Hey, there, how’re you doing? Watching movies, dramas, and series? I hope you enjoy these a lot!

Have you ever asked yourself? But, why? Why do you enjoy so much watching these things?

Well, there’s a science behind all of this! I hope you’re sensing what I’m just going to say now.

Well, they contain the art of storytelling. The art of storytelling keeps you attached to that particular movie, drama, and series.

You must’ve started thinking, hey friend, can I also be excellent in this art?

Yes, of course, you can also be a master in this art of marketing, all you need to do is go through the blog, and follow everything step by step.

You’ll get to know everything from this blog about what is storytelling, what is storytelling in business, the importance of storytelling in marketing, what is storytelling in digital marketing, the different types of stories in marketing, and the most important part how to write stories in marketing?

Yes, you’ll get to know about all of these things, be patient, and go ahead.

Let’s start with

What is Storytelling?

Storytelling is a way in which you consciously include narrative. Narrative helps users make them better connect with the narrator. Here narrator can be anyone, it can a brand, business, person, or any imaginary character.

With the help of storytelling, we can captivate our audiences better than data and facts. You may see some of the brands don’t include a call to action in their advertising, they just tell a story and connect with the audiences better. And not only small brands but also big brands are using this technique.

Do you want to know why storytelling is the most loved marketing technique? And why people are not stopping using this technique? Well, there is a scientific reason behind this. Do you want to know?

Of course, you want to know what the importance of storytelling in marketing is, and why storytelling in marketing works.

Importance of Storytelling Marketing

Well, we’ve learnt so far that storytelling in marketing works so much, but the reason behind this is our Human Psychology.

According to Human Psychology, our brain tries to better remember and connect with the things that have included the narrative part. It is one of the most fundamental aspects of human psychology to keep things framed in the narrative. Our human brain makes so much sense to the narrative part because it’s easy to comprehend the narrative.

Storytelling is the easiest way to create beliefs. The belief system is the most important part of what we think and what we do, and it’s not an easy task to break the current belief system or create a new belief system.

Whenever anyone tries this in his own brain, every cell of the body opposes this, so it’s the best way to tell a story. When breaking your own belief system is so much difficult task, then you may comprehend how much difficult will it be difficult for you to break your targeted consumers’ belief system, and create a new one.

You can’t get benefitted from your marketing efforts until you don’t create a belief in your users’ minds that your products and services are better than anyone. To create a belief easily you must include storytelling in your business.

Once you’re able to create a belief in your business community, they will no more be your targeted users, but will become clients, and will automatically promote your products and services consciously or subconsciously.

Let me give the biggest examples for this, have you heard about myths?

I’m sure there may be some of the myths that you still follow, they’ve been included in almost every culture of the world, why?

When they were told they included a story with them. That’s why they still seem correct to us, not because they’re correct, but they’re understandable, our human mind can easily comprehend the stories behind them.

Why Storytelling in Marketing Works?

You can take Storytelling as the soul of all of your marketing strategies. As you’ll need marketing materials to promote your brand, products, and services. And for that, we would suggest that you’ll create your marketing materials in the Storytelling format. As well know now that storytelling and narrative are so much ingrained in our human psychology. The more we will tie stories into our marketing material the more the customers will engage with our brand.

One thing about Storytelling that matters is you should be telling a story, it doesn’t matter what type of story you are conveying to your consumers. In simple words, you can tell storytelling in a way in which you use narrative to community your message. Using the narrative in your marketing strategies, storytelling is also called narrative marketing.

Storytelling is a way that empowers your users to understand why they should care about your brand, products, and services. It is the simplest way to humanise your brand.

In the storytelling you don’t focus on your products only, you just don’t commend your products to the people, but this is a way that tells people how your products and services can solve their problems.

In short, Storytelling is the way that makes your consumers aware of the solution to their problem you can bring into their life with the help of your products and services.

Storytelling is about your customer, it’s not about you or your brand, whenever you include storytelling tell your user, how can they be benefitted if they join your brand. This is the strength of storytelling marketing.

What is Storytelling in Business?

Your Business can be either offline or online or both. You’ve to decide how you want to convey your message to the people in both scenarios. Storytelling is the best thing you can do to evolve your business. Your audiences want stories to listen to, stories compel them to create deeper relationships with them. Whenever your business gets time to interact with your consumers you can use this, like in the local events you can tell who are you, and how you started?

