Storytelling Is Key to Increasing Sales
By Steve Schachter, SVP Business Development & Distribution
Consumers encounter dozens of advertisements daily, making it hard for brands to make their message stand out. Your company is constantly competing with other advertisers to get consumers to engage with your content.
This is why it’s more important than ever for you to tap into the power of storytelling and create memorable ads that grab your consumers’ interest. Long-form media is one of the best ways to put this technique to use, as it gives your brand enough time to tell a complete story, elicit emotion, and foster brand recognition.
What is Storytelling and How Is It Used In Advertising?
Simply put, storytelling in marketing is when your brand uses a narrative to communicate a message. Instead of merely presenting facts and data, storytelling aims to tap into consumers’ emotions — to make them feel something and take action.
Why is storytelling so compelling? According to Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman, people make 95% of purchase decisions based on subconscious factors instead of logical analysis. According to Zaltman’s consumer research, feelings drive people’s brand affinities and influence what they buy. Since storytelling aims to evoke emotion, you can use stories in advertising to generate positive feelings about your brands and products.
Great stories can influence your customer’s behavior, build relationships and improve your brand’s perceived value. Brand storytelling can also turn casual customers into loyal fans by creating a personal, emotional connection with the customer. As a result, your brand benefits from increased sales, customer loyalty, and higher returns on your marketing investment.
How Long-Form Media Lets Brands Tell a Compelling Story
Every brand has a story to tell. It may be the story of how your founder grew from humble beginnings to lead a successful enterprise or how they innovated to solve a problem they saw in the marketplace. Your brand can also let customers tell their stories about how your products have shaped their lives. With the appropriate data and analytics, your brand can uncover these treasured pieces of information and transform them into advertising content.
Long-form media provides an excellent opportunity for brand storytelling. There is enough time to highlight key branding messages, clearly portray the features and benefits of products, highlight key selling benefits against competitors, overcome common objections, present offers and entice emotion in the viewer.
Here are some of the best ways your brand can utilize long-form storytelling:
⦁ Product demos – Demos showcase your products and convey the benefits in detail. Your customer can see themselves using the product and understand how it fits into their lifestyle.
⦁ Problem-solving – This approach allows viewers to visualize their problem and see your product(s) as a viable solution. This effective technique of illustrating a problem can connect emotionally with your potential customers’ negative feelings – they can quickly and easily relate to the problem. It then gives real-world examples of how your product or service can benefit your customers, transforming the negative emotion into a positive one, all associated with acquiring your product.
⦁ Testimonials – Real customers telling their stories is one of the most powerful ways to prove that your product lives up to the hype.
⦁ Interviews – Interviews with your company founder or product expert can provide great insight into your brand. Through interviews, you can tell the story of how you started, describe the origins of your product idea, highlight your culture or share other details that make your brand relevant to your consumers.
Drive Sales Through Storytelling
Competition for consumers’ attention is fierce, but your brand can break through and capture it with storytelling. When it comes to long-form, we’re experts. Reach out today to find out how Cannella Media can help you incorporate compelling stories that create authentic relationships with your customers while driving engagement and enhancing sales.
