Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to breathe life into your brand and often called one of the main components of a content marketing approach.
Every human decision is driven by emotions. When clients build a marketing or advertising campaign a lot of focus is on numbers and impressions. Many ideas are presented focused on creating awareness and creating a memorable campaign that is unforgettable. Stories are the most creative way to make your brand memorable and unforgettable. A marketing campaign that works through stories produce high quality conversions and stays in people’s minds for a lot longer.
Stories communicate messages in highly specific and emotionally impactful ways. They’re memorable, and they give us something to identify a brand with and hold on to. Statistics tell us what the reality is—stories tell us why it matters and why we need to care. Every product has a story, we just need to present it and effectively continue to write the next chapter.
Why Brand Storytelling Matters
Storytelling in marketing is vital to the success of your brand because of the connection-building power it contains. Powerful connections give you loyalty and trust. The two things you cannot buy. but have everything to do with the livelihood of your brand and Return on Investment.
We are living in an age of swift and fast change. Swimming against the ferocious tide in a sea of noisy, subpar content. Storytelling is the buoy that will keep your brand afloat while others slowly sink around you. Telling the story of your brand will immediately help set you apart from your competition. Your story is what makes you different and it can help potential customers trust and become invested in you.
Storytelling, in some cases, will not increase conversions but can increase the value of the conversions. One study found that an Article in the Agriculture Industry became 16% more valuable when the clients story was featured below it. One of the main reasons is watching more behind the scenes then just the product and build an actual connection.
What Kind of Stories are Most Effective in Marketing?
Good stories are memorable. We relate to them and the characters in them. Good stories affect us emotionally. They make us part of the story and so we can’t help but share it with others. They make us believers, and many, brand advocates.
When you’re telling your brand’s story, you need to tell it in a way that will connect you with your target audience.
The more people connect with a story, the more they remember it, so creating connections with your stories will help create lasting bonds and loyalty between your customers and your business.
There is a story about A Pig Farmer who created a diverse Product line for other Pig Farmers (Pig Easy). This was 4 decades in the making and to this day his family still operates the business. They can use this development, personal stories and timeline to engage the audience with how they invented the product, how the process started for finding a solution.
Knowing these details make it easy to listen to the pitch, then just seeing an ad for the product. The key is diversity, and continuous communication techniques.
Don’t just give people the facts, give people something to invest in.
Final Thoughts
Use the Story Telling approach as a continuous strategy as you tell your story and build your brand narrative over time. Use multiple tactics to educate your company from the past, present and future, and show that connectivity grows a robust communication tactic based around your brand narrative. Remember that product branding and awareness/general advertising techniques are already a part of this strategy but the core attribute is to always focus the story telling in your marketing approach rather than focus on sales and stats. People are more interested in your stories and less interested in your stats. So always focus on the story and build a brand!
(Jim Eadie oversees Swineweb.com, Poultryproducer.com, Growerspoint.com, Dairyproducer.ca, and Beefproducer.ca and has been involved in digital media in Agriculture for over 15 years. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking in all areas of Canada and the USA as well as spending time with family.)