The digital age is here and as technology continues to evolve, so does the behavior of consumers.
As you will be aware, today’s tech-savvy digital consumer is immune to the plasticity of banner advertising or one-size-fits-all content offerings. If you want to grow your audience meaningfully, in a way that yields sustainable long-term results, speaking to your audience on a personal level is a must.
In the modern world, people will invest in a brand that they believe in, both personally and financially. And one of the most powerful means of conveying your message in the digital sphere is by telling your brand story.
In an age of social media and SVOD platforms such as Netflix, the average person is far more likely to respond to a narrative than a sales slogan. Recent research suggests that short fiction makes a significant impact on eBay listings. In fact, eBay listings that include a strong narrative attract an average of 64% higher bids. Moreover, 64% of consumers cite shared values as the main reason they maintain a relationship with a brand. It’s no secret: detailed tales connect with consumers.
With a multitude of channels and platforms on which to share your stories, values, and company culture, there’s a seemingly endless level of scope when it comes to presenting a creative, valuable, and meaningful narrative with your audience.
Here, we will explore the key outlets for brand storytelling in the digital age, and examine real-life examples for insight and inspiration.
Brand Storytelling Techniques
As a creative digital marketer, we know you appreciate the virtues of brand storytelling. To begin, here are three definitive techniques that will prove valuable to your storytelling efforts, the three Cs, if you will.
Craft a storytelling strategy:
Much like your content strategy, before you start to craft your narrative, you should first consider the particular message your story is looking to convey. Ask yourself why the narrative at hand is going to exist and decide the platforms you feel will present it most effectively.
Once you’ve put a micro-strategy in place, much like a piece of flash or short fiction, carve out a beginning, middle, and end, and humanize the main protagonist of your content, whether it be a person or a product.
The most potent stories use emotion to connect with people on a human level, so never forget who you’re speaking to, and never forget to add a human element to your brand story.
Create evergreen content:
When you’re trying to reach out and touch your audience with a meaningful brand story, creating content that will remain powerful and relevant in years to come is important.
If the content you’re crafting isn’t event or time-specific, always attempt to produce a narrative that doesn’t lean too much on particular dates or minor current events. To ensure your story stands the test of time, attracting consumers for years to come, you should aim to make it evergreen.
Conjure data-driven messages:
By 2019, content marketing services are expected to generate over $313 billion (€253 billion). By crafting meaningful narratives with the power of digital data, you could help your company generate a sizable share of that revenue.
Leveraging the enormous amounts of digital data available at your fingertips will help you to craft highly-targeted stories which resonate with your audience on a truly personal level. Digital data will help to dictate the flow of your narrative, leaving you the time and space to be as creative as possible.
Virtual Reality (VR) and Brand Storytelling
Forbes suggests that 75% of the planet’s most valuable brands have created some form of VR or augmented reality (AR) experience to inspire and engage with their customers.
Although VR and AR as brand experiences are in their infancy, there is enormous potential for immersive storytelling in the digital age. This hugely engaging storytelling medium has the power to become one of the world’s most poignant content marketing tools, delivering messages, news, vital information, and inspiring tales both in the past tense and in real-time.
Following the undeniable success of Pokemon Go – the AR gaming application that earned 65 million downloads in the US in 2017 alone – it is clear that today’s consumers crave immersive experiences.
Stepping into the realm of immersive VR and AR-based storytelling, British news outlet The Guardian launched its 6×9: Solitary VR in 2016.
In a bid to place its readers into the shoes of a human being subjected to the tyranny of solitary confinement, The Guardian created an interactive 360-degree experience that simulates the experience of being held in a six-by-nine-foot room
Brought to life with narration from real-life inmates, this immersive video offers a gritty, emotional, and eye-opening glimpse of life in solitary confinement, giving readers a taste of the world through fresh eyes. Not only did this immersive storytelling experience gain notable media attention, but it also sparked meaningful dialogue between those who viewed the video, boosting The Guardian’s brand awareness in the process.
As VR technology continues to evolve and continues to become a major part of our everyday lives, we expect to see a host of innovative VR storytelling experiences in the near future.
Social Media Storytelling
With so many active social media platforms in today’s world, there is a wealth of opportunity when it comes to telling your brand’s story to a highly-engaged audience.
Some 81% of millennials glimpse at Twitter at least once per day. On an average day, Snapchat reaches 41% of 18 to 34-year-olds in the US alone. LinkedIn boasts in excess of 530 million user profiles.
The point is that people love to connect, conduct research, share their opinions, and consume content via social media. If you tell your story in a creative, inspirational way, you stand to yield great results.
For example, accommodation innovator Airbnb has grown its social media following exponentially in recent years, with its primary Facebook page boasting over 11 million followers and its Instagram posts enjoying an average of 20,000 engagements.
In addition to leaning on strong visuals to convey its brand message, Airbnb crafts compelling copy for many of its major posts to encourage engagement and expand its social reach. Often, Airbnb crafts a miniature narrative to accompany its images, sharing its unique tone with its audience, and telling a story that not only sparks engagement but compels people to invest in the brand, both personally and financially.
The brand’s social media storytelling also ties neatly into its dedicated Stories platform. As this blog is committed to publishing high-quality user-generated content consisting of travel tips, inspirational tales, and guides produced through personal experience, and cross-promoting the platform via its social channels, Airbnb has become a global phenomenon.
