Want to communicate your brand to your consumers? Learn story telling! Remember the time when you were but a kid? Your parents used to give out important messages in the form of a story. They used to talk about a kid like you and tell you how to go about life. Stories with morals used to help you learn basics about life. Stories played an important role when it came to teaching you something.
Well, stories have always been interesting, and all you remember is what was taught to you with the help of stories. Brands are like parents, while the consumer is like a child. If you want your consumer to listen to you, you need to talk in the form of stories on a level that the consumer would love to listen and understand.
Social media is catching on the public like fire in the forest. Yes, you just can’t avoid the presence on social media, given that is where your audience is present as on today. You need to bring the human element to your story telling capabilities, and give out an amazing story to your audiences. You will build the much needed relationship with your consumers. Remember connect is essential if you are looking to ensemble loyalty.
Objective of Online Marketing
When you are all set to use online marketing, especially social media marketing as a tool, you need to know what the ultimate goal of this kind of marketing is. Let’s say you an online shopping site like Yepme or Myntra, and then your goal behind marketing is to achieve more sales. So, in a way you should be telling stories that are able to generate more sales for your brand. In case you are a charitable organization, then your aim is to build relations and get in more people to work for you. In that case you need to build stories that help build relations. So, knowing the objective will help you deliver the right story
Core Elements of your Story
When you are writing a story, you need to have the core elements prominently present within the story. Five elements that should be present when connecting with your audiences through story include a hero, the goal of the story, the obstacle to achieve the goal, the mentor and the moral.
Currently a “Chocolate girl contest” is ongoing in a coupon based website called Shoppal. The basic aim of the contest is to get more chocolate based recipes and make people aware of this website. For this purpose the website decided to connect to the audiences through a story. Their story had the perfect combination of the five elements. The hero was the chocolate girl, i.e. the participants, the goal was to make people aware of the website and make the people win, obstacle of the story was the punches they had kept in order to make the contest a bit difficult, mentor was creativity and moral was unique and innovative thinking to engage audiences. When such a story is let out, it makes people want to come to you and know more about you.
Method of Personalization
When you are talking of a story to connect audiences on social networking platform, you need to make the story a bit more personalized. You need to show more human faces in the story that you are building. Let’s say you are a retailer brand. Try getting your employees on board on the social networking platform. Connect with them, and build stories while talking with them. When the audiences see real human faces being used while telling a story, they are bound to listen.
Get a Media Mix
Well, who said only written content can be considered when telling a story? You can use videos, images, infographics etc. when you are planning on telling a story. The best and most effective stories are told when you begin using a mix of all the possible media platforms.
For an ecommerce site like Jabong, you will see that there are just too many images that would attract people. You need to play on those images when building a story online. You can use all the images and create a beautiful mix of content that would say a story connecting Jabong with the audiences
Audiences Can Share Stories
Create a platform where your audiences can create and share a story with you too! It is an interactive platform, and the best way to leverage on that platform is to build stories through which your audiences can talk to you too. Let them share their stories about you on the social networking sites. Build a conversation around their updates, either images or content. Effective communication is a result of how your audiences love to talk with you and hear from you.
Real Time Occurrences
Remember if past were to be accounted for, audiences would not be coming to your platform at all. You need to converse with them online that too realtime. Let’s say you are a coupon based website like Shoppal. In that case, you need to work on how to communicate with your audiences any coupon that has just come up on the website, and will not last for a long time. Say it is a limited offer! Your stories should have such characters that the audiences would want to take for grabs.
Interesting and imaginative story telling is the key to relation building on social networking websites. Use these tips and build your effective brand story.
