How businesses get customer’s attention has changed significantly.

There is a shift, among consumers and decision-makers, from the overreliance on old-fashioned sales promises and standard banner ads.

With the rate at which competition is rising, it is becoming extremely hard for businesses to draw customers’ attention through television ads or shiny billboards.

Modern consumers are interested in your brand ‘narrative’, which apparently, is more than your USP or even a sales pitch.

It is your brand’s voice, your background and identity.

The right narrative will help prospects and customers understand your brand from a different perspective, and that is why modern marketers are considering storytelling as a marketing tool.

However, what are the benefits? Read on to learn why marketing through storytelling works.

Reasons Why Storytelling is a great Marketing tool

Marketing through storytelling, of course, is not a new concept.

Brands such as BrewDog, Marks and Spencer, and even Coca Cola have benefitted from this approach for years.

With the average individual consuming over 100,000 digital words daily, research shows that about 92% of these people would benefit from such words if they were in a story format.

So, what’s in for brands that use storytelling as a marketing tool?

  1. Customer Motivation

Probably, you can remember an advert back in the day.

The chances are high that whatever the advert was, it had a story that lingered in your mind.

Marketing through storytelling is a great way to draw customer’s attention using a fascinating tale prior to the introduction of a call to action.

As such, the brand builds an emotional connection with its prospects and customers such that it is hard to turn down their call to action.

  1. Makes Brands Memorable

While customers can remember your brand because of numerous marketing aspects such as a catchy headline, professional photos, or even a fantastic video, nothing beats them all than a great and captivating story.

However, of course, the story should resonate with the tastes, preferences, or needs.

Can you remember a headline in a book in your kindergarten?

We bet, you can remember fables and still hum along most of the rhymes you were taught during preschool.

That’s it –the power of storytelling in enhancing memorability.

  1. Attitude, Opinion, and Brain Chemistry

It is unlikely that a bunch of statistics or a list of facts will change your prospects’ opinion and attitude towards your brand.

This is especially true where there is bias or strong objection to the brand.

Research carried out by Berkeley showed the potential of stories in changing people’s behaviors, opinions, and attitudes, as well as brain chemistry.

You can incorporate stories in your PRs, opinion pieces, or even in the sales pages to persuade your audience to taken action.

  1. Build Trust and Relationships

A report by Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages Survey indicated that 92% of consumers build trust in brands through earned media (media mentions, referrals, word of mouth, etc.).
How does it apply?

You could be sharing clients’ testimonials, media mention, anecdotes, or even stories with your audience to build trust and strengthen relationships.

  1. Creating Neuro-Associations

Storytelling not only makes your target audience remember your brand, but it also adds a more tangible element to its value.

There is no doubt that good stories impact our memories.

For example, there is a strong connection between Coke and Christmas, which is attributable to Coke’s Christmas advert where Santa uses a brightly lit branded truck to deliver presents on Christmas day.

As such, many people in the United Kingdom know is Christmas when they see the truck on their TVs.

Using stories to create such associations can transform your brand significantly.

While it is agreeable that storytelling is a powerful tool, it can only be successful if you have a brilliant brand narrative, understand your audience, and use the right channels to reach your target audience.

Tips on Using Images in Your Marketing Storytelling

Stories are a significant part of human culture and the art of telling stories is timeless.

With the introduction and advancement of technology, storytelling has become a great marketing tool.
Brands use storytelling to capture the attention of prospects and customers, as well as engage with them for improved sales and ROI.

Using stories in marketing is prevalent on social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat.

Visual storytelling is becoming one of the top methods of marketing for businesses and their audiences. It often uses images and other media that’s associated with visuals.

Marketers frequently implement images within their stories, as well as in their storytelling campaigns.
However, if you aren’t familiar with storytelling for your business, you may have difficulty recognizing when you are on the right track and when you need to make changes.

The following info will help you get and stay on the right path for your success.

Using Images to Succeed In Storytelling

Storytelling using images requires the adoption of the right images and emotion-evoking message. Here are a few life hacks on how to use images successfully in storytelling.

  1. Identifying good storytelling images

Before you use images to tell brand stories, it is important to identify and understand what should be considered when choosing images for storytelling.

To make sure your images are relevant, motivate, and inspire think about the story idea and theme, the mood the audience currently has, and the feeling you want to leave them with, at the end of the story.

• Idea: There is no denying how challenging it can be to illustrate a concept using images. However, an image that captures a given action can save you here. Abstract images, as well as, symbolism are often used when telling stories through images.

• Mood: Image backgrounds are used to express the mood in a given photo. In case a dramatic effect is needed, blurred backgrounds are the best. However, it is important to have a close relationship between the subject and its background.

Since emotions and feelings are important, it’s very important to use images of people with feelings they can relate to now, such as fear, disappointment, frustration, etc.

If you offer a solution to the problem causing these negative feelings, at the end of the story, use pics of people with confident, happy, and inspired expressions.

• Theme: Images you use in storytelling should follow a given theme. It makes it easy to tailor your message well to the audience you have in mind. Leave a few clues to allow your audience to develop ideas around your story.

In addition, the message you convey should resonate with the theme and your narration, whereby you’re let your audience into what happened before the current situation.

  1. Use a variety of images

Variation is essential in photography and storytelling.

While deciding on which images to use, it is also important to consider your story’s pacing.

You can achieve this by using diverse and quality images. For example, depending on the need, you can opt for a portrait, a close-up, or even a medium shot.

  1. Avoid redundancy

Usually, using many images does not guarantee you the most engagement.

All you need are the relevant photos. Every photo you use should serve a different purpose.

Your goal should be to elicit some action from the viewers. Avoid anything that does not have any overall effect.

  1. Use emotional images

A great story should evoke the right emotions. Emphatic stories often attract positive responses to any CTA. Emotions are usually conveyed through facial expressions.

In addition, images showing the subject’s action can be a great bet when it comes to expressing emotions.

For example, in a case of a lost boy, an image showing tears-streaked face, clenched fists, and red eyes can evoke the necessary emotions.

Using images to tell a story is similar to storytelling via a film.

You should ensure that several factors align, as well as adopt the right tricks and tips to ensure that your story moves your audience.

The implication is that not every image you find out on the internet, or you shoot is suitable for storytelling.


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