It can help your business in spreading more awareness, driving customer acquisition, expediting sales, and increasing retention and royalty.

Want to see how big businesses like Samsung India, Nike, and Apple have included Storytelling in their businesses to promote their brand and build a deep connection with their users. Click here to watch how they’ve cooked up their stories!

It would not be a surprise if I say this, “Brands don’t sell products, they sell a story.”

What is Storytelling in Digital Marketing?

Do you know what digital marketing is? You must be thinking, am I joking? Everybody knows about digital marketing.

We’re passing through a digital era, and we perform so many things digitally. Digital Marketing is the form of marketing your products with the help of digital presence and digital marketing tools.

Digital Marketing is an umbrella term. An Umbrella term is a term that consists of many niches and markets in it. Digital Marketing also consists of website development, content writing and marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, graphics designing, SMM platforms, paid promotions, affiliate marketing, and much more.

To perform these tactics and build a robust online presence we need to promote our brand by including storytelling in our digital marketing materials.

While performing social media marketing, we can design posts or creatives for the social media in a way that it looks like we’re conveying some story. So, as with graphics, content and other aspects of digital marketing.

Digital Storytelling telling is the same as traditional storytelling, but the difference is in digital storytelling you’re conveying your messages through the digital world and media.

We can include the digital storytelling process in some of the following basic steps:

Look for an Idea
Research how other brands are conveying their messages
Write and Script your Story with Your Brand Voice
Create a Visual Storyboard—A storyboard is an idea of how you’d represent your Branding & Marketing Materials
Build Your Visual Identity – Create Graphics, Animations, Music and Videos
Put them altogether
Share Your Digital Story
Get Feedback
Improve and Repeat the Process for New Idea

So, we’ve got knowledge of what digital storytelling is all about, and how you can cook up a story for your brand.

I would like to repeat one thing again, it’s no different from than traditional way of storytelling, rather than the delivery methods of the stories.

Different Types of Stories in Marketing?

Stories in marketing play a wider role in the whole marketing campaign. On the basis of different aspects a Business contains we can divide the stories into different parts that are the following:

Brand Storytelling

Brand Storytelling is also an Umbrella Term like Digital Marketing, containing different types of brand stories in it. In this, we use storytelling techniques to promote and shape the identity of a brand.

Different types of brand stories you can tell to your consumers are the following:

Brand Origin Story: – This is the story of your brand in which you tell how and why you started this brand or business. Like when I met Sonal, we were just friends helping each other in learning new aspects of marketing. There was no plan of starting DigiAvtar. But, one day Sonal approached me that we’re doing solely so much in this field why don’t we get together and give it a form of a Brand? I agreed and that’s how we started DigiAvtar.
Brand Founder’s Stories: – In this, you should include the stories of your founders how they get to know each other, and when and how they came to the decision of starting the particular Brand.
Brand Mission Story: – Brand Mission Story is to express your mission statement in the format of a story, and tell why your brand exists.
Brand Vision Story: – In the Brand Vision Story you paint compelling glimpses of the future of your company, brand, products, and services.
Brand Legacy Story: – In the Brand Legacy Story you tell people about what your brand has gone through.
Brand Value Story: – Value and Ethics are very important for you to establish yourself as a Brand. You should share what your stand for with your community.

Thus, there’re many stories you can deliver to your users on Brand Storytelling. You should be focussing on the following three elements the most while building a Brand’s Story:

Narrative: – It is the way how you tell stories, this is the term that represents elements of storytelling. A Story includes characters, plot, conflict, action, and end result (climax).
Why you started: The problem you’re trying to solve: – This is the second thing, you should include, always represents yourself as a problem solver, not on who just wants to sell their products.
Values: – This is the soul of a Brand, without values your Brand can’t last long. Values are the character traits of your community, these show the best behaviour of your company. Values define what your company is all about.

Have you got an overview of where you should be moving with Brand Storytelling, and how you should represent yourself? I hope you have a very good idea now about what should be needed to tell your brand’s story. So, start building a Brand Story of your Brand.

