Digital content creation is one of today’s most critical marketing tasks. It is now one of the foremost methods by which brands can connect with their existing audience as well as drive new traffic to their websites, and ultimately expand their market share and increase profits. But the process is a lot more complex than crafting a few social media ads and blog posts. It requires research, strategy, creativity, and persistence.

Elements of Brand Storytelling

Key questions you should be able to answer regarding your brand are: Who are you, and what can you offer to your audience? The answer to these essential questions should be readily apparent to your potential customers when they land on your website (or any of your other media channels). One effective and powerful way to answer these questions is by storytelling.

So what exactly is brand story-telling? It is when you use your brand to become part of an emotionally engaging story that involves your audience. To be effective, you have to showcase how your brand fits into the larger picture of what your audience needs and how they live, or, perhaps more importantly, how they want to live. In fact, good brand storytelling is less about your product or service than it is about your audience. And the storytelling must consistently convey that clearly defined narrative through every contact with your market.

Brand storytelling should pervade your digital marketing platforms, and the platforms you use should be selected based on their ability to relay the story to the right target audience. This means you have to approach a campaign with:

• A thorough understanding of your target audience and your buyer’s journey
• SEO research that identifies the best channels and media for delivering your story
• A clearly defined brand mission, vision, and values that shape your story
• Establishing marketing goals and quantifiable performance indicators that tell you if your story is resonating with your target audience

Advantages of Brand Storytelling

Relying on brand storytelling as a marketing strategy across all your digital platforms has many advantages. A powerful, interesting, or entertaining story that connects with an audience on an emotional level has a more substantial impact than simply talking about what you sell.

The Dual Role of Your Audience

Your potential customer should not be just seen as a consumer but as a character in your story. A successful campaign will invite audience interaction, and succeed in having the audience identify themselves as part of your brand image. Your goal is for them to want to be your customer.

Awareness

Good storytelling truly captures your audience’s attention. They should be able to readily identify your brand upon every subsequent exposure or interaction. The awareness and identification of your brand is reinforced by maintaining consistent themes with colors, images, sounds, and message.

Truly successful brand storytelling will cue the audience with certain expectations or feelings the moment they see your logo, symbol, or other identifier. And if your brand storytelling is entertaining or intriguing, your audience will actually look forward to the next interaction.

Trust

As much as your story must focus on the audience, your storytelling should also stress the virtues of your product or service in terms of quality or utility. Good storytelling will focus on solving a problem your audience can identify with. In resolving this problem, your story should emphasize those factors that demonstrate that your solution to their problem is superior to what your competitors can offer.

When you provide a visitor to your brand with helpful, high-quality, and unique content even before that visitor has become a consumer, you are building trust with the larger market. Further, when you help your audience by answering a question or providing useful information, you establish authority. That customer is thus more likely to trust your product or service because you have already given them something of value.

Brand Loyalty

Customers who like a product tend to stay with that product, and the importance of that brand loyalty is hard to overemphasize. To a certain extent, for customers to truly become loyal, they have to believe that they have gotten more than what they paid for. One way to deliver more is with digital content. Valuable digital content can win you brand loyalty even before a customer has made a purchase.

When a customer is able to find your content useful, not only will they see you as a go-to resource for what you provide, but they will share that information with others. And their word-of-mouth can sell your product even more effectively than any marketing you control.

If you are looking for expert help to develop an efficient and powerful digital content strategy through brand storytelling, Blue Zone Marketing can help. Blue Zone’s team includes entrepreneurs and marketing specialists who understand business. Schedule a call with Blue Zone today to learn more about our solutions in digital marketing.

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