This is an article ‘How to let your data tell your brand stories’ by Marc Primo
Nothing beats telling your brand story with facts that your target audience can appreciate and find interesting. In these times when digital marketing evolves faster than any company can keep up with, it's always vital for businesses to be one step ahead of the competition. Efficient brand storytelling relies on using social media insights to foreshadow what your customers need and how you can improve the delivery of your messaging.
Most marketers know that social media requires a give-and-take approach for campaigns to work. Businesses gather data and other relevant information from their engaged customers, while customers get content that can help them address their pain points. The key to telling your stories is how you use those insights so that your audiences will continue finding interesting content as you guide them through the marketing funnel.
This article will give you a few essential pointers on how you can polish your content with data-driven facts and achieve better business success via brand storytelling:
The truth in brand storytelling
Even in the age of traditional marketing, advertising campaigns widely use human interest stories to push their brand and establish emotional connections with their target markets. The most successful brands create innovative ways to show that they can empathize with their customers, create worthwhile experiences, or offer solutions to their urgent problems. However, authenticity is the most crucial factor in how household brands tell their story.
Whichever channel you post your content on, those who read and view your ads will search for genuine messaging that they find valuable and relatable to their way of life. Cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner postulated that people remember facts 22 times better if they read them within a story. More importantly, 81% of engaged customers purchase from brands they know they can trust.
Of course, marketers should also learn to mine what customers consider valuable and authentic through the data they can collect. Customer insight tools like Google Analytics, Google Trends, Zendesk, or Sprout Social can give businesses the proper data and information from their customers' points of view, from how they feel about a brand's content to their purchasing behaviors. Once you discover your target market's truth, creating content you can disseminate in the proper social media channels or corresponding landing pages on your website will be easier.
Explore different narrative techniques for the right customers
The band Bread put it best when they said, "a picture paints a thousand words." Brand stories with engaging art and copy paint a picture of the type of business companies operate in, or the products that they have to offer. Good visuals with catchy and attractive text are as effective in persuading audiences as the books or movies they find interesting. But the challenge for most marketers is executing the proper narrative techniques and knowing how much visual business is ample.
Let's take the Hero's Journey trope as an example. Most effective ads, whether static or video, usually present human elements as relatable characters addressing conflicts in a particular setting. The brand offers a resolution, and the audience approves. Ads that tell stories people love encourage 44% of those who viewed them to share the stories, while 15% of the same group usually make a purchase.
Exploring the various narrative techniques in traditional and modern storytelling, such as using cliffhangers, sensory and experiential elements, breaking the fourth wall, or point of view, can push your message to the right audiences more coherently and interestingly. When you can build emotional connections from the data insights you've gathered, you can increase your brand recall on your chosen social media channels.
Avoid being a data fashion victim
If flamboyant fashion worked for Liberace decades ago, dressing up your content and brand story with excessive infographics, charts, or video complements might have the opposite effect for most of today's audiences. However, that's not to say that informative visuals are unnecessary, but there's no need to put all your bells and whistles into one page. Some audiences still need help interpreting even the most detailed pie charts, so it's always best to know who you're talking to or if they have time to spare and absorb the visual information you give them.
Avoid unessential visual noise that may distort your messaging just for the sake of creating a grandiose web page. Most importantly, make your visuals relevant and accurate for your audiences. Don't overdo your designs' gridlines, borders, and shadowing elements, and keep things short and straightforward so that your main message remains highlighted. Share something clever with your target audience without going overboard in terms of creativity.
Make your stories resonate
If you review all of the popular social media channels on the internet right now, you'll notice how users tell their favorite brands the stories they want to read about. Today's two-way commercial communication gives companies that offer products and services a gold mine of feedback they can use to generate helpful insights and direction if they use the data they collect effectively. And like how most storytellers would do it, listening to the target readers' cues always comes first before the story outline.
According to www.thesilab.com, more than 80% of those who practice digital marketing utilize at least two social listening tools. A third of that number invested over $100,000 in monitoring social media channels from their marketing budgets. This high allocation is due to a recent report that says 74% of people who make purchases over the internet want to understand where brands are coming from based on the stories that they tell. They double-check each messaging if it aligns with the things they believe in or if it addresses their pain points.
Getting the pulse of your market via the comments sections on your social media channels or via direct messaging provides valuable qualitative data that can propel your digital marketing strategies. It creates easier workflows for your editorial calendars, email marketing, and other content management campaigns, similar to how focus groups provide you with specific insights.
Let data tell you and them everything
Brushing up on the most effective strategies and gathering useful audience information from your data tools will tell you how you can efficiently tell your brand's stories. Remember to dress up your social media channels and landing pages appropriately, know what details to share with the audience, and schedule your messages appropriately.
Once you master how your stories align with your entire marketing funnel, it will be easier for you to get more people to take notice of your brand and gain more conversions.
Learn more digital marketing strategies that can help boost your business by visiting https://www.marcprimodigital.com