Brand engagement increases by around 28% when people are exposed to a mix of user-created product videos and professional content. With a total valuation of $31 billion (€25 billion), Airbnb is a prime example of the potency of engaging user-generated content coupled with strong social storytelling.
Best Content Marketing Tools of 2023
- Hubspot Marketing Hub
Best content marketing tool for small and mid-sized businesses
Hubspot Marketing Hub is a platform that provides a range of tools for content management, sales and marketing, and social media advertising. Hubspot goes way beyond simply setting up a website and editing its content, as much as delivering a wide-ranging toolkit to help improve conversions.
It does this by offering options for split testing, content hosting, and communications within a sales team and with customers, along with goals and targets that can be tracked using Hubspot’s analytics software.
There are also a number of additional integrations available such as Salesforce, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365.
All in all, Hubspot probably isn’t the best at any individual feature that it offers, but the comprehensive set that it does offer makes it a clear market leader, and the best at what it does.
Even better, there’s a free tier for trying out Hubspot.
- Uberflip
Excellent content marketing tool for the full customer cycle
Producing content to attract business is one thing, doing it in an orderly manner to reach customers at every stage of the buying journey is another altogether – and that’s what Uberflip aims to do.
Describing itself as ‘a content experience platform’, Uberflip aggregates all your content – from blogs and eBooks to videos, whitepapers, and more – so you can manage and optimize a tailored content journey for clients.
A key component is the ability to create content hubs, relevant to specific topics and audiences, which subsequently helps you distribute content faster and accelerate lead generation.
To monitor and adapt your content marketing process, an analytics engine is built into the platform, but if you’re struggling to draw insights, Uberflip offers a wide range of useful tips and tricks to support your campaign. What’s more, the service’s customer support team is widely praised, should you run into any problems along the way.
- Adobe Marketing Cloud
Best content marketing tool for large organizations who want an end-to-end marketing platform
Adobe Marketing Cloud aims to provide a single end-to-end marketing platform, by providing the ability to manage multiple channels, campaigns, and personalization from a single platform, which controls four key software products.
The Experience Manager serves as a central content manager, allowing you to create and manage the content you need for marketing, whether in the form of images or text. Adobe Campaign provides a single place to automate ads, email, and campaigns, underpinned by analytics.
Adobe Target allows for personalization with marketing campaigns, using machine learning to test and optimize content across different channels. And Marketo Engage aims to help manage lead management as well as provide cross-sell and account management for existing customers to increase sales prospects.
When it comes to big-name businesses, the Adobe Marketing Platform is regarded as a leader for enterprises. Its data-centric service helps you track your online marketing and website performance, as well as deliver search engine results from third-party sources.
- Constant Contact
A solid option for most businesses
Constant Contact easily makes the shortlist of names people think of when it comes to email marketing, and there are plenty of reasons why. Constant Contact is easy to set up and use, offering high levels of support and security.
However, the shortcoming is that there’s nothing really setting Constant Contact apart from its competitors in email marketing services. At least Constant Contact offers a 60-day free trial, so it’s worth checking out. However, temper your enthusiasm as you can’t expect game-changing innovation at these levels.
Constant Contact can stand out with the separately featured and more comprehensive CRM plan, but as with the Constant Contact Website Builder, we’ll consider that in its own review.
- Populr
Best content marketing tool for swift content creation without IT support
With speed and efficiency at its core, Populr challenges you to ‘create a page for anything in 5 minutes’. The service aims to empower marketing and sales teams with a toolkit that assembles web pages with the same ease as PowerPoint slides, removing the obligation of using developers.
Populr supplies a whole host of web template options to create a professional feel without the need to use a designer, while the automatic layout engine enables users to easily drag and drop items onto their own customized web pages.
The platform then enables you to distribute your assets via its share options – covering social media, email, and more – while engagement trackers and analytics tools help you measure and refine your content.
Other handy Populr features include collaboration options so multiple users can edit a web page, customized branding allowing the easy upload of logos and fonts, plus password protection and encryption for added security.
Even better is that there’s a free tier you can use to experiment with the service and see how it fits your needs, which we recommend. Although there is a 12MB document limit, you do get full access to the drag-and-drop page builder, as well as collaboration and sharing tools.
- Ion Interactive
Great content marketing tool that’s easy to use
Ion Interactive gives marketers a digital toolkit for getting their content online in a variety of formats. Think you need a team of developers every time you want to produce a new web page? Think again, as using Ion takes the back end out of the equation.
Functioning as a kind of souped-up, user-friendly CMS (content management system), Ion offers up a host of customizable web page templates if you don’t want to start from scratch, plus data-based content formats like calculators, assessments, report cards, quizzes, interactive infographics, look-books, white papers and more.
Linking up with Ion Interactive also brings customized training and ongoing guidance from a dedicated customer services team, as well as best-practice webinars and access to support videos and articles to help build the expertise within your team. The package you adopt is scalable too, so if the content marketing remit expands and your organization takes to Ion well, you can easily expand your service.
For such a feature-rich platform, the reporting and analytics tools are perhaps lacking a little depth next to competitors, but it’s otherwise difficult to find pitfalls.
