Stop advertising and start telling stories through social media. Storytelling is a powerful tool in marketing and should be applied to your brand’s social media campaigns.
Brands that tell audiences a story through their content will build brand awareness and foster authentic consumer relationships. Telling a story resonates with potential consumers because it’s engaging, informative, and educational—content that audiences are hungry for in this digital age.
With audiences being inundated with so much content on social media, the storytelling technique will help your brand stand out from competitors. According to marketing research, 92% of consumers want brands to make ads that feel like a story.
Keep reading this post to learn why storytelling is significant in social media campaigns. So that your brand can start telling stories and building a solid social media presence and loyal following.
Brand storytelling in social media creates a robust and loyal following.
Storytelling allows businesses to tell their brand’s stories and develop deeper-level connections with their audiences. The ability to build a narrative out of your business humanizes your brand while showing consumers your brand’s mission and values.
Marketing is all about connecting with consumers and understanding their needs and wants. When you tell them a story through social media campaigns, brands are accomplishing two crucial consumer/marketing factors:
- Your brand is meeting the consumers where they already are because, let’s face it, everyone is on social media.
- Your brand is making an effort to connect with consumers in a more meaningful way.
Developing narratives on social media helps connect audiences with brands. People love stories because they tend to stir different emotions—it’s human nature to want to become emotionally involved.
Storytelling on social media platforms is an excellent way to attract consumers. Companies with compelling brand stories have a 20% increase in customer loyalty.
With social media storytelling, your brand can use different social channels to reach current and new audiences. Diversifying your brand’s social channels helps to diversify your audience. Why? Different demographics engage on various social media platforms.
By engaging on a few social channels with your social media storytelling campaigns, your brand gains more exposure, builds consumer loyalty, and develops new leads.
Here are seven storytelling strategies to apply to your next social media campaign.
Nowadays, more than dropping a post on social media is needed to generate engagement or increase your followers. Marketers and creative professionals need to strategize on the type of content they want to produce and which platforms they will post this content.
Crafting stories on social media takes more effort and is a component that is well thought out because stories need to have a beginning, middle, and end. Just like the stories you knew of as a child. Your social media campaigns should have a climax or conflict and possibly a lesson that reflects your brand’s mission and values.
Social media platforms are an excellent place to publish your brand’s stories because of the various tools available on different platforms.
To help you better understand how to tell the next great American story on social media (just kidding), we’re not Hemingway, but we are social media creatives—here are seven storytelling strategies to use for your next great social media campaign:
1. Develop and understand your brand story.
Before you can relay your brand’s story to your audience, you must understand and develop a brand story. When marketers are creating a brand’s story, there must be clarity in the story arc. If not, then your audience will be confused, and they will not understand your narrative.
When strategizing for social media campaigns, marketers always craft the stories to address their marketing objectives. Social media stories should also reflect the needs of your audiences and the social platform you plan to post your content.
You may ask yourself why you must create different content for different platforms. The answer is that different audiences on various social media platforms are used to and expect specific content tailored for each platform.
2. Know your audience
To create excellent, audience-specific content, marketers need to know who their audience is and what they want. If you don’t know and understand your audience, it will be challenging to start producing content that generates engagement.
The best way to get to know your audience is with data. Research from marketing and sales lead data will help you build customer personas. Creating customer personas will make developing stories much quicker so your brand can effectively speak to your audience.
Here are a few ways to collect customer data to help build out your customer personas:
- Listen to customer feedback.
- Monitor online conversations about your brand and its products.
- Leverage customer data in your CRM.
3. Create a social media storytelling strategy.
Content must be captivating on social media for your audience. But, marketers must strategize what time and format their content will be published on social media.
The key word here is strategy.
Strategically creating and placing content on social platforms is essential to boosting, engaging, and converting your audience into paying customers. Investing in social media listening tools will help your brand develop the content needed for your social accounts.
Your audience may not see all your content at once, depending on whether or not they follow you across your brand’s social channels. So, remember to be consistent with your content’s narrative, no matter the format.
4. Create resources and valuable content.
Marketers and creative professionals should be aiming to create educational content. Content marketing and ad campaigns must tell your brand’s story and provide context and information about your brand and its products and services.
Especially when your ad campaigns are for social media, a crazy amount of content is posted daily on social media platforms. Their social campaigns must be educational for brands that want to stand out against their competitors.
Educational and informative content includes instructional videos, how-tos, games, contests, or downloadable information. Not everything on social media needs to be entertaining—66% of successful B2B content marketers said educational content helps nurture leads, subscribers, and their brand’s audience.
5. Be visually appealing with your stories.
Visuals are essential to the success of your content. When you incorporate visuals throughout the content, especially text-heavy content, marketers will see higher engagement. Audiences prefer text accompanied by visuals, including images, infographics, or videos.
Showing your audience what your brand is about and its story helps immediately introduce it to audiences. It also showcases to potential buyers the type of work your brand can produce—this works incredibly well if your business is in the creative services industry, like our very own Skyline Studio.
A significant aspect of social media platforms is that creativity is limitless. Every social media platform has tools that make posting and sharing creative content more manageable. This is terrific news because the more you share, the more engagement and reach your brand will achieve.
6. Feature customer or employee testimonials.
Getting your employees and paying customers to become a part of your brand’s story is an excellent way to develop trust with potential customers. Your brand’s customers and employees understand your products or services and can help advocate for your brand.
The best way to incorporate customer or employee testimonials is by featuring customers in content, highlighting your employees and what they do, or resharing content from employees and customers on social media.
According to research, 79% of consumers say user-generated content (UGC) highly impacts purchasing decisions. UGC and employee-generated content will help build brand awareness and humanize your brand.
7. Make it shareable.
Social media networks are meant to be platforms where users can engage and share as much content as their heart desires. Social media brands can generate buzz through the content they create, UGC or employee-generated content, and reach new audiences.
When you create content that is on brand with your values and mission, is meaningful, educational, and visually appealing, you create content meant to be shared. Aside from encouraging content sharing, marketers should develop a strategy to engage and respond to followers on social media. An excellent way to do this is by answering questions and responding to audience comments.
Audiences will reciprocate positively to your content and share it for others to see. This helps to convert them into paying customers and, ultimately, loyal brand followers.
Social media storytelling develops authenticity with consumers.
Marketers who develop a solid social media storytelling strategy and create high-quality content for their brands will share their message more effectively and successfully.
Harnessing the power of storytelling for your brand develops authenticity with consumers because your social media stories are humanizing your brand. When you build content for your audience, consumers will take notice of your efforts and want to buy from your brand.
Optimizing your content delivery for each social media platform will help your brand generate more reach, build brand awareness, increase authenticity, and attract followers.
Start building your brand’s social media presence with Skyline Studio. For more information on our creative social media services and brand storytelling efforts, fill out the form below to partner with our agency.