Interactive storytelling — the future of SaaS communication

Interactive storytelling is the best way to find common ground with the audience, build a lasting relationship and engagement. Read the confession of a SaaS team that applied interactive storytelling in their communication — and succeeded.

The attitude, in which we believe, assumes that if you want to build the best software, you have to go through the entire journey together with the users. From a deep problem understanding, through stepwise designing, to advanced development. This is why our collaboration platform — Futuramo — is built with a strong customer input.

But gaining customer engagement is one of the hardest things in business. Fortunately, people love stories and the simplest and the most authentic way to get their attention is to make them interested in your story.

Why people are interested in listening to storytellers

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…. There are a few lines that make us listen. It’s funny to see how people switch off our phones and ignore pushes from social media. Have you ever wondered why almost every great story starts with one of these simple formulas that take us to the dreamland? Why is it so intriguing?

Catrinel Bartolomeu from Duarte explains it well in her post at Contently:

Our predisposition to believing good stories comes down to human physiology and psychology. We’re wired for well-told narratives. They can be so alluring, enticing, and transformative that they can cause even the smartest readers to change their minds, relinquish money, and see the world through someone else’s eyes.

According to Paul J. Zak, founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and a professor of economics, psychology, and management at Claremont Graduate University:

As social creatures, we depend on others for our survival and happiness. A decade ago, my lab discovered that a neurochemical called oxytocin is a key “it’s safe to approach others” signal in the brain. Oxytocin is produced when we are trusted or shown kindness, and it motivates cooperation with others. It does this by enhancing the sense of empathy, our ability to experience others’ emotions. Empathy is important for social creatures because it allows us to understand how others are likely to react to a situation, including those with whom we work.

These two points of view — business and scientific — show us exactly how a client-oriented tech company should communicate. Instead of gathering people around the campfire, kitchen table or city market, we take advantage of our combination of UX experts, developers and marketers-storytellers to create interactive stories that explain the ideas behind our tools.

Customer experience is the new marketing

In the beginning, we didn’t expect how it would influence not only our marketing but also the business model and platform development. Storytelling has become an important part of our communication. By designing addictive landing pages, we build visitor engagement and gain deeper understanding of the problems to solve. Once interested in the topic, people are more eager to become early adopters.

Brian Solis says that customer experience is the new marketing and customer experiences are the new brand. From this perspective, the best user path includes three steps:

1. Follow one of the stories — understand the problem and how we can help.
2. Become a beta tester — use the tools and share feedback.
3. Be active in tailoring the platform accordingly to your needs.

It’s possible to build an amazing and inspiring community that allows to develop a team-friendly platform. It all starts with a remarkable storytelling experience and continues with a unique customer journey.

The story way to promote web apps

This part is dedicated to the process of creating the award-winning interactive storytelling and making it essential to the entire branding strategy.

The adventure starts with the launch of History of Icons and continues with Relativity of Time. Both projects are never-ending sources of referral traffic, warm thoughts from viewers and awards from the design websites.

History of Icons is an introduction to the Futuramo Icons app. Its success inspired our team to follow this strategy. Relativity of Time tells the story behind our time tracking app — Futuramo Time Tracker.

How to make the story of your product a part of the big picture

History of Icons is a visual brief of icon evolution among different user interfaces in various operating systems. It illustrates the history of computer icons and icon design from the 1980’s to the present.

Ideas inside:

• We have determined the topic that interests our target group — UX and UI designers, marketing professionals and every creator who uses icons in visual projects.
• We focused on the educational value and a nostalgic experience — creating an emotional relationship with the story — it’s a huge part of our adventure with graphic design and software development.
• We have made the Futuramo Icons story a part of the big picture — the story of the entire UI and UX icons ecosystem.
• We gave the audience a sneak peak of the team’s skills — let them know what to expect in the future.

Results? Hundreds of mentions, many publications, and several design awards. History of Icons was featured in Fast Company, The Loop, HOW Design, The A.V. Club, Genbeta, Communication Arts and much more. The website received Site of The Day at Awwwards, Featured of The Day at CSS Light, Site of the Day at CSS Winner and (as you probably expect) more.

But the best of all was the buzz in social media — shares and tweets with love, appreciation and emotional comments. People have a lot of memories and individual stories with all these icons. History of Icons allowed them to remind others about their input and tell additional stories about creativity and design evolution.

History of Icons helped us reach global audience — the site was discovered by visitors from 185 countries!

How to build awareness and show benefits of your products

We love the essential parts of the first documented content marketing campaigns (sorry, content marketing nation, you seem to forget about your roots and John Deere’s The Furrow) — defining unnamed problems that customers face, expressing customer needs (even if they are not aware of them yet), explaining possible solutions, and letting them know how the product owner may help. We applied these rules in storytelling. It allowed us to create our famous mammoth and a brief story of time perception — Relativity of Time.

Ideas inside:

• We built the awareness that time is a valuable resource and it is important to use it wisely (customer problem).
• We pointed out that skills and capabilities may develop with time (customer need).
• Then, we presented the reasons why people should track their time — to be more aware of what they can achieve if they dedicate to a certain goal. (customer solution).
• In the end, we introduced Futuramo Time Tracker (ready-to-use tool).

Relativity of Time takes viewers into a fascinating, interactive journey through the ages and allows users to discover how long it took to fulfill some duties. The list of mentions, awards and publications was also impressive. Seeing how the project goes viral is one of the most exciting parts of our job.

Why is interactive storytelling so valuable?

While promoting your work you need to find the most suitable and growth-generating channel for your business. Here are some reasons why creating landing pages that tell good stories are one of our most effective strategies:

• We gained the most precious resource on the Web — user engagement. One of the fans told us that he spent over 14 minutes on Relativity of Time. Storytelling is addictive.
• We created our own manner — customer experience journey. It’s neither buyer’s journey nor sales funnel. We talk about software in a non-technical, non-marketing way. We engage would-be users into the story behind the tools. They become our users and members of our product development team.
• We gained valuable backlinks from strong domains. Designing quality projects increases your chances to be spotted by the key publishers. If the project is of value, they will be happy to mention it and link back to your site. In the end, it pays off in better SEO and larger organic traffic. Higher positions in search results and matching long-tail queries translate into thousands of additional website visitors.
• We received thousands of views from our interactive stories. Well-created promotional pages can turn into an evergreen content. If they are captivating enough, they can drive new visits for many months/years.
• We have interesting content to share through our social media channels. Interactive stories can be just the beginning of enriched storytelling. This kind of content can be expanded and is easier to sell through social media.
• We brought fun to our everyday duties. Who said that work couldn’t be fun? Working on such a project makes our team excited.

Wordpress’ Posting Activity shows that in October 2017 over 91,8 million blog posts were published on blogs hosted on their domain. You cannot publish mundane articles and look forward to capturing the audience attention. We share this approach to interactive storytelling because we believe it is the most engaging way to communicate and attract prospects.