Storytelling is by no means a new strategy in communication. In fact, people have told each other stories as a means of passing on important knowledge and information since the dawn of time. While storytelling may seem outdated and unlikely to capture the attention of modern audiences, successful marketers are leveraging this strategy to transform their businesses.
According to Matt Bertram, Enterprise SEO Consultant at EWR Digital, storytelling is fundamental when it comes to connecting with potential customers. He argues that storytelling is not only essential for connecting with a target audience, but also for building trust and evoking positive emotions in that audience. Bertram explains that storytelling is a more subtle approach than creating traditional marketing materials, and it focuses on providing the ideal solutions for consumer pain points without using the abstract tone of a hard sell.
This guide explores the value of storytelling in digital marketing and how marketers and businesses can adapt this customer communication approach to success.
Why Marketers Should Use Storytelling
“Digital storytelling is no different from its traditional counterpart—other than how those stories are delivered. Nowadays, many people use online platforms to develop and convey their messages to others,” Bertram says. Recent studies have shown that digital storytelling provides marketers with the ability to create engaging, interactive content that can be later disseminated across a multitude of platforms. Moreover, the same research points to the fact that storytelling is an effective strategy for upgrading digital marketing campaigns. It plays a significant role in transforming ongoing campaigns and creating new ones.
Brands like Disney, Coca-Cola, and Apple have successfully used digital storytelling to promote their image and products, reach new audiences, and create fresh and immersive content for their target audience. Disney decided to use storytelling to create a heartwarming ad that promotes Disneyland Paris as a magical destination in 2018 and later reused the strategy to promote its Marvel Cinematic Universe–themed area.
Similarly, Coca-Cola combined this method with augmented reality (AR) to deliver an interactive customer experience. Apple opted for an authentic approach and used digital storytelling to promote its newly launched iPhone 7 Plus, back in 2018.
Big brands use digital storytelling to upgrade their marketing campaigns, and they constantly come up with unique ways of sharing their values and brand identity. They do this by re-inventing older campaigns, combining storytelling with modern technologies, or simply using their products to tell a story.
How to Use Storytelling to Upgrade Digital Marketing Campaigns
Digital storytelling is equally effective on most platforms and media. The examples above provide interesting ideas on how to adopt storytelling for high-level companies. But this method is also easily available for businesses with smaller budgets. Storytelling can become an integral part of their social media strategies, and can be leveraged when creating content for a website or blog. Moreover, marketers can use digital storytelling to create newsletters, informative updates, and even podcasts.
According to Great Content, the leading content service provider in Europe, digital storytelling can be used to create different types of content, like a brand or product story, customer success stories, educational stories, and holiday or events stories. Each of these narratives can capture buyer attention and deliver a customer-centric brand story with a human-like element. You can use storytelling to inspire customers to take action.
Brand stories, for instance, can be designed to describe the brand itself, tell the history of its founder, or simply communicate a value-oriented narrative that shows how founders and employees work together for a common purpose.
Digital storytelling can be used to create different types of stories on different types of platforms, as long as the narratives in question are both authentic and memorable. However, marketers should follow expert tips and tricks to create engaging stories.
What Makes a Story Memorable and Engaging
To use digital storytelling at its fullest, marketers should first discover the key elements that can make a story memorable and engaging. A sound and successful brand story is built on three components: characters, conflict, and resolution. Great characters provide the audience with a reason to interact with the brand at an emotional level, while conflict offers readers a reason to take action. The resolution can appear in the form of a product, but it can also be a core value of the company in question. The Disney ads discussed above, for instance, end with the simple yet impressionable idea that Disneyland is a magical place.
Marketers can develop captivating brand stories to upgrade their digital marketing campaigns and boost profits in 2023. They should also consider that phenomenal stories are usually told by lifelong learners, who continuously work on developing their empathy and their strategic thinking skills.
