We have time and again emphasised on how important data is to marketing today. In a generation that only responds to context and personalized messages, it is important for businesses to know what they are looking for or expect, before creating a reach-out strategy.
With the rise of the need to remain contextual and ditch the sales pitch, storytelling is a marketing tactic that is being adopted by marketers across all industries. But mostly, all in vain.
We’re not saying that the story of your brand isn’t compelling. We’re just saying that the story of your brand is not relatable to your target audience. And the only way to create one that resonates with them, is to dig deeper into an asset you have been dreading – data.
Today, companies like Wigzo empower marketers with powerful tools driven by machine learning. They offer marketers all the insightful data that they need to create omni channel personalized campaigns for their business.
The importance of data in storytelling
We all know how important data is for running marketing campaigns and optimizing our budgets, but here’s taking a look at why it plays an important role in effective digital storytelling as well:
1. Helps create better experiences
Storytelling is used to create an everlasting experience for the customer. Stories go beyond the facts, figures or figures that are associated with your business sales and focuses on capturing the heart of the target market. Data helps you understand what your audience really cares about, the values and causes they stand for, and the common pain points they face. This in turn, helps you create a better customer experience through your story that addresses exactly those.
2. Helps you convey your brand message better
There are at least ten more businesses out there in the market that are offering similar products and services as your business to the ‘same’ target audience. The one who is able to acquire this audience is the one who is able to convey his brand message in a better or unique way. Align your brand’s origin story with audience data and competitive intelligence to create something so compelling that the consumers consider you the most trustworthy in the market.
3. Helps you establish better bonds with your customers
Stories help you connect with people. But you connect with people only when you know who they are. Continuing on the first point, data helps you segment your target audience effectively. This helps you create custom journeys for each of the segments, established better and stronger bonds on the way. Customers acquired by this tactic are also known to have a longer retention rate than the others.
4. Helps share insightful information with a meaning
The hyper informed generation of today wants to know everything. Unless they are absolutely sure about a business, they don’t engage or interact with it. As a matter of fact, an average online consumer is 62% through the customer cycle before he interacts with the business. He conducts research on the credibility of the brand and what its existing customers are saying about it. Data helps you understand what information they are looking for, and where. This helps you present them that information in the form of a consumable story, making you their go-to source of knowledge.
5. Helps you keep customers motivated
A compelling story is known to stimulate an action or a reaction. For a business, they act as the customer’s guide to a conversion. Stories give you the opportunity to keep your customers motivated enough to talk about your brand in their circles, boosting the brand awareness via word-of-mouth. A great example of storytelling being that of Apple – the customers are so consumed by the products that they rave of the same in their circles, creating media for the company. Now data here, helps you understand what this underlying motivation could be – an offer on a product, a loyalty program, a simple social media acknowledgement, etc. It also gives you a sneak peek into your competitor’s retention strategies.
6. Helps you create a shareable story
Adding up all the points together, data actually helps you create a story that is not just relatable, but also more likely to be shared. The more your audience relates to the story, the more they interact with it and share it in their circles – which are mostly likely to have a lookalike audience that your brand can reach out to without separate campaigns. For instance, if you consider a Disney story, you would realise how the word-of-mouth and social shares do half the promotion magic for them!
7. Helps you scoot the ad resistors
With only 20% of the consumer market trusting advertisements on social media or offline media, marketers often face a challenge in acquiring customers via broadcast messages. This is where stories come in. They help you scoot around the ad blockers that most of us now have installed on our devices. We don’t like hearing the sales pitches and definitely don’t like being bombarded with interrupting advertisements. But when we’re being told a story that has brought about an impact that concerns us, we are more than likely to give it even minutes of our time.
Over to you
Storytelling is your chance to hook the target audience onto your brand for good. While your story could be compelling, there could be nothing that peaks their interest as much as what they value. Data gives you the opportunity to dig deeper into those values and re-align your story for high converting results.
Wigzo helps you track and analyze your audience behaviour across multiple devices closely, enabling marketers to create effective global profiles. This in turn helps marketers understand what these customers want to hear and when, giving storytelling the competitive edge of perfect timing. It also helps you predict their future behaviour, so as to optimize your stories beforehand!