Let’s move a little bit further and discuss the customer Stories

Customer Stories

Testimonials of your users are the easiest way to introduce storytelling in your marketing campaigns. Through the testimonials, people tell about their journeys, how they started, and where they’ve reached.

As we’ve discussed already that storytelling is the way of telling stories about how your product solved your users’ problems, and what can be the best way of telling this rather than Testimonials.

People love to read testimonials because they want to see themselves in those places people are talking about. So, make reviews part of your landing pages, and products pages. It’ll help people in building a new belief system that this product can make their lives better. They can be any audio, videos, or text.

We can also take testimonials on prominent places just like Google My Business, Trust Pilot etc, and make them work as an element of external marketing.

So, ready to take reviews and include them in your marketing strategies?

The next one we’ll be reading is Products and services Stories.

Product and Services Stories

You can use some of your customers’ reviews here also in which they’re talking about how your services and products helped them in achieving what they were looking for.

But, if you don’t want to post those in your product stories, then you can make your own kinds of stuff about your products like most of the brands do. You’ve seen it in the television ads, they show a man achieving something with their products. Like most of the cold drink ads, people are trying hard to get a sip of the particular cold drink, how amazing is this? I hope you’re right now remembering all of these types of ads at once.

Making your own product or service stories doesn’t mean you should be lying and unethical. Make up the stories about the end result they’ll get by using your products and services. Think about what they want to hear from you, and make a story. While describing your products and services, your narrative should have a sense of what people expect in their own lives.

We’ve gone so far until now, and learned the different types of stories you may include, but can you include stories in your advertising copy? Definitely yes, you can include stories anywhere you want in your marketing materials

Ads Copy Stories

Ad copies are used for advertising your products and services on social media websites or elsewhere. After seeing the ad copy one decides whether they want to interact with our brand or not by clicking, filling up a form, or paying up for the services.

So, for the success of your advertising campaigns, it’s a must that you write a compelling ad copy. This ad copy will make sure that most of the users will interact with your brand.

Now, let’s discuss, what an ad copy should be like if you’re making storytelling a part of it.

Well, in simple words, if we want to conclude how an ad copy should like is, “show your target audience how the products or services can be useful in their real life.”

Don’t tell them, just show them, by telling them you would try to impose your belief on them, and that everyone hates.

So, show how useful your products or services can be in their daily life.

E.g. “Aurora feels bad whenever she goes to a party when she sees her shaped and slim friend. There was a time she was also like that. But, as the time passes nothing remains as it is, because of so many responsibilities she couldn’t give herself time. One day she saw an ad for Fitness & More, Gurgaon that showed how you can reduce your weight in just 30 days by doing a daily half an hour of exercise. She joined their program. And see, now whenever she goes into parties, everyone looks at her, how she’s shaped herself again.”

“Avani was so much stressed with the work of previous web developer has done for her, she is one of the people who didn’t get a chance to work with an expert. She was thinking that none can improve her website. One day she was scrolling Facebook randomly and noticed the sponsored post of DigiAvtar. She thought of giving them a try also, and after taking services from them. She felt so content. She is satisfied now and working on the marketing strategies for her business with Team DigiAvtar.”

Thus, we’ve shown you two different ad copies in which you can see how we’ve used the story to make people believe that this can be the best fit for them.

Make your own copy in your own words.

Educational Stories

Storytelling is an extremely effective way of learning and teaching new skills. With the help of educational stories, you can plant messages, ideas, thoughts and emotions into your listener’s mind.

Educational Stories can bring value to both your employees and your customers. So, when can include this strategy into our teaching material with the following types:

How to Story: – In this, you show how to complete a particular task.
Problem Solver Story: – Solve your users’ problems with the help of a story.
Training Story: – Employee training can be much more effective and interesting when you make storytelling a part of your Training Story. Inject stories in your training materials.
Ask the Expert Story: – You may interview some of the expert people in the same field you’re in and discuss with them the needs and challenges of your consumers. Then tell those stories.
Instructional Story: – You can use immersive instructional stories in your product or service material

You can use so many other types of stories in your educational material and teach your students and employees in an unforgettable way.

Seasonal Stories

With every season passed we change our hobbies, likes, and dislikes. Then why should we change our storytelling approach in marketing? We definitely should, and most marketers use this kind of storytelling in their brands.

