Are you a CMO planning your 2018 marketing campaigns? Here’s 5 reasons why you need to put stories at the heart of your strategy
1) Stories drive emotional engagement
Great brands understand that their success is based on an emotional engagement with their customer. If you can find a way to systematically channel positive feelings to your customers then you will succeed.
Stories are the best way to do this. Why? Because they have people at the heart of them and they are designed and perfectly formed to get an emotional reaction from you.
One great example of this is AIB’s last day of the mortage campaign. In particular the story featuring Maura does this with great success.
2) Looking for permission from the gatekeeper is over
The era of the gatekeeper protecting a media channel is long since over. The idea of getting on a bended knee to a news editor, producer, or editor is a thing of the past. Paying huge fees to buy airtime is less and less relevant in the marketing mix.
But how do you succeed in the era where to have to earn the attention of you customer? There is just one way – with great stories. Great stories are a magnet for attention, and if you can shape them the right way they will be shared. Those sharing them see their role as an oracle, gaining social currency for enlightening their network with a great story.
A great example of this is the famous Dollar Shave Club video that transformed them from a company getting three to four orders a days to one getting over 12,000 a day. It also set them on a journey where they were eventually taken over by Unilever for $1 billion Dollars.
3) Only one type of person wants to read your press release
The purpose of a press release is for one thing, to get your story to journalists. If writing a piece of content to an English speaking audience, you wouldn’t write the piece in French.
So why try cater your press release to anyone but a journalist? Tell your story with a clear and structured beginning, middle and end. No journalist wants to read a press release that’s six pages long.
Keep it short and the language precise. The title and subject lines should be a summary of your story to engage the journalist immediately.
4) Stories bring communities together
Stories unite people, particularly in the context of a community where people have shared experiences and similar interests. The foundation of a community is a number of people who share common ground. When you tell a story, you need to find that common ground in order for your audience to feel an attachment to your brand.
An example of this is Centra’s sponsorship of the GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship. By telling the story of Sarsfield GAA club in Galway, with interviews from people of all generations about the pride and spirit the club brings to the community, it evokes emotional response and associates the brand with a warm and proud feeling.
5) Fact tells, story sells
Facts should always be provided when marketing a brand, they are important for the customer to understand the service/product being sold. However, plain facts aren’t enough to sell the item. Facts are not personal, and they don’t engage the customer.
In the video below, David JP Phillips outlines the story of a journalist, Rob Walker, who wanted to find out was storytelling really the most powerful marketing tool of all. He bought 200 items on eBay for $129, and asked 200 authors to write a story for each item. He went back on eBay with a story for each item, and resold the 200 items for $8000 dollars in total.
