For your content to get real results, it needs to engage your audience. It needs to grab attention. It needs to make readers think. It needs to spark emotions.
And what’s capable of doing these things and more? A good story. That’s why compelling stories need to be a key component of any effective content marketing strategy.
Enticing Your Audience To Bond With Your Brand
Customers want to buy from brands that they feel aligns with their personality and values. Therefore, when you get readers involved with your brand’s story or the stories of your employees or customers, it can spark a connection. This bond can have a major impact on creating new customers and boosting brand loyalty.
Chanel’s website is an epic example of storytelling, taking readers into the luxurious world of Chanel in each “chapter” of the site. Luxury goods can be a tough sell – people are buying a feeling as much as they’re buying the product itself. That’s where Chanel shines, making readers feel like they’re being invited into the sophisticated Chanel universe and learning exclusive secrets about the brand’s products.
Showcasing Your Human Element
Great content captures the humanity and personality of your brand as well as helps your audience understand your mission and values. An effective storytelling strategy that humanizes your brand can be your origin story – how did your company get started?
Frozen-foods company Amy’s Kitchen nails this technique on their website. They tell readers how they sold handmade pot pies out of the family kitchen during the early days of their business and never imagined the enormous success that lay ahead. This story helps the brand appear humble and family-oriented, and it gives their frozen, microwaveable meals a homemade, wholesome vibe.
A good storytelling approach doesn’t just help you build relationships with your audience, it also boosts the shareability of your content. A study delved into the psychology of social sharing and revealed that content was more likely to be shared when it evoked certain emotions – amusement, awe, fear and anger topped the list. While anger and fear are probably not advisable emotions to try to evoke with your stories, if you can get elicit an emotional response from your readers, it’s also more likely that they will remember your brand in the future.
Storytelling Doesn’t Have to be Difficult
There’s no need to be intimidated by the idea of telling stories to your audience. Certain patterns tend to come up again and again and you can take advantage of these basic formulas in your own storytelling. You probably recognize some of these classic story structures:
- A coming-of-age journey
- A hero’s adventure
- A beginner being taught by a master
- Triumph over obstacles or adversity
Dove Products put one of the classic storytelling patterns to good use in their Real Beauty campaign. This marketing campaign told the stories of women who overcame obstacles to develop self-confidence and view themselves as beautiful. The real-life tales resonated with Dove’s audience and helped the company boost their revenue and social reach.
Making Connections Through Stories
Storytelling is nothing new—people have been telling tales to one another since the dawn of time. It’s getting harder and harder to stand out in a crowded sea of content. But your company’s stories and the stories of your customers are unique and worth sharing. Incorporating them into your strategy will allow your content to be memorable, shareable and enjoyable. And most importantly, it makes it easier to build a genuine connection with your current and future customers.
