How-To Create Your Business Narrative

In today’s blossoming social networking and marketing, it’s hard to compete with all the new up and coming start-ups. You have your viewers’ attention for a maximum of 5 minutes if your promotion is catchy enough that is. This doesn’t mean that you should drop your narrative for the company, this is actually one of the most important aspects of appealing to customers. A human to human connection is how you demonstrate your company’s purpose, product, and narrative for a personal stake in your company. So how do you demonstrate all of this in five minutes or less, and why is it so important to do so? In this article, we will discuss the importance of short narratives, the different types of promotional narratives you can use, and how to personalize them towards your clientele.

Short narratives that are both visually appealing and informative are the backbone of social media marketing. They help you communicate the brand in a fast and instructive way, that allows for a full view of your company. Short narratives for the average social media scroller will allow them to engage in your brand without having to take the long investment of going to your page and reading through it. Direct and concise your ad could reach a viewer on the cusp of deciding between two brands and your strong narrative discussing the ethics and background of your company can help sway a decision. That is a pretty persuasive thought, that a well-timed ad that allows for a personal stake in the company will help a conflicted customer buy into your company’s product or service. The ad in this sense has to be not only short but have a wealth of information behind it, so if your viewer clicks beyond your fast video or product display they will continue to see a story of your company that matches the video. These short narratives can be thought of as narrative teasers; they give a subtle relationship-building tool that has the viewer interested in seeing more.

No matter how you are marketing your services and/or products, you need to remember that your promotion is about connecting with people, and people love a story that allows them to connect to an abstract company. Your brand will stand out in the marketing sphere if it not only motivates your customers to learn more but also is motivating your staff to develop more content for your brand. These narrative strategies are not isolated events to one video or one post that describes your background. They are concepts that underline your entire presence as a company and are weaved into the content on all your websites. This is not to say that you should be in the midst of writing a long-winded brief that encompasses five or more pages about how your company came to be. Instead, it should a short paragraph that can be placed on labels, social media content, and tagged in videos to demonstrate the human background of your company. Including your staff in this development, in made at office videos for promotion and testimonials surrounding the company will not only increase your employees stake in your company but show that your products and services are distributed by people just like your clientele. To distinguish yourself in marketing make sure that the view is 100% transparent and incorporate your narrative to all levels of your company, including CEOs to factory line workers. Giving a holistic human first narrative will allow your customers to connect to your brand and therefore be more likely to choose you over another brand.

Now this isn’t all to say that you should nix your promotion that focuses solely on the product or the service. If you have started your narrative arch with the background of your company and the people that work there you need to take it one step further by incorporating these methodologies into product advertisement. Your brand is well marketed at this point, people know who you are and how you came to be, now they need to see the value in your products and services. Look at your average clientele and decide what caters best to them, even directly ask in a social media post, what do you like about our products? Businesses have found success in allowing clients to make testimonial videos and link it to their various social media pages. Think of it as taking one step further to an amazon review. If you list your product, you can spend hours pulling your hair out thinking of the best way to communicate its values, and then at the end of the day your customer scrolls right past that to its reviews. Instead of thinking that as frustrating, try incorporating it into the narrative of your company. Marketing in this sense is all about the customer’s point of view and their needs, so why not allow them to tell the story about how your company’s product revolutionized their daily life. There is nothing more convincing than a satisfied customer.

So you are ready to try writing your own short narrative and develop your brand as a human to human relationship. A few last tips would be to keep any content you write short and sweet, to be direct in what you are trying to say, and for the most effective advertising, make it readable and interesting. Would you read it yourself? Would your partner, your parents, your siblings? If the answer is no, rewrite, make it shorter and more entertaining. You are asking potential clients to stop their daily activities for 5 minutes or less to see what you have to offer, so you want to cater to their interests. Once you have developed it, don’t let this be a stand-alone post or distribution, take that narrative back to your staff and pose: how do we incorporate this into all of our content? Have keywords used throughout your content, and encourage that the story is a part of your working environment, clients will see right through your ad if it’s not transparent and authentic. Be yourself, be the company that you’ve always been, but market it better so that your customers can see and interact with your brand on a more personal level.