Storytelling is an essential
“We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others”
– Forrester Research, Inc., Storytelling And Data Visualization Will Turbocharge Insights-Driven Action
What should the end goal be when using storytelling in social media marketing? It is not enough to just tell stories and have some nice engagement and clicks. We must define a business critical target audience. This is when appealing storytelling becomes effective storytelling…
- Create consistent, authentic and effective stories that activate the target audience.
People recall a good story even after many years
I first saw this tweet many years ago and kept it ever since. To me it summarizes why stories are so effective. We need to use them wisely in our content strategy.
“Storytelling is an important tool for gaining perspective about real-world customer experience – not just use cases. When organizations are in tune with customers’ needs, they can meet those needs more effectively”
– SiriusDecisions, Inc.
Storytelling Minimum requirements
I have created story-lines for over a decade for social media projects. This is what I consider to be the minimum requirements of a story-line;
- Story-line title
- Story-line description
- Target audience description
- Social media platform to post on
- Preferred format (Video, text, memes, pictures, infographics, animations, mix etc.)
- Most effective posting times and posting frequency
- Key performance indicator (KPI) measurement (e.g., tracking code generator)
3 easy steps for better storytelling content
- Understand your target audience needs.
- Translate them into need-focused content and resist product-based messages.
- Create a thematic messaging story that follows the target audience journey through the entire buying cycle.
Understanding the audience’s needs, aspirations, and challenges enables us to plan an effective content strategy. However, note the things to avoid when creating storytelling content.
Understand your target audience needs.
Social media marketers are storytellers, and B2B targets or B2C consumers are the audience. The ability to tell a story that the target audience listen to might be your most effective tool as a marketer. I use desk research and particularly social media listening to discover target audience insights. Once I discover those insights, I can develop more relevant and topical stories.
Here is one of the many social media analysis tools I use from Sprinklr. It deep dives into the most used action words based on a particular topic. I click on each result to see the issues or activities the target audiences is doing as an anonymous group. Vital clues to create content that will resonate.
When I look for Storytelling insights I regularly use the culture trend diagram. I apply it to the dedicated Sprinklr social listening dashboard that I made for a particular topic.
When I click on each node I can deep dive into the culture of the social media posts by influencers, hashtag, sentiment, location, and emotion and much more options. This gives me even more clues to make my storytelling relevant and possible chapters for my stories.
Translate target audience insights into need-focused content and resist product-based messaging.
When I start to write story-line content I always start by looking again at the business and marketing objectives. How do they actually translate into social media objectives?
I start looking at the data and insights collected and the draft messaging and try to see what mood or emotional direction or theme that may be appropriate for the story-line. For this I often turn to Buzzfeed’s Cultural cartography diagram for guidance.
“.. What’s missing is the bridge from the data to the emotional engagement that actually drives decisions. We drive that emotion through storytelling“
– Forrester Research, Inc., Storytelling And Data Visualization Will Turbocharge Insights-Driven Action
Create a thematic messaging story that follows the target audience journey throughout the entire buying cycle.
For this I use the classic storytelling flow diagram.
Create more storytelling chapters as the timeline progresses throughout the entire buying cycle.
It is important to note that you can have several story-lines running at the same time. Therefore adjust each story-line to respect that another one is featuring key events or activities and needs more of the timeline.
Manage Storytelling during deployment
It is not all over when the story-line goes live. Your attention is still needed:
- Track all paid promotion.
- Manage all comments, and replies; checking that the responding people are in the target audience definition.
- Manage the KPI and metric dashboards; being prepared to change course if needed.
Have you used storytelling in your content marketing to achieve your social media marketing objectives? If yes, give a short summary in the comments. If no, well, now is the time to start!
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