To do well in the business landscape, it is crucial for marketers to focus on how to connect with their customer base. Marketers need to look for things that can help them connect well with their customers. And one such area they cannot ignore is social media.
Marketers need to know that social media marketing plays a significant role in helping them connect with their customers. Social media marketing not just helps you in branding, but it can also provide a thrust to your SEO efforts.
Social media has opened up a plethora of opportunities to connect with customers. There are many options to captivate your target audience. And one of the best ways to connect with your audience on social media is storytelling.
Storytelling has been around for ages. Storytelling is a powerful way that can help people take note of your brand. But to get the desired results, brands need to do it the right way.
Let us take you through what is good storytelling, how you should connect by telling your stories, and why it is important to find out what your customers are saying.
What is good storytelling?
Good stories can connect people like a magnet. Authors become popular because they have a knack for storytelling.
However, everyone does not become a bestselling author. It is crucial to know how to narrate a story, especially when you are doing it for branding purposes.
So, what is good storytelling?
A story is a good story if it can connect well with your audience.
The process of presenting facts and narratives through improvisation, theatrics, or embellishment to communicate and convey a specific message to an audience is known as storytelling.
Storytelling cannot happen without a story or narrative. It is a two-way communication process between the storyteller and one or more listeners that captures the listener’s active imagination. Storytelling can happen in different situations, and it may reflect different cultures.
But what is storytelling in the context of social media?
People these days are successfully using social media platforms to tell their or their brand’s story to their audience. For example, when a successful marketer shares his success story on Instagram or Facebook, it is a form of storytelling. Or, when a baker shares his or her recipe in a vlog on YouTube, it is a form of storytelling.
When you use social media platforms to share your brand’s, product’s, or company’s story to captivate your audience, it is known as social media storytelling.
If you think social media storytelling is another way of selling your product or services, you are wrong. Social media storytelling is capable of delivering your messages to your audience. You can tell your audience what your brand or company stands for.
As you might be aware, each story will have specific characteristics like a beginning, middle, and end. Also, each story tends to convey a special message, which could be a moral lesson, a noble thought, or a strong belief about something that you can relate to easily. And, social media storytelling is not any different either.
When you are doing social media storytelling, make sure it is not aimed only to sell something. If it is a story only to sell, it is not going to work because people are smart to differentiate between a story and a promotional message.
One of the best examples of successful storytelling in today’s times is Google’s #StayHomeSaveLives campaign. This is a popular hashtag these days on the current pandemic situation. Google has effectively woven the narrative to show how people across the globe are trying to help healthcare workers. It inspires others to stay home and follow social distancing to check the spread of Coronavirus.
Connect by telling your stories
Storytelling is a nice way of connecting with your customer base. The reason why it is effective is this – it establishes an emotional connection with your audience. The emotional angle is what makes storytelling so effective.
If you can connect by telling your stories, you can easily win over your customers and prospects.
When done in the right manner, effective storytelling can tackle your audience both emotionally as well as rationally. For branding professionals, storytelling serves three main objectives of an organisation – it adds value, creates identity, and generates trust in its audiences. When you do it as a branding exercise, you need to convey your company’s essence – what you stand for, how you think, and how you act and react in a given situation. After all, your reputation in the market depends on all these things. That is why branding and storytelling go hand in hand.
If you know how to write a good story, it can spread knowledge, stimulate thinking, and create engagement with your audience. A story can convey your organisation’s products, services, culture, and objectives.
Find out what your customers are saying
Emotional marketing is a new buzzword. Consumers these days want to know a brand on a personal level. They are looking for an emotional connection with brands they can trust and rely on. The connection here is known as emotional branding, which can make your customers loyal to your brand.
And storytelling is one such method that can help you to connect with your audience at an emotional level.
But if you want your storytelling to be effective, you need to find out what your customers are saying.
It is vital to know what your customers want and what bothers them. You can use social listening tools to find out what issues are important for them at any given point in time. It is important to gauge their emotions and sentiments. When you know what your audience feels about your brand, industry, and your competitors, it can help you fine-tune your marketing campaigns. For example, when Dove’s customers’ relationships soured due to some goof ups, they launched a social listening campaign Project #ShowUS to listen to what their consumers had to say. They launched their campaign with a full-page ad in The New York Times owning up to its mistake and openly seeking their consumer’s input.
It is vital to connect with your audience directly. Make sure you have direct communication with your audience. People like to give suggestions, and when you explicitly seek their opinion, they feel valued. Ask your customers what they want and how you can solve their problems. You can use social media (launch a survey) to get your consumer’s feedback and assess the data to streamline your operations.
You also need to listen to what your frontline employees have to say. Your frontline employees interact directly with your audience, so it is crucial to take their feedback. Listen to what your customer service employees have to say about the pain points of your audience. Try to overcome the problems to keep your customers satisfied.
After all, it is important to listen to your audience and deliver what they want. It is crucial to have an active social media presence these days because most of your customers are active there.
If you are looking for a social media marketing services company to take charge of your social media campaigns, you can contact vStacks Infotech now. We are a digital marketing company specialising in social media marketing. From social media posts to surveys and storytelling, we can help move your social media activity in the right direction.
