How to perform well in brand storytelling on social media to boost your business
Social media marketing has now become one of the most important means of boosting businesses. Accordingly, several marketing strategies have shown well results in helping marketers to generate leads and convert them into sales.
One of the most sought after strategies is “Brand Storytelling” on social media which can lead to brand awareness, more followers, and finally more sales. Your story is actually the way your company or brand will be recalled by your customers. This is why some top social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, etc. have used Story as their posting feature.
In this article, we are going to summarize the brand storytelling strategy on social media in order to help you to boost your business.
What is a Story?
A story is generally mentioning a concatenation of events including some key features of your product/service. There is scientifically mounting evidence that “Stories” can get people’s attention. Brand storytelling uses a narrative to engage your brand with customers focusing on connecting your business message to what your potential customers might pay for.
Fortunately, social media has provided marketers with numerous features to tell their brand stories creatively. So, they can perform beyond the boundaries of traditional advertising and influence as many people as possible. Of course, you have to go on this journey step by step and based on a clear plan to be able to keep your ROI high.
Step 1: you have to know your objectives
Before embarking on this marketing career, you need to define your goals clearly and quantitatively. Many marketers might think that the purpose of online marketing is simply to increase sales. However, you have to set some clear goals and certain metrics to be able to track the changes and measure your results.
We strongly recommend you to set some measurable goals with the deadline you expect to reach that point. For example, the number of followers, likes, comments, conversion rate, etc. within 6 months. By this approach, you can concentrate on your story and avoid distractions.
Step 2: you have to know your audience
Recognizing the niche audience is one of the most important tasks every marketer must do. Before you can tell your story to customers on social media, you need to understand the characteristics of your audience.
Depending on the style of your brand, certain parts of your country or even the world might be your target audience. They are highly likely to buy your products/services. You need to recognize and sort them based on age, weight, gender, color, profession, language, social network, and location. By collecting data about your customers via different means like interviews, relevant social channels/groups with high engagement rate, social media analytics tools, and also Google Analytics.
Remember that the more exactly you target your audience, the more keyword-focused and trendy your stories will be.
Step 3: you have to create compelling content
Creating content is at the heart of your marketing activities, which must be as per your storytelling strategy. You need to generate compelling content, matching your niche audiences’ desires and your brand story.
Surprisingly, you do not have to be an expert in any genre to tell your story on social media. This is exactly why modern storytelling on social media is different from traditional advertisement methods. Of course, a bit of experience can really help you to bold your content.
But, creativity is the factor that grabs the attention of people and makes them follow your updates on social media. You have to be different from your competitors in terms of color, style, tone, theme, keywords, etc. If you want to build a long-lasting brand identity on social media, you need to create a unique appearance in your content.
An image or more importantly video can influence thousands of followers, while many of them might consider texts to be boring. So, the word “storytelling” is not just writing about your product/service. When it comes to social media marketing, it is of paramount importance to utilize multi-media content to convey your story’s message. By this approach, your story will get much more likes, comments, and shares.
But the truth is that creating numerous high-quality pictures or unbranded videos means spending your time and money. It is obvious that you cannot rely solely on your own resources to create compelling content for your marketing. One of the most efficient means of content generation is to ask your followers to create quality content for you.
Step 4: you have to engage with your followers
Many marketers might think that they have finished their task of marketing simply by posting stories. Remember that without a consistent engagement, your efforts in previous steps cannot lead to business growth. If you want to make your audience remember your story, you need to be consistent in engaging with your audiences.
With a good work of engagement, your followers will feel that they are part of your stories not just buyers of your products/services. You need to adopt a suitable voice for your engagement. People like to engage with the human being, not selling robots. Also, do not ignore comments, suggestions, or critics. By this approach, you will gain the trust of your customers and encourage them to purchase your product more and more.
Step 5: you can use influencer marketing
No matter how well you have performed in storytelling, without the help of influencers, you might fail. With numerous rivals active on different social media platforms, you cannot reach out to your audience by a normal storytelling strategy. Influencer marketing is now one of the most important means of brand awareness on social media.
You need to combine your storytelling approach with some advertising techniques like influencer marketing. People usually respect influential people and accept their suggestions. You have to take advantage of this personality trait and collaborate with some influencers on social media. Involve them telling your story so that followers feel that they are part of your strategies.
Depending on the type of your product/service and also your marketing budget, you have to select a suitable influencer for your marketing. Niche relevant influencers are strongly recommended because of a high rate of engagement. They are usually experts in a certain field and consequently, they have the most targeted audience to reach. You need to be careful in selecting the right influencers. Because, based on Social Tradia, many influencers on social media, especially Instagram, cannot keep their followers and want to sell their accounts.
Step 6: you have to analyze your performance
To reach a high ROI, you have to constantly analyze your performance and optimize your storytelling approach. Your strengths and weaknesses in storytelling can only be recognized and removed by measuring your results based on certain metrics. Clear goals you have set in the first step might be of use in this stage.
Every social networking service has its own Analytics tool by which you can see your results and track the changes. Also, Google Analytics is a useful tool you can take advantage of in order to measure your activities on social media.