At Quaintise, your Los Angeles healthcare marketing agency of choice, storytelling takes the cake. Telling a powerful story is what drives us, what motivates us to create successful campaigns for our physicians and specialists. Without a commanding, relevant story, your brand has nothing substantial that the audience can grab onto, connect with, and remember. What would Susan G. Komen be without the amazing storytelling behind the 3-Day, or the Race for the Cure? What would Allstate be without their main character Mayhem?
Forbes.com recently published an interesting article on the ‘5 Secrets to Using Storytelling for Brand Marketing Success.’ Let’s take a look at what they had to say, and compare their ‘secrets’ with Quaintise proven strategies.
1. Speak Truthfully – Honesty and Transparency are important in brand storytelling…even brand stories must adhere to the three primary steps of brand-building: consistency, persistence and restraint.
At Quaintise, we couldn’t agree more. If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a million times, transparency and honesty, integrity and remaining genuine to your audience will always supersede everything else. Your audience is intelligent, and they will see through any falsehood. Remaining true to your audience is key, and will help your brand to cultivate lasting relationships and credibility with that audience.
2. Infust Personalities into Stories – Brand stories are not marketing materials…brand stories should be told with the brand persona and the writer’s personality at center stage.
Connecting with your audience invites a certain amount of individuality and character in order to separate you from the competition. Template ads and prefabricated marketing campaigns might get the job done, but they will not hold that lasting affect that true storytelling can.
3. Create Characters Your Audience Will Root For – Tell stories from your employees’ points of view or from a third-person point of view. The important thing is to create characters that enable your audience to become emotionally connected to them to such an extent that the audience wants to follow their character arcs.
Your character doesn’t have to be a person or celebrity; it can be the brand itself. When utilizing social media, thing from your audience’s point of view. What are they interested in? How can you use this information to connect with them on a deeper level?
4. Include a beginning, middle, and end – If they enjoy the ride, they’ll stick around, tell other people about it, and come back again and again.
For example, for our client Arizona OB GYN Affiliates, we created a Miracle campaign, featuring patients, their problems, and their journey to solution – or their miracle. It was honest, straight forward, and had a simple beginning, middle and end.
5. Don’t give it all away – Perpetual marketing tactics offer the perfect opportunity to include offline and mobile marketing in your brand storytelling initiative, too.
As with any marketing or advertising effort, you want a strong call to action but you also want some intrigue. Always leave your audience wanting more!
Storytelling and brand marketing are like peanut butter and jelly, and the professionals at Quaintise are experts at integrating not only these aspects of your campaign but many others. Give us a call today for more information!