In the content marketing industry, storytelling isn’t just limited to brand building it’s about finding creative ways to inject your company’s ideals, history, and audience expectations. Jake Sorofman, research director for Gartner, compared the trend to the sound of a drumbeat. (Content marketing) is a continuous storytelling. It’s about a steady stream of storytelling innovations large and small delivered as an ongoing pulse, Sorofman argued.
To know more about the âdrumbeat’ experience, listed below are some ways storytelling heightens your content marketing strategy.
Real-time marketing is here to stay
Through Wise’s official Twitter account @letsgetwise, online marketers from Let’s Get Wise said that we are in the age of real-time marketing, a technique used for storytelling. For brand infrastructure, the tweet notes that marketers must answer two critical consumer expectation points relevance and immediacy. In this endeavor, brand content director Eric Korsh said that there are things to consider:
Small Teams
Korsh suggests to create small teams with areas of expertise. This ensures maximum quality of content for product launches and brand positioning. By having small groups practicing a particular skill, they are producing better output.
140-character Limit
Combining interactivity and precision is critical to success. On Twitter, you must maximize the 140-character limit to tell your story and translate them into consumer values. It has to convey the information in the most interesting way.
Visual storytelling drives engagement
On content marketing, brands have often centered on the written word to narrate their story. But an article, despite written extensively, is still blunt and monotonous without visual graphics. In an interview with DashBurst, Columbia University professor Ross Crooks said that visuals must be attuned to three standards: beauty, utility, and soundness. These aspects take form on the following:
Infographics
As a popular content format, infographics have the ability to make your material easier to understand and share. Forbes said that its ability to boost your credibility and website traffic has made it ubiquitous.
Videos
Motion graphics have the most potential in narrating a story. Depending on your target audience, videos can easily share the narrative of your products, from the time of conceptualization to actual production.
The unsung storytelling success of Coca-Cola
Declared as creatively bankrupt in 2004, Coca-Cola gained their glory last year when the company was named Creative Marketer at Cannes. What drove most of its success is when the company launched its own blogger contributor network The Opener. The platform managed to create and share narratives by establishing emotional ties and adding creativity along with the heart of the story.
From Coca-Cola’s success, crafting your content marketing plan must answer the Why Should I Care test, wherein you have to assess your readers interests. Following this are the elements of surprise and appeal.
Surprise
If not downright boring, more content available online is predictable. This is where the element of surprise delivers. While thinking extraordinarily is risky, take note that readers like anything that catches them off-guard.
Appeal
Appeal means the ability to resonate your content with your readers. This is where knowing the audience is important, as a story is only effective when told to the right market.
Telling a narrative through Facebook Timeline
Notwithstanding the fact that your label is older than Facebook, you can still dig up old files, photos, and documents that you can share to make a compelling social media content. Showing your company’s tremendous growth can draw more audience attention.
The New York Times found success with this technique. On their official Facebook page, the publication has been doing a remarkable job of posting archived images dating back to 1948.
To close the article, we’ll use a quote from San Francisco reporter Wayne Freedman: There are big stories in the small ones, and small stories in the big ones. Indeed, all it takes is a good storyteller and content marketer to unravel these meaningful truths about life.
