At their core, humans desire connection and often find that in a well-crafted story. Using storytelling in content marketing can help make your content more engaging, creating a deeper, more meaningful connection between your potential customers and your brands. To succeed at storytelling in your marketing campaign, check out this list of pointers on the importance of storytelling and how to make a good story.
What’s Good Storytelling?
Relatable Protagonist
Your target audience will be more invested in your story if there is a protagonist that they can relate to and/or want to see succeed. Being able to get them to empathize or relate to the character will be key to getting your audience to care about your story. Because of that, you need to spend time researching to understand your ideal target persona. Therefore, make sure you spend enough time researching your ideal target persona to create a protagonist your audience will latch onto.
Authenticity
Lacking authenticity dooms your marketing campaign if your readers deem it to be a cliched narrative that can be seen through. Having a unique perspective and idea to craft your narrative can help in the long run. Staying true to your brand’s values and using them to craft the voice and tone that will make you stand out amongst competitors will also be very helpful.
Emotionally Connect With Your Audience
Not being able to create an emotional resonance within your audience will be the downfall of your narrative. They are what allows the narrative to feel more lively and more connected to the human condition, and not having that will cause your message to fall flat on its face.
What's the Point?
Your story shouldn’t be a huge fairytale where readers have to wait for you to get to the point. In fact, storytelling in content marketing works only when the story you tell is succinct and absolutely to the point, without digressing even a bit.
You want to keep your audience engrossed, not lose their attention. So, remove unnecessary details and boring plot points and craft a story that grabs readers’ attention, makes them feel something, and then leaves them thinking about it.
In the end, you want readers to imagine themselves in the shoes of the protagonist and think about how using your products could actually turn their lives around, and not be left with a narrative that leaves them confused, bored, or unmoved.
Support With Evidence
Combining storytelling and facts can help you reiterate your message to your target demographic. After you craft your narrative for your audience, it can be helpful to include data from the research you’ve done to make your narrative campaign more credible.
When your audience finds out that your narrative is backed by factual evidence, they will be more willing to give your product a chance.
Cliffhangers
Having an explicit ending can result in you giving it all away to your audience. Instead, you should leave the ending open-ended for interpretation or a cliffhanger. Cliffhangers will intrigue your audience and result in a potential customer that you now have a greater chance of converting.
How To Make A Good Story?
Understand How You Want To Be Perceived
Step one to creating a good story is knowing what you want your brand to be known as. When you’ve decided on the brand persona, everything else will be easier to hone in on.
Know Your Customers
If you want your story to be a hit with your customers, you need to figure out who your target audience is. Having a basic understanding of your prospects' interests, likes, motivations, etc. will be useful in crafting a story that will cater to them.
Conducting interviews, surveys, and any other research will be important to create the ideal customer profile to represent your target demographic. Once you achieve that, the information gathered can be woven to create a narrative that will resonate with your target demographic.
What’s The Point?
Endings are hard to do, and good endings are even harder, but they are something that you need to be thinking about from the start. A call to action must be established, and the narrative you create must lead to it in some way. With clarity on what the point of your narrative is, you will be able to create an important narrative.
Visual Cue
A visual cue will help you capture attention from the start and keep them engaged. It can range from images to animated videos. Visual cues need to support your narrative, enhance the experience for your readers, and help your audience remember the most important parts of your story.
Improve And Innovate
Storytelling is not a one-time thing. When it’s out to the public, it’s necessary to improve and innovate your narrative to optimize its reception. If you don’t do anything to keep it fresh, it will inevitably grow stale over time, and your consumers will forget about it.
In order to prevent this, you should revisit it often, observe statistics to see how your audiences are engaging and reacting to it, regularly revisit it, as well as watch the numbers to see how your various customer segments are engaging with it, do multiple further rounds of research to improve on it.
Storytelling Is Important Why?
Aside from the fact that storytelling gives you the chance to stand out amongst competitors here are several other reasons why storytelling is absolutely important:
More Valuable Buying Experience
Having a strong story will be a good tool for getting your consumers to find immense value in what you are offering. A well-framed story will cause a reader to engage in a more valued buying experience that they both appreciate and reward with their patronage.
Personalization
Storytelling allows you to tap into the human need for personalization, which is inherently inauthentic, by allowing you to stage customer journeys that are more fulfilling and meaningful than automated processes. This can make your buyers feel cared for and cause them to return to you. In turn, they’ll trust you more and be more willing to give you and your brand a chance.
Improves Credibility
Authority in your desired area can not be achieved without storytelling to help support its marketing efforts. Consumers will be more convinced when you’re able to demonstrate your expertise with confidence, making it easier to get your consumers to purchase your product.