Digital Storytelling Explained & How It Works In Marketing Your Business
Buzzwords have been around for over 60 years and according to the Buzzword entry in Wikipedia, businesses would fail to operate these days without them. So let’s introduce you to a recent buzzword in the digital marketing space – ‘Digital Storytelling’. The title pretty much says it all – digital says it’s medium is ‘online’ and storytelling says you’re going to learn something via a tale or narrative that is highly engaging. As a marketer it’s important you know as much as you can about digital storytelling, how other marketers are using it and how you can too especially in content marketing which requires fresh ideas, and leave a memory.
Storytelling is centuries old and predates writing. Wikipedia’s definition of Storytelling is:
Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, often with improvisation, theatrics, or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and instilling moral values.
Although telling a tale to get a point across especially in business is not readily used it’s an art that being resurrected by marketers and really there’s nothing better than a great story to engage an audience all the while partaking wisdom and of course workable knowledge about a topic you wish to share.
Now apply the ‘digital’ to ‘storytelling’ and you’re engaging users via online mediums and Apps including: text, video, images, chat, games and well as in content copy with hypertext (in articles, blog posts etc). Digital Storytelling can be a short campaign e.g. a 60 second video or a series of content releases in different formats but in essence the longer campaigns are much like a TV soap opera which as we know can go on for years.
How to create great content for your marketing
Marketers are not necessarily the go-to people to create your content articles. A marketer’s focus is on the call-to-action and measuring the success of clicks. However audiences today are wise to that strategy and they are no exiting webpages or blogs in record time. The same can be said of your salespeople. They too are probably not best writers, (think: storytelling). Sales people are in a hurry and a story takes time to tell and it’s meaning is hidden which doesn’t suit the usual hard sell message your product or service professionals want to inject in the content. So is there anyone in your business who can write your content for marketing? Probably not. Your product and delivery experts will fall into the trap of spilling out boring corporate or product jargon that just alienates the reader. So as a business we recommend thinking outside of the box that means going outside of your company to get the content your marketing craves. Hire professional copywriters and if that is a step too far – read this article on how to write articles for marketing your business.
In summary digital storytelling is the way forward for content marketers and digital marketing full stop. The in your face style of landing pages, call to actions etc is long gone and now marketing is a lot more sophisticated and requires more finesse.
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