Brands Adopt Storytelling Strategies to Attract and Move Audiences

Say goodbye to advertising. Say welcome to storytelling.

A rapid decline of the effectiveness of “interrupt advertising” has forced brands to turn to sustained storytelling, according to a new report from Skyword, A Study in Brand Transformation. Storytelling offers brands a new way (or age old, depending on your perspective) to engage with and convert customers.

Ever since humans could speak, well-told stories have enthralled and moved audiences. Brands today are finding success in incorporating storytelling into their PR and marketing materials to attract, captivate and move consumers. However, storytelling must be done correctly to produce the sought-after outcome.

Elements of Successful Brand Storytelling

The most successful brand storytelling makes the product feel real, exciting and more compelling. Brands that tell stories and excite audiences see a huge return on their investment, as customers start to feel involved, and more likely to buy, says Sahail Ashraf, owner of Talented Content, in a Business to Community article.

The best storytelling, he says,

• Contains a narrative structure that is easy to follow,
• Conveys an emotion,
• Focuses on real people – not supermodels.

For examples of superb brand storytelling, Ashraf cites Dove’s real story of a serviceman eager to return home to see his children. “It works because we have a story here, a video that tells us about something that stirs up emotions. And it links those emotions to the healing, reuniting power of soap,” he says. He also praises work by TOMS Shoes, Heinz, Airbnb and others.

The Dove video was part of the company’s #RealDadMoments campaign designed to support its Dove Men+Care products. Ample research backed the campaign. “It specifically targets fathers who feel as though their role in child-rearing is not fairly represented in the media,” according to Digiday. “Research conducted for the campaign revealed that fathers feel they and their fatherly responsibilities are routinely misrepresented as clueless, ineffectual or outdated.”

Marketers Must Change their Mindset

To effectively implement storytelling as a marketing and PR strategy, marketers must reorganize their teams and shift their mindset from purely marketing to an editorial viewpoint, according to the Skyword research.

“They need to gain greater insight into what motivates their audience members, adopt technology and processes to support scalable publishing and distribution models, and recruit talent more aligned to publishing than traditional marketing roles,” Skyword asserts.

Marketing leaders know they must reorganize their departments but they lack the resources to do so, the study finds. Despite a profound shift in how audiences consumer information, brands are only in the early stages of responding.

Main Points of Marketing Survey

The survey of 190 marketers conducted by Researchscape reveals these key points.

• Most companies surveyed (62%) had not reorganized their teams in the past year. Of the 38% that had, 26% said they were extremely successful in marketing, compared to 9% that had not reorganized.

• More than 58% had invested in new technology over the past year. Top technologies used include design software (52%), social media monitoring (51%) to better capture customer viewpoints, and analytics (47%) to better understand consumer viewpoints and marketing successes and failures.

• Half said they are work with more technology providers; only 4% are working with fewer.

• Firms that reorganized marketing in the past year were also more likely to have adopted new technology within the last three months (24% vs. the 9% that didn’t reorganize).

• More organizations are investing in brand storytelling roles such as editorial manager (33%) and content marketer (28%). Titles such as storyteller and evangelist are becoming more common

• Forty percent of marketing teams have expanded content marketing in the past year.

• Marketers are making significant investments in visual storytelling. Video, produced by 49% of enterprises surveyed, is the most common type of content produced.

• Blogs, representing 45% of media produced, remain a major content avenue.

• Marketers are investing significantly less in longer forms of content such as white papers (18%) and e-books (17%).

Bottom Line: As consumer content consumption habits change, marketing teams are shifting gears to move away from traditional marketing and advertising to brand storytelling. Brands that invest in talent, including positions such as editorial managers and content marketers, will gain a head start. Organizations that invest technology such as social media monitoring and analytics will be better able to understand their audiences, an essential step for successful brand storytelling.