As we all know whether it’s Yoga Day or Environment Day, there is a particular theme is being attached to that day to make it relevant to the season. And that’s where the seasonal stories come into existence. It’s the best way to make your content and marketing materials more relevant to your brands.

And relevancy is one of the most important factors in the branding strategies of your brand. Making content relevant makes your brand more relatable and recognizable among the users.

There’re many types so seasonal stories you may include in your stories are the following:

Seasons Story: – Tell stories about your products or services that are relatable to the particular season that’s going on.
Seasonal Event Story: – In this area, you can make up stories about your upcoming online and offline events.
Weather Story: – If you sell products and services according to the weather then showing a weather story would be the best fit.
Monthly, Weekly Stories: – You must’ve seen some brands using this strategy, whenever they want to run sales, they tell us like Black Friday Sale, this day sale or that day sale.

So, which one do you think is best suitable for you, find the one best suitable and start working on that type of story.

Next and last is community stories we’re going to discuss in this blog post

Community Stories

You are a human so you must know that a human is a social being. So, everybody wants to live in a community that cherishes success, happiness, education, and experiences.

People always want to be a part of the community that gives them something back. If you don’t know how to build a community for your business, then you can check out our blog by clicking here.

You should always focus on building community, even I’d say a community for your every product and service.

Community Stories can also be many types that are following:

Community Spotlight Story: – Tell what the strength of your community is and what the values of your community are.
Person of the Year Story: – Nominate a person who has done well in the last Financial Year, and Award him among the community to cherish his success and motivate other members of the community.
Employee Spotlight Story: – In this type of story you can spotlight an employee that exemplifies your community’s values. This way you can create a real character who represents your company’s mission, vision, and values in the best possible way.

Thus, you can picture different community stories and make the best use of them in your marketing materials.

Until now, we’ve been talking about different types of stories…take a deep breath!

Thanks for giving this much time to this blog post but I’m sure you are finding it the most valuable blogpost so far in storytelling, well, it’s going to be more interesting when we’ll discuss how to write stories? We’ve talked about everything rather than this part, so let’s talk about this also:

How to write stories?

Writing stories isn’t that easy task as you understand this, as it needs a lot of time to understand the concepts of storytelling and make it a part of your writing style.

But, if you’ll follow along with the methods we’ll be discussing further, then I’m sure you’ll be able to easily make up stories for your brand.

Create an Audience Journey Map

Creating an audience journey map help will help in understanding your customer better, and create a more compelling and efficient story to promote your brand. You can only create a suitable audience journey map when you know your customers completely. To understand your customers first, you’ll need to create a marketing persona for them. This user persona will help you in understanding your consumers’ current state and desired state (what can they expect from your products and services). Click here to know more about how to create a buyer persona.

Create a Visual Storyboard

Visuals look more appealing to the users, so I would recommend you always try to make a visual storyboard. Still, wondering what a storyboard is? Well, it is a graphics organizer that plans a narrative. Graphics can be an illustration, animation, images, short videos, or any type of interactive media that is like a visual. Visual Storyboard helps in keeping all these media in a sequence so that it can make some sense. In short, these are a set of sequential graphics to tell a story.

Well, we’ve understood everything now, what things we’ll need to create a story for our brand. Now let’s understand how many ways you can make up your stories.

The Pitching

I know you also use this word a lot, whenever we meet a new client we say we pitched him/ her this much. And my pitching was so perfect that she agreed with that.

Whenever we’re recommending someone a new action or solution this is the perfect fit. Pitching is also consisting several other short steps in it that’s the following

The Windup: – In this step, we tell a quick summary of the position of where our brand is.
The Hurdle: – This may be the problem your new client is facing right now, you can describe the client a little bit about it.
The Vision: – Vision is the part of this whole story writing technique in which we show a glimpse of a way over the problem.
The Options: – Always try to present two ways of achieving the same thing. This way you’ll certain that your client will become interested in what you’re saying. And he/ she will choose the inspiring one leaving the boring one behind.
The Close: – Here, we also make our users see why is the inspiring one option is the option by which he/ she can achieve what they want to achieve in their life. This is to warm up our audience.
The Fine Print: – Now as we all know that our audiences are excited, here we will cover how we will make it happen. This is the stage where they get to know how our products and services will help them in achieving their desired results.
The Hook: – Never leave your audience without telling them about the added benefits. Everyone desires to get something for free, and this is the stage we show our users the added benefits of our products and services.

