5 Advantages of Using Storytelling in Marketing
Most of the today’s top notch marketers have adapted their marketing style according to the consumers’ behavior. What does that mean?
Well, 2017’s consumers are totally different from what 2000’s consumers used to be. New tendencies were born, and as far as effective marketers are concerned, these tendencies could be leveraged for better marketing results.
Stories have always been interesting. Kids love them, our friends love them and even you love them. Good stories are truly powerful attention-grabbers. Besides that, stories always contain a moral.
Smart marketers and copywriters manage to connect stories with brands, products, and services. The branding potential which these stories have is absurd – of course, only if the stories are good.
Let’s begin exploring 5 of the most important advantages that storytelling brings to your business organization.
If you’re a digital marketer, entrepreneur, or small business owner, pay close attention – these benefits will make you adopt storytelling the moment you finish reading!
1. Storytelling Creates Memories
Did you know that an efficient story will frequently create a memory? You may believe that it’s not real, but it’s there. It’s stuck in your head, whether you realize it or not.
When you hear a story, you use more of your brain’s parts to create a visual image. You’re also hearing certain sounds, and you’re possibly feeling some emotions too. This is part of basic psychology, and that’s how our brains work.
The good thing for marketers – they don’t need people to actively listen. The messages are so effective that they get stuck.
Memories that are created through stories are so efficient because people tend to link these “memories” with their own life experience. They connect the story with something that is part of their lives and somehow resembles.
For example, if you hear a success story about a guy who lost half of his body fat in one month, you’ll be thinking about that story for a while. You’ll be wondering…how can I do that? See? It gets to you.
2. Good Stories Are Seeds to Neuro-Associations
If I caught you off-guard, here’s what neuro-associations are. Whenever we hear stories that come with a bigger impact, we become vulnerable. When we’re vulnerable, we’re much more likely to create these associations towards brands and products.
As mentioned earlier, good stories often leave traces in our memories. Here’s a concrete example of how neuro-associations are created. Remember Coke’s Christmas TV advertisement with Santa delivering presents while driving a big Coca-Cola truck?
Coca-Cola linked its products and brand’s image to Christmas. The joy and excitement which happens during Christmas were linked to their products. People felt the great vibe of that ad, and they have associated Coca-Cola with holiday times and happiness.
Whenever a story gives us chills, we unconsciously associate that strong feeling with something present in our internal and external environment. The next time that something (thought, person, song) pops up into our life again, we’ll re-experience the same feeling again.
3. Storytelling Engages Your Customers
Because aggressive advertising damaged the consumer’s attention capacities, stories became better solutions for different marketing purposes. If the story is good, you got the listener’s attention. When you grabbed one’s attention, you almost won.
With storytelling, each and every word can spark emotions and breakthroughs. If we can touch our customer’s feelings, we can also influence them to engage with us.
If your customers feel like they’re feeling a positive experience by reading your articles, by buying your products, or by engaging through social channels, you then know that your storytelling goes pretty well.
4. Exciting Stories Lead to Exciting Content
Even if the competition can often be overstepped, paying attention to your content is still necessary. You want to give your readers exciting experiences that will make them remember your name.
Creating and distributing free valuable content is the best way to create loyalty between your followers and customers.
You should take advantage of storytelling and include it in your blog posts. By doing so, you’re giving your audience exciting and interesting content which they’ll always digest.
If your content marketing contains enough relevant stories, people will link more things to your brand. Therefore, they’ll always remember your brand’s name whenever something triggers the association.
5. Storytelling Helps You “Borrow” Content Ideas
Are you running out of good blog posts topics? By adding stories you’re instantly getting rid of this problem. You see – most of the information that you find online has already been rewritten ten times before. It’s just how things work.
Even if people call their content “unique”, they refer to the SEO requirement which suggests that every piece of content needs to be – pay attention – uniquely written. So only the sentences mustn’t be the same. That doesn’t stop content creators to get their inspiration from articles from the first pages of Google.
When you create your own stories, you’re basically adding a new twist to something already existent. Yes, the information is already out there, already written, BUT, it’s up to you if you only change the sentences or you’re adding a new twist.
The twist is the story, and it could be considered one of the most original and unique forms of content.
Conclusion
If you’re not convinced by now, I’d suggest reading this post again and again until you get it. Storytelling works. It always has, and it always will. The great thing is…storytelling is different for every company and business organization.
The name, the product, or the service that you’re marketing has unique characteristics. There are also many advertising angles, and lots and lots of twists. Add compelling storytelling to the equation, and you got yourself a powerful brand image.
Author’s bio: Eva Wislow is a blogger and career advisor at resume writing service CareersBooster.com. When she’s not helping people improve their careers Eva loves stay up to date with the latest digital marketing trends. Follow Eva on Twitter
