There’s a lot of noise in the world today. With Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, podcasts, blogs, and YouTube, it can feel like everyone is shouting. Every day, your customers are getting bombarded with sales and advertising messages from all sorts of brands. So how do you rise above the noise? By building a connection with your audience. The best way to do that? Storytelling.

Studies have shown that it’s emotion rather than logic that pushes people to make brand decisions. One good way to elicit an emotional response from your audience is to tell a story. Stories can help to break the ice with your audience and customers. Here are five ways you can use storytelling for your brand.

1. Social Media Posts

The core of social media is storytelling. The more personal your social media posts feel, the better, even if they are from a company page. They can humanize your business and help people to connect with your company.

Most businesses share links to their blog posts and let their audience know when they’re having great deals, but it’s possible to use social media posts as an opportunity to tell stories. You can share the story of your business’s origin or you can share a customer experience in a more narrative form.

These posts don’t need to be long or complicated. When crafting a storytelling plan for your social media posts, you can let go of any ideas of what a traditional story should look like and simply go for a story with emotional resonance. You can even use Twitter to tell a story in tweets or Instagram to tell a story with images.

2. Blog Posts

You might find that it’s difficult to incorporate a story into each one of your blog posts, particularly if you are blogging often. If a story isn’t relevant, you don’t need to force it. You should, however, try to integrate narratives into your blog post wherever you can.

You can try using a story at the beginning of your post to get your audience more engaged in your post from the start. If it’s a longer post, you can insert a narrative into the middle to recapture your audience’s attention. Or you can tie up the end of the post with a story that brings it all together.

3. The About Us Page

Your “About Us” page is actually a great place for a story. Here you should tell the story of your company’s origin. Why did your company begin? Why did the founder get into the industry? Were there any obstacles the founder had to overcome? Have there been any obstacles you’ve had to overcome as a company? These are all great questions to answer in your company’s origin story.

In the most compelling stories, the protagonist overcomes obstacles to achieve his or her goal. How can you frame your company’s origin story into a narrative? You might want to try asking yourself why the company began and then asking why to that. Then ask why a few more times. You should arrive at an interesting narrative.

4. Video

With video, you can expand your reach and tell the story of your brand in an entertaining and accessible way. You can increase your audience engagement by using more video. A video can convey a lot of information in a short amount of time sometimes in a more effective way than written words.

Customer testimonials are great for videos. They can make your brand seem more personal and make it feel like people are getting word-of-mouth recommendations. Customer testimonials can be powerful because they can tell the story of your brand for you.

5. Marketing on Multiple Channels

You can use campaigns to market across channels. Users are now active on a number of devices, on a number of platforms. You can connect Instagram posts to tweets and connect those back to blog posts and YouTube videos. The trick is to give each post on each platform its own meaning even if they are also connected.

You can also use offline activities like events and benefits. You can document the events and market them on any number of platforms. The possibilities are endless.

 

Brand storytelling is a powerful marketing tool that can be used on a wide variety of platforms. These are just a few suggestions for ways you can do that. But don’t stop here! Get creative and come up with your own ways to leverage the power of storytelling for your brand.

 

WT Digital Agency is an Atlanta marketing agency specializing in brand development, content marketing, social media marketing, website design, SEO, and more. To learn more about what we do, click here.