For many marketers, storytelling is the key component of their content promotion approach and the most powerful way to make their products more attractive and engaging.
Basically, by telling a story, you give your services and products an identity and capture what they can really do for your audience to improve their experience. For the purpose of making people build emotional connections to your content, you have to tell your story in a creative, authentic, and inspirational way.
This is the so-called emotional branding strategy which does miracles in progressive marketing, such as dramatic increases in customer retention and revenue. The feelings your product inspires in people are the main incentives for them to buy it, which is why you must give them a reasonable story related to common human challenges.
Impress your audience
In order to craft a good brand story, and convey your message in a way that will affect your audience, try to figure out what matters to your users, and to illustrate it in a creative way. Draft a plan of the steps you need to take to reward customers, and sell them something fun and creative, as difficult as you think that may be.
Remember, nevertheless, that the story you’re sharing is not an invented one, but rather the tale of how your business was developed, and what your products/services are trying to achieve.
Your story should answer users’ questions, fulfill their needs, engage them emotionally, and connect with their everyday life. Basically, what you’re doing is making valuable propositions to your audience of how your story can be useful, and how they can relate to you.
Make it personal and relatable
Since stories have to be personal and involve your development and main mission, try to trigger some valuable sales practices used to connect with the audience, and relate your mission to their needs.
As personal as it is, the story must have something in common with your audience, and enter their minds rather than simply providing facts. As an example, you can involve the customer and give him the leading role in the story, so that he will feel more important to you, and believe that your business is trustworthy and transparent.
Storytelling tools
Content in general leaves enough room for creative people to express themselves, share ideas, but most of all turn simple words into a creative force moving their product ahead.
There are many ways to share a story with your audience, but the most successful one is definitely telling that story as it is. Nowadays, the concept is often confused with fabricated journalism and factual information, and emotive, engaging, and memorable side of the story is neglected.
While many content providers believe engaging audiences is a difficult task, we’d say telling a story is way easier than summarizing facts, assuming that there is a talented writer or blogger in charge of leading users from A to Z seamlessly.
The storytelling tools kit has expanded significantly in recent years and offers an array of creative tricks such as interactive animations and video stories. Let’s learn something more about them:
LookBookHQ
eBooks are the digital form of business books which aim to attract and engage customers with a product and make it easier to combine stats with creative and intellectual content. They often contain relevant analytics and reports, allowing the people interested in those to find them easily and in less than no time.
That’s exactly the role of LookBookHQ: it allows content creators to organize content in a way which allows readers to indulge in specific sections, point out the lengthiest and most important sections, specify what is unique in their story, and consequently involve more users. If you’re looking to educate customers, and provide an online library, LookBookHQ is the perfect tool for you.
Story Builder
In case you’ve decided to work with a reputable and proven brand, you should give Google’s Docs a look. This platform helps you tell and execute unique stories using the familiar Docs and all the features they can offer.
Shorthand
Launched in 2013, Shorthand is an enterprise tool for creating media-rich, immersive and interactive stories – with no coding required. Attention time for stories created with Shorthand can be up to 10 times higher than for other stories, according to their users.
CoSchedule
It is true that brand storytelling and blogging are very similar, but you still need to balance between them. CoShedule is the perfect tool to help you organize content-related needs, as this easy-to-use plugin allows you to perform all important activities from its Post Editor.
Shortcodes Ultimate
As the name indicates, Shortcodes Ultimate aims to provide you with cool and interesting shortcodes collated in a single package and make it possible to attach videos, notes, buttons, or tables without knowing coding at all. Thanks to it, you can deliver both unique and consistent content for your users.
CLICK TO TWEET
Click to Tweet is another neat product, this one allowing you to create shareable content directed towards social networks.
Storybird
Storybird lets anyone make visual stories in seconds. We curate artwork from illustrators and animators around the world and inspire writers of any age to turn those images into fresh stories.
It’s a simple idea that has attracted millions of writers, readers, and artists to their platform. Families and friends, teachers and students, amateurs and professionals have created more than 5 million stories.
Ending thoughts
Marketing storytelling is, in fact, a practice that lets you build emotional relationships with the consumers of your product/service. Plus, it is a creative strategy for sharing vital information and letting users know how your brand can be valuable to them.
Look at some of the most successful marketers and their stories: they are always reinventing this concept, and sharing content on new channels to reach as many people as possible. On the other hand, marketers that fail are usually holding on to traditional campaign restraints, and let their brands suffer from their inability to develop an engaging marketing strategy.
The post How To’s & TutorialsStorytelling in Content Marketing – tools and resources appeared first on ThemeFuse.