Why Storytelling is Leading Marketing’s New Era
Marketing has evolved dramatically especially throughout the last decade. With the rise of digital and mobile technology, marketing has had a strong resurgence in business priorities. Coming from a business major, marketing was one of those subject areas that seemed to be outdated and even underappreciated. Fast forward a decade later after the introduction of the iPhone especially, digital marketing is one of the most in-demand jobs out there. This brings me to my next point when it comes to revenue generation.
Business owners, founders, entrepreneurs and marketers are continuously looking for new ways to engage with the market and their potential user base. In return, consumers have developed a sixth sense for many marketing methods. If something sounds overly promotional, over-hyped or “too sales-y”, consumers will immediately be turned off. Many marketing gurus have always stressed giving a reason for why people should care about what you do, but how it is implemented is where the disagreement occurs.
In fact, for the largest living and working millennial generation, there is much less trust between this generation and brands as opposed to previous generations. This makes advertising that much more difficult, never mind the many channels the mass market is exposed to, in this digital era.
The key to differentiating yourself as a business or as a founder is storytelling. When people think of storytelling, they think of dumping an overload of content through blogs. Creating content on a recurring basis helps drive marketing engagement, but only for when an audience is already established. To establish an audience in the first place, telling the story of your business is what would drive curiosity and further engagement.
The great news is that there are many digital platforms to supplement these efforts. Platforms such as Medium, Quora, and LinkedIn exist to self-publish thoughtful content that could potentially reach a global audience. Learning the art of storytelling is often referred to as a phase in marketing, it is not.
The evidence has shown that people are attracted to stories in general, which explains why content-driven platforms like Netflix are wildly successful. In business, people want to know especially from the founding team why that business exists, how it got started and what was the initial point of inspiration as to why action was taken in the first place.
The best part about storytelling is that does a few things:
- It builds trust and authority.
- It illustrates expertise.
- More importantly, it builds an emotional connection and thought-leadership.
Thought-leadership, especially among founders and executives, is vital. That is where that trust is initially built giving the impression to the market that it could trust that brand. Once that emotional connection is built, loyalty is created. Authenticity goes a long way.
As a content writer, strategist and market researcher myself, I encourage every single entrepreneur, founder or business owner to publish short authentic pieces on digital platforms in any way they can. Tell them why you started your business. Tell them what drove you to step in when you saw something wrong, and why it needed to be fixed. Tell the market how you are working to provide a viable solution. Tell them about what kept you from sleeping many nights when you knew something needed to be done. Share with them these stories, it matters.
This tells the market about why you are doing what you are doing and why your business exists.
You do not need to be a writer in the traditional sense to make this happen, but once you handle this portion, your marketing and sales campaigns will be that much easier.
