So this piece, published on the Razorfish Australia blog last week, which considers the application of storytelling in the online space, surprised me (even though it was written by a staff member who's on a graduate program with the company). This, in particular:
"I suppose this means furthering a campaign or brand story at each consumer touch-point. Which leads to one of the main takeaways from Tim’s talk: story is the new branding."
Woah. This is news? If you're not furthering the brand story every time you communicate with your audience, then what are you doing? (Also, if you think you're not furthering the brand story every time you communicate with your audience, then your audience has news for you. Story isn't new to them. Stories are how humans make sense of their experiences.)
In an interview I did last year, Seth Godin said, "In a world where there’s not a lot of scarcity of ideas ... ubiquity is a better strategy [than exclusivity]."
If you're going to be ubiquitous, you need a coherent storyline, otherwise you're just talking. A few tools that can help with online storytelling:
- a brand persona
- brand vocabulary/language
- audience profiles/personas
- a creative strategy
- content and community strategies
- an engaging, compelling social media presence
- an interactive* blog or other rich public content presence
- out-of-brand-context appearances (e.g. community or event sponsorship)
- creative collaborative alliances (e.g. coauthor an article/cocreate a video with an authority or character your audience loves/respects)
- informational/entertaining subscription products (e.g. email, video, webinar, or other content series)
The problem with this list, from a digital-agency-account-management viewpoint, is that none of these items mentions sales. None of them is sales-campaign-focused.
They can be, but, better than that, these tools create a conversation or context for selling. They can be used to create a storyline in which sales are an inevitable feature—along with loyalty, advocacy, and so on.
They can be, but, better than that, these tools create a conversation or context for selling. They can be used to create a storyline in which sales are an inevitable feature—along with loyalty, advocacy, and so on.
The question is how agencies sell that argument to sales-focused, besuited clients who don't really believe in social media, let alone things like content marketing, and have no idea how their target customers actually live.
*By which I mean proactive engagement, not "interactive" in the traditional, functional sense.
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