Does your content marketing strategy focus on conversion-oriented brand storytelling?
Well, if not, then you are missing out on a lot.
Conversion-oriented storytelling essentially involves stories that trigger an emotion in potential customers, using appropriate metrics, tools, and goals to measure the ROI of storytelling.
Such stories effectively map the customer touch points while converting high-quality leads into loyal customers.
So, in this blog, we’ll walk you through seven ways to tell conversion-oriented brand stories.
[1] Research your audience and paint their world
Storytelling is about creating a fit between story and audience. The first step to do so is researching your audience. This can be done by conducting quizzes, interviews or through surveys. The research provides a greater impetus and help businesses to create their brand story according to it.
For example, Knorr mainly wanted to attract millennials.
So, they interviewed 12000 millennial consumers about the flavor in their lives. They created a story about adding flavor to your food like home. Their slogan #TastesLikehome instantly hit the mark. It resonated with many consumers.
[2] Recreate an Already Existing Story
Sometimes creating a story from scratch is not the key. And this is where you can leverage stories of people to create high-impact content. However, despite having a powerful storyline, sometimes nobody pays heed to it.
In such cases, you can take inspiration from stories of brands that are available online and create tailor-made content for yourself.
One of the viral trends of the anti-marketing campaign of this year started with the “Ghar ka khana” tweet by Zomato. Taking to its official handle, the company asked its followers to eat at home sometimes instead of ordering food.
This prompted other brands like Amazon to come up with their version of the tweet — asking followers to watch cable TV occasionally.
The takeaway — Amazon Prime Video took the opportunity of a viral trend to present its take on it. This paved off well for them as it generated significant buzz and witnessed many retweets.
[3] Leverage two-way communication in brand storytelling
Brand storytelling also incorporates brand communication especially between consumer and the brand. With the introduction of technology as well as digital tools the world of marketing has been revolutionized.
Hence most businesses are using various channels and platforms to create personalized ways of communication with their audience. Moreover through this ROI can be tracked on a real time basis.
The best example of this is Airbnb. OMNI is the initiative of Airbnb which supports message creation, processing, distribution as well as engaging our guests as well as hosts at the right time through appropriate channels.
[4] Stimulate emotions with your brand story
By stimulating emotions the natural desire for power, emotional security, and love is enhanced among people. Moreover, storytelling with emotions is more effective than stories without emotions.
Coca-Cola’s “Choose Happiness” campaign is one of the best examples of business storytelling. The campaign showed how companies could actually use emotions to connect with the people at large.
For example, the campaign encouraged consumers to share memories and experiences and feel happy during summer. This clicked instantly with people, and people started becoming emotionally invested with coke.
[5] Solve problems with your stories
Customers connect to brands that are problem solvers. Storytelling can immensely benefit your business or brand if you portray yourself as someone whose experience can be trusted.
When people depend upon your business, think about the problems you can solve or how you can address their pain points. This develops credibility, and people start considering you a trustworthy business.
The campaign ‘Pump it Forward’ by Johnson’s Baby is one of the best examples in this case. At a time, about 50% of working women were mothers.
However, after the maternity leave, they had to pump their breast milk at their workplaces.
Due to the shortage of such nursing spaces, mothers face a huge difficulty. This is where Johnson’s Baby launched its campaign ‘Pump it Forward’, which involved creating reusable stickers and short videos to raise this issue among employers.
[6] Use your audience’s medium to tell stories
Most marketing heads or business owners have to decide the format they’ll use to tell stories.
For some businesses, brand storytelling through visuals in social media can get things going. Whereas for others, textual content by leveraging SEO can create a stir.
So it becomes essential that brands research and understand how their target audience would connect with them.
For example, the social media platform of Starbucks is all about the “experience.” In the age of a thriving Gen Z population, they pumped up their brand storytelling through visuals. For example, to infuse diversity, they created campaigns like #WhatsYour Name and the #ExtraShotofPride campaign, which genuinely connected with the users.
[7] Bring the storyteller into the limelight
Every business has that individual who perceived the idea of the business and launched it.
It is important to try to incorporate the role of the storyteller in your brand story, especially the challenges they faced and the motivation they overcame.
One of the most significant examples, in this case, is the brand story of KFC.
In 2008 with the financial recession and fast-food restaurants badly hit, KFC tweaked its brand strategy by introducing Colonel Sanders, the creator of KFC, to everything that they sold.
In addition, they devised their social media strategy around him and even created a robotic Col Sanders. This helped them drive consumers’ attention, and their store sales increased consecutively for 11 quarters.
At Loop Of Words, our founder, Torsha Ghosh, is a storyteller herself. She did her engineering at one of the top colleges, and was placed with a high-end job at an MNC. But within 2 years, she felt claustrophobic with the sense of lacking creativity and individualism at work. Even the job security and prestigious work profile couldn’t replace that feeling. Her deep-rooted passion and creativity compelled to pursue this career path of content creation and storytelling.
The path might not have been flowery, but with her conviction and dedication she built up her own team, created a company and eventually crafted a brand out it. For her, finding context, relevance and individualism is the key driving factor for creating any content. She focuses on the same parameters while shaping a brand story. She aimed to bring the creativity and passion of everyone else (her clients and associates) to the table every single time.
The Bottom Line
Presenting your story to the audience can significantly impact your business. They enlighten your readers. As a result, they become loyal advocates of your brand — skyrocketing your conversions.
But it requires dedicated time and effort. So if you want us to help you with brand storytelling, book a consultation call with us today.
