5 reasons why your business should prioritise storytelling in marketing campaign

Such things always happen around us. Last year, my friend posted a short video of her grandparents for fun. In the two-minute video, her grandpa tied a balloon to her grandma's wrist as a daily gift. Both of them laughed like kids. This short video went viral overnight on Tik Tok. She was "freaked out" when she gained thousands of likes and comments. 

Compared to plain words and sentences, videos and pictures may speak louder for your business because they include relatable stories that can easily touch and resonate with the audience. Thus, making the customer experience visual and shareable is pivotal. It can help the audience to think about your services and trust your brand.

1. Storytelling humanises your brand

Since humans would like to trust humans instead of robots, you should sometimes refrain from making your posts seem too authorised. A good tip for humanising your brand is to think from your customer's angle. In other words, you can speak their language to tell your brand story. As a result, storytelling optimises your brand messaging, making your brand mission and vision clear and understandable. It also makes your brand approachable. 

2. Storytelling creates an emotional connection with your audience

My grandma told me stories before I went to bed when I was young. As a kid, I instinctively tried to feel every story detail and resonate with a particular character. It was this feeling that pushed me to want to hear more. Likewise, if you tell a story that makes your audience resonate with you, you will gain loyalty from your customers based on this emotional connection.

90% of the time, people make unconscious purchasing decisions. Taking celebrity endorsements as an example, the celebrity effect is powerful because we want to be like successful and prestigious people. We want to make purchasing decisions like them to enhance our social figure. It proves that people make purchases based on their feelings or emotions. Therefore, your business will make significant profits once you build an emotional connection with your audience.

3. Storytelling helps you to understand your customers

Storytelling is a powerful method of learning. It has hugely satisfied our original curiosity about this world, about something we don't entirely know. Meanwhile, we should always be eager to learn more about our world, the brands we present, and the consumers we serve. Based on learning and observations, we can share first-hand experiences through stories. This process will enable you to understand your customers, figure out problems, and analyse your business status in the marketplace.

4. Stories set up goals and drive actions

In storytelling, there's a moral that selling your product is not the most important thing you're selling. However, you should never forget that customer experience is more crucial than products. Stories give your customers a purpose and show them the imaginable process of realising it. As a result, storytelling will stimulate customers' appetites and drive them to purchase. For instance, storytelling ads work well in the charity fundraising campaign; audiences are more likely to make donations when they see or understand how the money would help the lives of others. An excellent ending to a story can even trigger audience action. 

5. Storytelling improves the engagement of your campaigns

Remember to tell stories on social media to enhance audience engagement. In the digital age, connecting with loved ones becomes people's greatest need. So the Super Bowl spot from Google used a real-life story to create one of the most emotionally resonant ads of all time. This story is heartbreaking, about an older man trying to reminisce about his wife, Loretta, with a Google chatbot. Google's aim in this ad was to show that the company's product can penetrate and help people's daily life. 

By February 2020, the ad "Lorretta" had gained nearly 12 million views on YouTube, with some people commenting that they cried while watching it. Additionally, the older man has a personal connection with the company as he was a former employee of Google. Therefore, this story is also an emotional aspect of Google itself. The company has wisely engaged with customers and conveyed their concerns about protecting user privacy through the story.

In general, storytelling enables your business to speak as a human, send unique messages to your audience, and establish long-term customer connections. Therefore, telling stories in your marketing campaign is essential.