A key digital marketing trend for 2019 is Stories along with micro moments (with mobile getting popular, attention becoming a premium and leveraging moments to encash), voice (Alexa and its likes), video (Youtube getting more famous what with Genz craving for it), picture search (search options available to identify just pictures), social messaging apps, influencer marketing (when clients get lazy, influencers take over), chatbots (service at your desk), programmatic (martech tool to create and position ads), etc
So what does this signify? That stories are here to stay.
If there is anything that connects close to the human heart – they are stories. Have’nt they always been? Right from stone ages when hunters and farmers used stones to indicate and depict happenings on rocks and walls.
With social media marketing taking the Internet and the world by storm, if there is anything close to us today – they are the different forms available in them for eg- Facebook stories, Instagram stories and the snapchat story formats.
First to walk this route has been Instagram.
Stories are easy to digest, more pictorial, help in brand recall. They also help produce more conversations, high traffic, more followers, and increased leads.
While a story in social is not just a story but is a plan that needs to be tied with it closely. Behind the scene story development is also shown to indicate start to finish.
Thanks to martech and the tools available in the market, social stories make authors out of the common man. It ensures that the power of the pen or the brush or any other tool one maybe using is well utilized.
Treat stories or storyfication similar to the headline, main bullets, or breaking news on television channels.
Are you in the Social Media Game or left behind?It is also a far cry from a sales pitch and hence there actually has to be meat to the content. One can also consider multimedia formats to convey these stories.
The growth of stories has something to do with the burgeoning genZ audience and their interest in themselves and personalization to the content they create or view. It also has to do with very little time to catch viewers’ attention and hence the audio visual format sells better.
While there is organic content that is generated across social channels, inorganic or sponsored content is created through paid media. These are typically triggered when an action is taken by the user for eg when a page is liked or when known contacts checks into a business page or when a friend claims an offer made.
The direct impact of getting stories onto a self-service mode is also that the role of advertisers has turned ‘redundant’. Of course the option to ‘skip’ ads exist unless that is taken away as well.