conclusion
Storytelling is a necessary part of your content and marketing strategy if you want to be successful in today’s market.
Sharing relatable stories, both concerning you as a brand and your customers and their success with your products or services, is sure to create better relationships with your customers.
Storytelling is also effective at differentiating yourself, expanding your reach, and getting more sales.
Interested in using storytelling in your marketing strategy? Brand Hause can help you with that! We offer services to help with marketing strategy, content creation, and social media promotions to ensure you’re crafting the best stories and promoting them effectively.
Get in touch for a free consultation to learn more.
Struggling to find the perfect mix of form and function with your brand identity? Find out how a brand audit can help.
