Storytelling Marketing: What Is It and How It Works?

Storytelling is a part of old, traditional marketing. It has been around since its early days. Still, its biggest rise took place in the digital age. It particularly gained momentum with the growth of social media and content marketing.

Why? Probably the growing competitiveness in the digital era is the answer. Social media has given us an abundance of bright brand images that are hard to compete with for users’ attention. And a huge volume of content on the web has made it harder to stand out and demonstrate authority. That’s where a compelling story can help.

Why does storytelling marketing still matter, and what makes a truly good narrative? Let’s figure it out!

What Does Storytelling Mean?

What is storytelling? Storytelling is the process of establishing a narrative to convey something to your audience. In marketing, it’s about telling about your brand and its mission. You can use facts, real-life cases, dramatic elements, or humor, whatever helps convey your message best. Most importantly, your narrative should help your potential customers relate to your brand and interpret it as you want.

Why Is Storytelling Important for a Brand?

According to Oxford Academic, the importance of storytelling in marketing has multiple points to it:

• Narration lets you speak to prospects’ emotions. When you do this, you connect with your audience on a much deeper level.
• It helps you gain a competitive advantage. Storytelling can help you affect the feelings your brand evokes in prospects and tell them about your path, vision, mission, and uniqueness. This can differentiate you from a crowd of competitors.
• It helps build trust. A company that tells its story invites prospects and customers behind the curtains. It shows them what’s in it beyond the general brand image. This demonstrates your transparency and increases trust.

In the long run, a deeper, emotional bond, a competitive advantage, and increased trust can help you shape a better brand image. It can make your company more memorable and give your customers a greater motivation to take action. Respectively, it can boost your revenue.

The Main Elements of a Great Marketing Story

So, where do you start with storytelling in marketing? John Gumas, a former member of Forbes Councils and the CEO of Gumas Advertising, says there are 7 key elements of a good marketing story:

Need

In literary works, every protagonist has a certain underlying need or weakness. In marketing, the role of the protagonist belongs to your target audience. Before planning your narrative, you need to identify “the need” of your TA and use it as a central point.

Desire

Apart from the need, your protagonist should also have “the desire”–something that motivates them to take an action. And they may not always match completely. For example, the underlying need of your TA might be to solve a problem with dull or brittle hair. However, the real desire behind that is to look appealing.

Opposition

As always happens in a story, there is always an obstacle or opponent in the protagonist’s way. In the business world, the main opponent is your direct competitor, who may offer the same products. Your goal is to use your strengths and unique points to overcome the opposition.

Plan of Action

In order to fulfill their desire and need, the protagonist needs a viable plan. You need to offer them an easy solution that will take them to their goal. This solution is your product or service.

Climax

In storytelling marketing, the climactic crisis is the decision stage. This is the moment when the protagonist needs to choose between your brand and your competitors.

Self-Revelation

Following the crisis, the protagonist needs to come to a realization that your product or service meets their needs and can help them fulfill their desire. This is where speaking the language of benefits can help.

New Equilibrium

Finally, at the end of your narration, there should be a transformation. You need to demonstrate a fundamental change that happened to the protagonist after they chose your brand.

Applying this structure to your narration helps you accomplish several goals at once. First of all, you gain a better understanding of your target audience in the process of detecting their need and desires. Then, you formulate a compelling value proposition when deciding how to overcome the opposition. Finally, when you speak to the audience’s needs, desires, and the change they can expect to experience, you involve their emotions. That’s how you resonate with your TA.

Types of Stories in Marketing

While the key elements usually remain the same, content marketing storytelling can actually take different forms. Most commonly, businesses use the following types of stories:

• Brand stories that tell about your history, values, and mission.
• Customer stories that show real-life cases of customers who have tried your products or services.
• Employee stories that show real people behind your brand and give prospects a sneak peek into your operations.
• Testimonials that tell about customer journeys from their perspective.
• Case studies that show the positive changes your brand has created for customers.

How to Become a Master of Storytelling in Marketing

Now that you know more about the importance and elements of a compelling brand narrative, there is only one question left to answer. So, how do you become good at it and create a perfect story?

Here’s a glimpse into the major storytelling techniques that should help:

• Don’t cut the time on audience research. The best way to resonate with your TA is to know exactly who they are and what they want.
• Set an authentic voice. For many people, it will be easy to sense the fake in your narrative. Besides, they want to see humans behind your brand, which is why sounding too corporate is rarely a good idea. So, be sure to speak using your true voice and vision.
• Don’t be afraid to use emotional advertising and engage with your TA’s feelings along the way. This will help them feel better connected and will make you more memorable.
• Use vivid and lively language to create a more sensory experience for the reader and show how your story unfolds instead of simply telling it.
• Give yourself the possibility to experiment with different storytelling techniques to add suspense. Elements of drama can help you grab the attention and make your audience stay engaged in your narrative as it flows.

Now, all this takes time, effort, and resources. Clearly, some businesses may lack in-house capacity to implement storytelling in content marketing effectively. But that’s not necessarily a problem. Today, you can consider hiring a copywriting agency or outsourcing the creation of your brand story to an external professional. You just need to find someone who will be able to understand and implement your vision.

Storytelling Across Marketing Channels

After you create a compelling story, it’s important to ensure that your prospects find it. Unfortunately, simply posting it on your website or blog won’t cut it. For maximum impact, you need omnichannel marketing.

Follow these tips to unfold your narrative across different marketing channels:

• Identify the channels your target audience uses.
• Choose channels that are the most promising.
• Create and optimize your profiles on the selected channels (where needed) to ensure consistent branding.
• Adapt your story to suit the preferred formats of each channel. For example, if you have written content for a website and blog, you can break it down into a series of short videos and publications for social media.
• A/B test your publications to see which finds the most engagement.
• Start sharing your narrative on different channels and continuously monitor the results.

And one more tip worth attention–remember about search engines. SEO still remains one of the most powerful tools in advertising. It helps get your content in front of the target audience in an organic way, while boosting the level of trust and overall brand awareness. And it works for storytelling too. Popular platforms like Semrush, as well as trusted Semrush alternatives, have complete optimization toolkits that will let you target the right keywords and optimize your narrative so that it finds your prospects for you.

Conclusion

For decades, creating a compelling narrative that evokes emotions in prospects has been an effective way to build a strong brand identity and stand out. And today, when the competition is tough, it has even more value for businesses.

Now, you have a detailed guide to storytelling that fuels marketing. Use the knowledge and tips we’ve shared to feel the true benefits of sharing your narrative with the audience! Better yet, hire a professional copywriter who specializes in storytelling in marketing.