Is Storytelling The Future Of Marketing?

We live in a world that encourages emotional connections. And this connection occurs through a story that makes people relate with each other. What’s more, is that hearing relatable stories releases hormones in our bodies that change our mood to become happy.

So, when it comes to creating a stronger connection with your audience as a brand, storytelling holds a lot of importance when planning to present your campaign. Without this emotional connection, your audience won’t be able to relate to your brand and can even end up preferring someone else’s products over yours; someone who will cater to your audience’s emotional needs.

But how important is storytelling in your marketing strategies? And is it the future for your brand to succeed? We discuss it in this blog.

What is Brand Storytelling?

Simply put, storytelling is a means to tell more about your brand to people than just the products and services you’re promising to provide. Questions like, ‘Why does your brand exist?’, ‘What inspired you to create it?’, ‘What culture do you seek to promote through it?’, are all answered in the storytelling narrative you seek to provide to your audience.

We’re no longer part of a world where only the big brands in the market would use a limited amount of storytelling for their audience while all the smaller brands just sought to present their products in the market without giving an inside look at what they’re all about. Now, in this world of technological growth and social algorithm advancements, you need to stand out from the crowd and bring your individuality to the spotlight. Only through this will you be able to make your brand visible and unique. And this visibility will ultimately lead to profitability.

The Personal Element

When the pandemic hit in early 2020, every brand started spreading a message for people to stay at home and follow SOPs, some health and hygiene brands even encouraged people to use products of their competitors but follow the proper safety measurements. Food delivery services followed strict SOPs to make people ordering them to feel safer. All of this may have just been a bandwagon for marketers to climb on, but for the common folk, it was a means of staying connected to the brands and increased their likelihood in the people’s minds.

Now imagine if, in the same pandemic-driven world, brands had still only cared about selling their product instead of caring about people’s health and safety or proper SOP measures. Not only would the brands have lost customers, but they would have lost market value as well for the strictly capitalistic approach. But the opposite happened instead, why? Because of storytelling.

Brands didn’t just provide people with solutions, they also cared for their safety and told a story about a world where surviving is a priority and everyone should come together to make it all possible. In short, they became human and that personal element makes people feel cared for. This put a positive impact on an overall negative situation, and that’s why brand storytelling is important.

2020 is the biggest example of why this storytelling suit should be followed, not only to make the already targeted audience feel understood but also to drive new traffic to the brand.

Why Is Storytelling the Future?

The Tribal Need

Since ancient times, humans have learned to connect with each other and evolve through the help of their tribes. And this same tribal need is what brands need to reach out to. People don’t just want your product or service to be of value, they want you to tend to their tribal senses. Identify the audience’s emotional cues, values, and ideas; create a persona that will allow you to use storytelling to turn your audience into not just customers but tribesmen that will stay loyal to your brand and lead to your success.

Communicate with the audience, encourage them to engage, and ask questions from you, all of this is part of the storytelling you introduce that will keep them coming back to your brand for more value.

Break the Clutter

With the expansion of marketing tech, the number of brands available in the market have also expanded to such a level that now it all seems saturated. With this saturation comes the risk of the audience being so overwhelmed with the number of options available that losing their attention becomes inevitable.

In order to break away from this clutter and make your brand unique, you need a good story to ensure people remember what you’re all about and how you’re different from everyone else. No one has the time to look at your testimonials and research stats about your success. Your main content should revolve around telling a story that makes people stop and focus on what you’re saying.

Storytelling isn’t only more preferred by people, it’s also 20 times more effective in being memorable for the audience.

Simplified Messages

In a world where people don’t have time to even look at your stats, introducing new campaigns that require a lot of understanding on the audience’s part won’t do you much good. But with storytelling, you can redefine your strategy to convey your message in a simpler and relevant way for people to understand and connect with.

Give real-life examples, tell your personal story, etc, all of this will make your complex business mindset easier to be conveyed and understood by people. And not only that, but it will also make your marketing task easier, less technical, and more human.

The Human Connection

In a world where everything, from food to clothing to general stores, is available online and just a tap of a finger away, you just need to have the right strategy to become a preference. While that’s entirely true, the thing most brands fail at is when they try coming up with a strategy, they become too technical and forget to provide an emotional value through their campaigns.

In a world that already provides all the technological values one can think of, what people need is a human touch that can make all the difference for them. Be empathetic of people’s concerns and provide them with the solution that shows them you care about them. Tell them your story, so they know exactly what struggles you faced to become the brand you are today, so they can relate with you on an emotional level. We can do all of this through brand storytelling.

Stories are Inspiring

One of the most important aspects of telling your story to the audience is that it motivates and inspires them to do better than they have been so far. People thrive on the success stories of other people. When you provide them with this story and tell them the struggles you faced to reach where you are, they start not only to relate to you, they also get the inspiration that they’ve been looking for all along.

Providing people with transparency also makes your brand authentic and human. And this results in creating stronger relationships that lead to loyalty and success for your brand.

Storytelling is an art that goes beyond your content and is visible through every medium you’re seeking to reach out to your audience. In this modern age, the human connection is all about being honest and storytelling gives you a good means to do just that. There is an unlimited amount of potential that storytelling provides you with, you just need to come up with the right story to make it stick with the audience.

So if you ask that is storytelling the future of marketing, we’d say you’re wrong. Storytelling is the past, present, and forever of marketing. What’s your take on storytelling? Tell us in the comments.