Everybody loves a good story, including your target customer. Adding storytelling into your marketing toolbox can provide a 30% increase in conversion rates.
The challenge is crafting stories that are authentic to your brand and that your audience can relate to. It’s an art form, and it’s invaluable if your team can develop a talent for it.
However, you don’t get from a blank page to a bestselling novel in one sitting. It takes time, vision, creativity, and a storytelling strategy.
So, let’s talk about brand storytelling and developing a strategy for wowing your audience.
Why Do You Need a Storytelling Strategy?
People are hardwired for stories. We remember them more than data because tales tug at our heartstrings, stimulating our emotions and releasing chemicals such as oxytocin, dopamine, and cortisol.
These chemicals help us develop relationships, regulate emotions, and form memories, all essential reactions when creating content to help your brand stand out in a crowd. Unsurprisingly, consumers want brands to tell stories, but don’t believe brands are very good at doing so.
Image Source: Headstream
If you tell stories that don’t resonate or are inconsistent, you might find out that your audience remembers you for the wrong reasons or not at all. A storytelling strategy helps your team develop your brand’s narrative voice to leverage this powerful marketing approach.
Creating a strategy also ensures your team is on the same page and able to create, plan, and deliver story content efficiently and effectively.
How Do You Develop a Storytelling Strategy?
Before you can tell your brand’s stories, you need to lay the foundation and establish a framework.
Define Your Brand’s Core Values
Whatever story you tell must align with your company’s identity and values. When you give voice to your customers, your audience should still be able to associate your brand with the narrative.
Your brand’s voice should be apparent in your stories. If you look at a brand such as Nike that is great at storytelling, you can see how well its stories align with the company’s identity and values.
Even if you’ve already done this exercise for other marketing strategies (and we’re sure you have), it doesn’t hurt to revisit the conversation.
Know Your Target Audience
As you develop your storytelling strategy, identify buyer personas. You may need different types of stories for different segments of your audience.
Your current market research and customer and content analytics can help you define your target audiences for brand story marketing. This information will also help you identify what customer pain points you might want to address through the tales you tell.
Establish the Central Message
The best stories have a central message or theme. As you establish the message, keep in mind your brand’s identity and values, as well as buyer personas and pain points. If you can sum up the point of your story in a short sentence, you’ve likely nailed the message.
Determine What Kind of Story You Want To Tell
All the work you’ve done up to this point informs the type of story you’re telling. The format you use should fit your objectives. Common marketing story genres include the following:
- Brand stories
- Customer stories
- Community stories
- Products and services stories
- Educational stories
- Value stories
When choosing the format for your storytelling strategy, consider the endgame for your audience. What do you want them to do after hearing your story, and what emotions will engender the desired actions?
Craft a Call-to-Action
The action you want your audience to take leads directly to your call to action. Your story should end with a CTA, just like your other forms of marketing content. Make sure it aligns with your goals and objectives.
Choose How To Convey the Story
When you think of storytelling, your first thought might be a written story, but there are other options for conveying your tale. The written word is still an effective medium, and you’ll undoubtedly want to include stories on your blog and even in your emails.
However, with the insatiable demand for video content, you might want to consider telling your story visually. Creating a video story may have a higher up-front investment, but 92% of marketers find that video content has a positive ROI. Podcasts are another option.
Outline and Draft the Story
Before putting fingers on the keyboard, your team should take time to plan the story structure. Creating an outline can help everyone focus on each element of the goals and objectives for the story.
Once you’re satisfied with the form, you can draft the story. Remember that you want your story to elicit an emotional response and engage your audience.
Schedule and Share Your Story
An important component of your storytelling strategy is determining when and how to share it. Choose the channels you want to post it to.
If you plan to share it on social media or your blog, decide how it fits with other content on your calendar before scheduling a time to post.
What Are the Elements of an Effective Brand Story?
After all the preparations, you want to make sure the end product is effective. You can use everything we’ve talked about so far but still not have a masterpiece unless you include the following elements for a compelling brand story:
- Theme or core values
- Setting
- Main and supporting characters
- Conflict or challenge
- Resolution or solution
Your story also needs to draw in your audience. Make sure you tell a tale customers can relate to. They should see something of themselves in it, and it should have meaning or add value to their lives. They also need to trust that your brand has a right to tell the story.
Image Source: ABC Copywriting
How Does DivvyHQ Help With Your Storytelling Strategy?
Developing an effective storytelling strategy requires creativity, organization, planning, and collaboration. DivvyHQ’s content operations platform supports your team with all the tools they need to write your brand’s next bestseller. Request a demo to see its poetry in motion!