These 3 Digital Storytelling Techniques Reiterate the Power of Story for Your Brand
We are storytelling animals. We watch movies, play games, read books, spend hours on Facebook or Instagram, just to get acquainted with new stories. We love knowing what we haven’t heard before, and that’s why most of us are usually found scrolling up and down the newsfeed and making frequent internet searches.
According to a study, an average U.S citizen consumes 100,500 words daily, while 92 percent of consumers want brands to make ads that feel like stories.
With digital media growing exponentially, successful businesses are engaging more long term clients through storytelling by hiring content marketing experts and putting up an extraordinary story that gets clients right on their hearts.
Digital brand storytelling could be very interactive and appealing, considering you know how to use the digital tools to your advantage.
1. Content , Content , Content! Content is King in Storytelling
From ranking on the search engines to converting your “potential clients” into actual clients, content marketing is making that all happen! Marketers are using storytelling to spearhead brand awareness and to build a progressive and strong relationship with their clients and audience alike.
Let’s take some inspiration from this instance:
We all know about Kick Starter is a major crowdfunding platform but what most of us don’t know is how it has made storytelling popular. One popular project that’s worth a mention is “Dying Words: The AIDS of reporting of Jeff Schmalz”, a documentary that’s been created on the epidemic of AIDS by the reporter himself, dying of the disease.
With still 19 days to go, the project raised $24,000, (the project’s original goal was $20,000). Just as said before, people like to read compelling stories and Jeff Schmalz gave them one.
Here’s another example: NIKE — EQUALITY Campaign:
This is a campaign video broadcasted by one of the greatest storytelling brand -Nike in their _Equality_ campaign. Through offering the athletes a set of branded workout gear, Nike makes a blog statement has made a strong brand image of positive social change. This is a very good digital brand storytelling example that showcases how a brand can engage with its audience and potential clients. The viral effect created baby various social media channels can be very promising. This story also invited the audience to be a part of the NIKE community by wearing their branded workout gear.
2. Social Media — A Powerful Digital Storytelling Tool
The content that we have been talking about, needs an interactive platform with lots of potential users, and undoubtedly, social media has no parallel in terms of a large, targeted audience. Just like you are using your website and blog for brand storytelling, you could also use social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, etc.) to do the same.
Social media is a powerful platform that requires concise, contextual content, so it’s important that your brand story is put forth in the right manner. A brand’s story is just like writing and directing a play. It should have a theme, characters and an intriguing plot (beginning, middle, and ending). In brief, a great story lies within a great content.
But there’s more to digital storytelling than just good written posts.
When combined with the right _digital media_, i.e. images and videos, you could really take your brand’ story to new heights. There are like over a dozen ways to use social media for storytelling, let’s take a look at one of them:
Above, you can see a narrative style of storytelling. Check out the number of likes and shares for the post. Pretty impressive!
But it’s not just Facebook that you are confined to for digital storytelling, even Twitter is a pretty awesome tool too. The 140-character word limit is quite less but it encourages you to deliver another version of storytelling, i.e. consecutive posts.
There are dozen other techniques to use social media for digital storytelling that you can learn about here.
3. Visuals are the KEY!
Internet users love videos. According to [PsychologyToday.com], an average user watches 2006 videos per month, while according to Nielsen, 64 percent marketers plan onto to put video marketing as their dominating strategy.
The article above also states that “If you want them to fall in love with your brand, send them a video”.
There are so many reasons why videos work better than text when it comes to digital marketing. First, it’s the human brain’s ability to process videos 60,000 times faster than text. Humans find watching videos a lot easier than reading, as the former avoids cognitive strain.
Storytelling through visuals is a lot more effective over text. But it’s not always the case. According to ClickTale, users have a tendency to choose the same kind of content that they previously chose for themselves. So if someone watched a video and liked it, they will prefer visuals and vice versa.
But brand storytelling via videos could both be great or disaster, so it’s always a wise decision to follow the leads of the successful brands if you are a new entrant in the market. If you want to look at a super-successful attempt of visual brand storytelling, check out the following advertisement from GoPro:
The above video doesn’t promote GoPro, they didn’t even mention the Go-Pro, it just simply shows an amazing, heartwarming video of a firefighter rescuing a kitten.
But how is that benefiting GoPro?
Well, the video makes their case for USP by telling the audience how their product could be beneficial. This is the “show, don’t tell” technique of brand storytelling; the content demonstrates amazing story but doesn’t use the product as heroes. So through this clip, GoPro made their point clear: you can capture awe-inspiring videos using a GoPro but they said it even without saying a word.
Ready to start your own?
