In a highly competitive market, differentiating yourself from your competitors is one of the bases for success. In this article we will talk about brand communication and what are the keys to Storytelling.
The quality of a product or the competitiveness of its price are no longer sufficient arguments to ensure an online sale. For most companies, marketplaces, offers and comparison sites have forced them to offer a very competitive price in order to sell their products. Likewise, a good reputation for quality is a basic criterion for converting a visit to a site into a sale.
Consequently, when addressing their target audience, companies must go further and try to connect with people, creating a relationship that allows them to identify with the brand’s values.
What is Storytelling
Storytelling is the art of telling a story and creating an emotional bond with the audience. Using powerful storytelling, a good story allows people to connect immediately and lastingly with a brand.
In practice, it is a digital marketing tool that aims to create a connection between the company and people to achieve a certain goal, such as selling, informing, inspiring, obtaining feedback, reinforcing the brand or publicizing a new product or service. The dissemination of the story (in text, video and audio format) can be done through different channels such as social networks, web, blog, email, among others. The key is that the story is adapted to the channel used (and ideally that these complement each other).
Why it is important
A story is always easier to remember than a simple message or advertisement. People identify more easily with a story that is close and inspiring and better grasp the message that a brand wants to convey. The emotions generated are engraved in the memory.
In terms of communication, Storytelling has numerous advantages:
- Generates customer confidence.
- It brings the brand or company closer to people, creating a sense of belonging (identification with the values conveyed in the story).
- It makes it easier to remember the brand and the impact it had, for example, in the face of a need.
- It remains in the consumer’s memory and is contagious (we love to tell stories).
- It allows differentiation with the competition and traditional advertising campaigns. If another company uses storytelling, it is likely to be a very different story.
The keys to Storytelling
We often wonder what we could tell about ourselves. This problem exists in companies that sell products without a particular appeal or in the B2B channel.How can you excite when you sell consulting, maintenance, financial services or ordinary consumer goods?
The answer lies in creativity: stories can be found everywhere, every brand can find an interesting story to tell its customers that generates emotions. Sometimes you just need to gather information and ideas by asking customers, employees, collaborators and, in general, people who are close to you, such as suppliers, neighbors…
Another element to take into account: the story must send a message. At this point it is essential that this message and the values it conveys are aligned with the business objectives.
The story must be simple and close so that the audience has no difficulty in understanding it and can identify with it. The link thus obtained can more easily endure over time.
When telling a story, it is essential to do so following a specific structure that establishes a common thread.
Companies must connect with people, creating an emotional bond that allows them to identify with the brand’s values.
Eric Onidi
Structure of a story
A good way to structure a story is to use Freytag’ s five-step pyramid. It was developed by studying Greek dramatic structures and Shakespeare’s plays. These five phases of story development, key to Storytelling, are:
- The exhibition, which begins with the story, provides a context and introduces the characters.
- Bottom-up action, where a conflict occurs that implies a change and increases action (conflict fighting, complications, etc.).
- The climax, where the story reaches its point of maximum tension and the conflict manifests itself with more force.
- The descending action, where the tension eases and prepares the reader for the final resolution.
- The denouement, where the events that resolve the conflict take place and the outcome of the story is reached (it can be a closed or open ending).
Narrative structure of a Storytelling
How to set up a campaign with Storytelling
To carry out a good digital marketing campaign using Storytelling, a series of elementary steps must be followed (but which are too often neglected):
- Define the vision, values and mission of the brand so that the story is aligned with them.
- Defining the target audience to whom the story is addressed allows to make the narrative more personal and closer (to touch feelings and passions).
- Set the business objective of the campaign, such as reinforcing the brand, increasing sales or raising awareness of a product. In this step it is essential to integrate Storytelling into the company’s digital marketing strategy.
Measuring the ROI of a campaign
The return on investment (ROI) of a Storytelling campaign is difficult to calculate, as it involves criteria that are difficult to quantify (identification with the brand, emotions generated, memorization) apart from traditional numerical criteria (impact on sales figures, conversion rate, engagement, etc.).
If one were to choose the most important metric to know if a story “works”, it would be the degree of connection with the reader or viewer. This link depends on the emotions produced when watching a video or reading an article. Without making a great deployment of resources, there are indicators (KPIs) that give us relevant information.
A KPI of this connection is the engagement it generates: the more interaction (comments, forwards, likes, questions), the more emotional impact it will have had. Of course, the content of the comments is fundamental, both in our media and in others (forums, blogs, social networks). To collect and classify all the information, there are “social listening” type software, such as Mention o Talkwalker.
In parallel, you can measure audience excitement in the percentage of people who have watched the video of the story to the end, or the time spent on a page reading it. These metrics are easy to obtain in a well-configured Google Analytics.
Throughout time there have been many successful Storytelling campaigns that are still in everyone’s memory such as:
- Nike and Michael Jordan. The sneakers and sportswear company made a Storytelling based on the basketball player Michael Jordan in 1999. It was a 1-minute video where different moments of the NBA star’s sports life were shown. The brand is not mentioned throughout the ad, except at the end of the video where the logo and the slogan “Just do it” appear briefly.
- Christmas lottery. In Spain we have a clear example of successful Storytelling in Christmas lottery campaigns. The objective is the sale of lottery tickets and they achieve it through close stories attacking feelings and where the audience gets excited and easily identifies with the events.
Evolution of Storytelling
Some companies are currently opting for transmedia Storytelling, where the story is told using different communication channels that complement each other, and where the audience takes an active role. We will talk in depth about transmedia storytelling in a future post of this blog.
