“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe” by Simon Sinek
What Simon really means by that is people are more likely to buy the story behind what you are doing than what you doing itself. How a person feels about your brand typically determines whether they want to buy your products or services. By telling your band’s story that connects with your customers’ challenges, you create an experience that resonates with them. The only way you can connect your brand story with the spirit of your customers is by leveraging the power and the art of storytelling.
Storytelling in marketing is the art of using facts and narratives to communicate your brand’s true values, information, knowledge, and wisdom to your customers. It is the perfect way to communicate brand core values, missions, and cultures. What challenges are you trying to overcome? Storytelling allows us to do that in an entertaining way by using other skills such as musical, artistic, and video recording to enhance the audience’s enjoyment, retention, and understanding of the message conveyed.
Why storytelling is such a powerful marketing strategy to strengthen your brand?
One key part of being a great marketer is by understanding how and why people think and act the way they do. Your job as a storyteller is to find key matching points between your target customer’s needs and your brand story to trigger their emotions to make them notice, remember, share and buy. This strategy is called emotional marketing. Emotional branding is a progressive marketing strategy that has the potential to drive revenue and increase customer retention. Ok, let thinks of it that way, your customers are human beings and by nature, they are not rational.
They are most likely to make decisions and then construct rational arguments to fit them. Most of the time people make buying choices based on feelings.
This is a good example from google search advertising. Let’s watch it and let me know your feelings.
Emotional marketing typically taps into a singular emotion, like happiness, sadness, anger, or fear to elicit a consumer response.
Storytelling creates good memories
Think about when you were little when your parents used to read bed stories to you. I am sure you remember more than one and I bet they will last in your memory forever. These stories were designed to help us grow into people with moral principles and written in a way that made them interesting, enjoyable, and memorable. In such ways, a good story would still have a huge impact on us. People might forget what you do but they will never forget how you make them feel.
Using strategic stories will create effective and everlasting memories for your customers. They might not remember every intricate detail but they will remember the important parts, the parts that make them feel something.
Storytelling can build connections and relationships with your target customers
Your brand story is the most valuable key to building connections with customers. Even though marketing technology allows us to study customers and understand their patterns and even the human emotions that trigger the need to buy. But at the end of the day, business is personal; people buy from brands they like and trust. Think back to 2010 and 2011, what it would take to get Apple’s products mania to switch to another brand.
Even though Samsung could make very good phones but Apple’s product users are driven by emotional connection and identified themselves with the brand and make it their own. Brand storytelling continues to prove its power in helping companies and their marketers establish and nurture those customer connections and grow their business relationships and reputation.
Benefits of using storytelling in marketing
- Storytelling is good for building relationships with customers
- Storytelling could help marketers to develop a deeper connection with their audience
- It helps to trigger an emotional connection between customers with your brand
- It makes marketing content exciting and more captive
- Storytelling is a powerful method for teaching and learning
2 storytelling trends that marketers should pay close attention to in 2019
1-Video Storytelling is a simple and natural way of making video content interesting. People feel strong emotional connections to video storytelling because stories entice us to remember and connect with a brand’s story. The second most powerful search engine in the world is YouTube. Yes, it is! Youtube is a video-based search engine with millions of videos about any kind of tropics. According to MerchDope, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! And around 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every single day. YouTube gets over 30 million visitors per day.
YouTube is a powerful marketing tool that every marketer leverage by producing video storytelling for their band.
2-Data-driven storytelling. By 2020, 1.7 megabytes of data will be created every second for each person on earth. The huge development of a lot of advanced tools and Machin learning algorithms to collect and analyze data makes it very easy for marketers to leverage their marketing activities with very target data and create more success. They can leverage very easily the rich amounts of digital data available to create highly visual, engaging, and targeted stories to prove incredibly potent for brands and companies.
In conclusion
Storytelling is the method we use to tell our brand story to customers and to trigger their emotional buying. It is about creating emotion, authenticity, personal connections, and driving action. Any medium can be used to tell a story, including blogs, film, print, social channels, and multimedia. Each communication medium elicits a different reaction from your audience, so stories must be tailored to fit.
There is a reason that storytelling has become somewhat of a buzzword in the marketing industry lately. Stories are a simple, natural way to make interesting content that motivates your audience to act. Click here to learn more how about to create powerful storytelling and many more advanced techniques. You can learn more here and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletters
