I was in Glacier National Park, the rain started to descend from over the adjacent ridge. The wall of black haze approached us as we set underneath a lean to we had built with a tarp and duct tape. As the rain drummed on the tarp harmoniously we started our whisper light camp stove to warm ourselves up with a Guatemalan coffee.
Do you see where the product is in the above paragraph? It’s hidden in the story, and that is storytelling marketing. Storytelling marketing is the process of creating story narrative where the product is a character. It casts a vision of a product being in someone’s life — typically in an aspirational way — and helps people to sit in someone else shoes, in someone else’s problem and see how a product will make their life better.
Hire me with the form below.
The Importance of Storytelling in Marketing
Storytelling is a part of the fabric of being human. We connect with stories, and they’re the perfect vehicle for marketing. Marketing is the expression of how a product helps people solve a problem. Stories help us create a portrait of a moment in a time when that problem happens, and how the product is a solution.
In this way storytelling is a cheat for capturing a persons interest, illustrating a problem, and showcasing a solution to that problem in the form of a product or service.
Storytelling Marketing Examples
Storytelling marketing is always composed of three things, a problem, a journey and a solution. When Google premiered its first real commercial called Parisian Love, it showed the problem of someone trying to impress a french girl, their journey of falling in love, and how the product of Google Search helped this protagonist. Below is the Google storytelling marketing example.
Storytelling Facebook Marketing
Facebook Ads are a powerful tool for storytelling marketing because Facebook is a way for users to tell stories digitally in the form of text, video and images. Ads that employ the model described above by casting a vision of people facing a challenge and overcoming that challenge with a product will get the cheapest traffic from Facebook.
Email Marketing Storytelling
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, and people are notorious for forwarding stories. Think about the last time your grandmother forwarded you an email, it was an elaborate story that contained that made the reader feel. With this idea in mind, we can use email marketing for storytelling by tapping into this natural desire to share stories that make us feel. Feeling can come from learning something new, hearing about another person overcoming an impossible obstacle, or sparking the flame of irritation that comes from a frustrating fact of life.
Best Marketing Storytelling Books
If you’re trying to learn marketing storytelling, these books are the best on the market.
Stories That Stick
Every person has a gap in their business they want to fill, and the bridge for that gap is a good story. Professional storyteller Kindra Hall shows business leaders the four unique stories they already have at their disposal to more effectively captivate and convert audiences.
Brand Storytelling
Brand storytelling is using a narrative to connect your brand to customers, with a focus on linking what you stand for to the values you share with your customers.
Unleash the Power of Storytelling
Unleash the Power of Storytelling offers a practical roadmap to crafting and delivering more powerful, persuasive stories that you can use to get more of what you want out of your career and your life.
Storytelling Marketing Agency
If you’re trying to hire a storytelling marketing agency, look for firms with people who have a large volume of empathy. Empathetic people are the best storytellers because they can identify other people’s problems and craft narratives from the perspective of those people. It’s also critical anymore for your storytelling marketing agency to understand the distribution of stories through social media. If they don’t have the ability to empathize and then distribute those stories with modern media, don’t hire them.
