To build a successful eCommerce brand that people will love, you need to make them feel a connection with it. Today, when new brands are popping up every week and great products are going viral on social media every day, your eCommerce company will struggle to survive if you don\u2019t build that connection.<\/p>\n
By failing to create a meaningful connection with the target audience, a brand makes it difficult for people to fall in love with it and ultimately, convert into loyal customers. So avoiding storytelling is a risky strategy because up to 92 per cent of customers want brands to make their marketing materials feel like a story, according to the Digital Marketing Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n Since social media is extremely popular, connecting with customers and sharing stories via this channel makes perfect sense. But with thousands of posts created by users and brands every day (for example, Facebook generates 4 petabytes<\/a> \u2013 that\u2019s 4,000 terabytes \u2013 of data each day), you can\u2019t simply broadcast an advertisement, because it won\u2019t capture people\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n To avoid getting your content lost in a sea of posts and drive action from your target audience, you need emotional content. And this is where storytelling comes in.<\/p>\n Storytelling for branding is a marketing communication strategy that involves using original, emotional stories by a company to encourage customer loyalty and increase followership.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how eCommerce marketers use this strategy to leverage emotion and draw connections between brands and customers.<\/p>\n Continue asking questions like these until you have a perfect vision of your ideal customer in mind. When you do, the answers will help to define how your brand\u2019s solution can be a great one for simplifying the lives of your customers or helping them solve a problem.<\/p>\n This information will also guide the creation of the brand story. Whatever story you choose to share, it must have a human element that your customers can easily identify with.<\/li>\n According to them, a good story has three parts:<\/p>\n To get help with outlining your story, organizing content, and scriptwriting, feel free to use online tools such as Workflowy<\/a>, Proessaywriting<\/a>, and WriterDuet<\/a>.<\/li>\n Dove is without a doubt a great example of a brand that creates likeable, down-to-earth content that illustrates everyday problems of being an average person (think the \u201cReal Beauty\u201d campaign<\/a> that won numerous awards).<\/p>\n That campaign succeeded because it had stories and characters your target audience can emotionally connect to, so you should also consider using characters that represent your ideal customers.<\/li>\n To make sure that your plot meets these requirements as well as grammar and style recommendations, feel free to use online tools such as Hemingway Editor<\/a>, A-Writer<\/a>, and Grammarly<\/a>.<\/li>\n One of the best examples of honest storytelling is a video that Adidas made with a well-known soccer player Lionel Messi where he talks about a problem with growth hormones that he had while growing up.\n
\nBefore including storytelling content in your social media branding strategy, you need to prepare by learning what kind of stories your target audiences would appreciate. To achieve that, you need to research them and get as many details as you possibly can.<\/p>\n\n
\n<\/strong><\/strong>In order for your story to attract the attention of your target audience and help you build meaningful connections with them, you must get the fundamentals right.<\/p>\n\n
\nOne of the best ways to evoke the emotions you want from your customers is to create likeable, everyday characters and have them face problems that the target customers face on a daily basis.<\/p>\n
\nWriting a plot for your brand storytelling content is critical because the art of telling stories is all about having a well thought-out plot. Here are the most important things to keep in mind when writing a plot:<\/p>\n\n
\nPeople hate being sold to, so your campaign is likely to fail if it doesn\u2019t feature honest and accurate values. To maximize the chance of success, you need authentic content with minimal production that may not be perfect but realistically portrays the mission your brand is after.<\/p>\n