As a professional services marketer, you tirelessly seek new ways to engage your audiences. It can get discouraging to perform traditional marketing methods, and I'd like to know if you are making a connection. You attend professional seminars and lectures that cover important points to consider. However, you can't find the right ingredient to bridge the gap from concept to an emotional connection with your audience.
Along with many other marketing professionals, you've known your firm's story for a long time. The story is part of the firm's cultural heritage, and it explains why the firm exists. In many ways, your firm's story engages and connects with people on an emotional level. This post aims to help you tap into the storytelling magic with digital marketing methods.
Working with My Story, Inc., Rudolph and Sletten captures their project story about Green Music Center.
Digital storytelling is a method for leveraging your firm's brand by weaving an intricate series of experiences via blog posts, social media channels, and presentations that include narratives, anecdotes, images, and video. Peppering your story with visual moments of encouragement and inspiration for your audiences will make a connection. Demonstrating your passion, humor, and style will have audiences asking for more! These elements create your desired connection and promote engagement with people who can best identify with your firm.
Some valuable points to first consider when conceptualizing your story include:
- Understand your audience's interests.
- Understand where your thought leaders (characters) excel. Understand their comfort zone and challenge them to get outside the box through conversation.
- Could you develop the final theme before you fill in the story?
- When your story is stuck, you can think about what will NOT happen next.
- Could you offer a compelling reason why you are telling this story? What is the defining belief you hold that fuels this story – tell it from the heart.
- Refrain from perfecting the story; plenty of stories exist.
Digital Storytelling Tools and Visual Content Statistics to Consider
If you are sitting on the fence, the following information and statistics will convince you to take the leap, get the creative juices flowing, and the camera rolling!
Blogging:
A blog is a powerful tool that offers creative ways to tell your story. Here are three examples of how to make an emotional connection with a blog post:
- A post can tell a story about how you solved a client's challenges that incorporate images or video.
- A post is a way to bridge a connection between your firm's leadership and audiences. Incorporating images and videos that portray the human side of your firm's employees will prompt your audiences to say, "It would be great to work with that firm!"
- A post is also a great way to stay connected with your existing clients by sharing your firm's experiences and offering new ideas about you can work together in the future.
Social Media Channels:
The following points are important social media statistics to consider about storytelling and visual content.
- A recent HubSpot study of 1,500 B2B and B2C company Facebook Pages determined that photo posts generate 53% more likes and 104% more comments than average posts. In addition, photo posts receive 84% more link clicks than plain text status updates or links with thumbnail pics.
- Pinterest generated more business referral traffic than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. (Source: Shareaholic)
- Photos and video posts on Pinterest refer to more traffic than on Twitter, StumbleUpon, Linkedin, and Google+. (Source: Simple Measured)
- Knowing they needed more visual content, Twitter launched an integrated mobile video app called Vine. They intend to provide brief clips to compliment their micro posts' brevity. If you'd like to learn more about how marketers use Vine, read this article from Mashable.
Presentations:
The recent post, A Content Marketing Approach to Designing Presentations That Amaze discussed the importance of developing a presentation that weaves a story and enchants audiences. A presentation is another tool for providing visual content that builds excitement, heightens interest, and amazes audiences with a visual platform and message.
Pictures:
Great images tell a story. Your content marketing and storytelling experience's success depends on visual stimulus. Investing the time and effort to capture a moment with a picture that gives audiences a glimpse into your firm's day-to-day practices will build your firm's visual brand. Pictures can also provide a historical record of your firm's path to success. Collaborate with your firm's creative minds to come up with images that are fun and compelling.
Video:
The following points are some important video statistics to consider:
- Viewers spend 100% more time on pages with videos on them. (Source: Marketing Sherpa)
- Posts with videos attract 3threetimes more inbound links than plain text posts. (Source: SEOmoz)
- 85% of the US internet audience watches videos online. The 25-34 age group watches the most online videos, and adult males spend 40% more time watching videos online than females. (Sources: comScore and Nielsen)
- Over 60 hours of videos are uploaded each minute on YouTube.com (Source: YouTube)
- Mobile video subscription is expected to hit $16 billion in revenue by 2014, with over 500 million subscribers. (Source: Ooyala)
- Viewers are 85% more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video. (Internet Retailer)
With that, I will leave you with a final note. When you communicate simple truths with digital storytelling, you will capture the magic that reaches your readers' hearts and nourishes their souls.
For further reading, check out Professional Services Content Marketing: Let Video Tell Your Story.