The Drama

You also like drama, I like so many and am a big fan of movies. Why do you like them so much? Dramas are based on some hero’s journey and we can easily connect with that hero’s journey, we feel in the place of the hero, and it gives our brain comfort and happiness. Don’t you feel this way?

Dramas are used to inspire a new belief, they show us a unique way to see the world. Let’s know how they build a story in the drama.

Let’s assume you’re a hero, and everything is working well in your life, but one day out of nowhere some problem enters your life and all of your happiness vanishes in a moment of time. What to do now, you try harder and harder but nothing works, and then you reach a situation where there is no hope. You’re completely hopeless.

This is the point they show us, that out of nowhere the hero sees a way out. Then with the abilities, we thought we never had we fight back for success. And we see that hero not just only removes obstacles of his life but enters into a whole of infinite possibilities.

Thus, drama tries to create a belief that whenever we fight back we always get a way out of the problems, and enters into the world of infinite possibilities.

This is the way of cooking up the stories dramatically. Get ready to cook one up for you.

Start thinking about how you’ll show your brand’s story to the community?

Situation-Complication-Resolution

This is the simplest form of storytelling used in consultation or B2B sales. We use “but” and “therefore” to link this three-act structure. This is a three-step storytelling technique in which we talk about our current unbiased situation, then we talk about the complication our brand can face in the near future, and in the resolution step we talk about overcoming the problems and providing solutions.

The situation is the view of current conditions that should be totally unbiased. This describes how your brand or business is doing right now.
The complication is the third stage where challenges lie. Here we talk about the problems that our brand can face in the near future.
The Resolution is the third step of this storytelling technique. In this stage, we talk about the proposed product, service or solution that can face the complications. Always show some proof of how your service or product can help people to overcome their challenges, this will add credibility to your brand.

Situation-Opportunity-Resolution

This is the same as the previous storytelling model in which complication is being replaced by an opportunity. An opportunity is the hopeful path alternative path that leads the story in a hopeful manner.

Hook-Meat-Payoff

This is the last technique of writing stories we’re going to discuss in this blog post. In this you take the help of a hook to engage with your audience, then you show the meat of the story, and then at last with the help of payoff you end it with an effective conclusion taking back your audience to the introduction. This story structure is being used by one of the good companies of the world fassforward.

So, this is how it works, it’s basically like you’re meeting with someone and spending time, but doing the things in an orderly manner.

A hook can be anything that creates sense in people’s minds of what is coming next, it can be any question, statement or personal story). This is how you start engaging with your question by telling your story to them. This is like an introduction phase to everyone.

Meat is the next step that is completely organized, it can be any list or timeline. People get to know in this step where they are standing right now, and where they can go with the help of the services or products a brand is providing.

The payoff is the phase in which we make our audiences remember that if they want to achieve the things we discussed in the second phase then they need to do an action, right now.

So here this strategy ends, and you can again go with the first step.

I hope you have comprehended everything properly, and we’ve tried to cover everything so far relating to storytelling and its different aspects with it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I believe that you know what storytelling is, what the importance of storytelling in marketing is, why storytelling in marketing works, what is storytelling in business, what is storytelling in digital marketing, Types of stories in the marketing of a brand, how to write stories in marketing?

You say you’ve learnt so much even with a single blog post and in a funnel-like way, now it’s time to implement the knowledge you’ve got.

What story you’re going to spread around the world? The important thing is to show the people how your products and services made their life better.

Storytelling is an art with a process. You just focus on telling a story in the world, no matter what you’re telling and how you’re telling it, the thing that matters is what you’re telling. You can start with one aspect of your marketing strategy, then increase the region of the storytelling in your marketing materials as it suits you. Do it, analyse, and then improve. It requires practice to master storytelling. Start with one, then next, and so on…

Every brand has a story, you tell what is yours! As many brands as many stories…

If you get stuck somewhere, and any question arises in your brain, we’re always here to help you, you can always comment in the comment section.

See you in the next blog post 🙂

Storytelling Marketing: Tell the Story of Your Brand | Get Ready to Learn 5 Easy Ways of Writing Stories in Marketing