The holidays are almost upon us once again, and consumers are starting to head online to research their gift-buying options. Now is the perfect time to get started on your holiday marketing campaign to attract new leads and reinforce ties with old ones through the power of storytelling. When creating your story, you should be exploring the common pain points, barriers, and triggers of your demographic. You can take advantage of these emotional motivators by weaving them into your narrative. This year is a little different from last year, however. You might need to rewrite your playbook of storytelling to improve sales results.
So here are a few more ideas on how to increase sales with storytelling. But first…
Quick Tips to Produce Great Stories
Create a story that is appropriate for your audience
Make sure your story has a goal
Use emotion to persuade
Come up with a relatable story
Create stories that people want to share (for instance, videos on social media)
Create More Shareable Stories with Stock Images and Videos
There’s no denying that more than 60% of people prefer to get their information from videos. Studies have shown that 95% more information is retained when delivered via video rather than text.
For that reason, if you haven’t yet created a YouTube channel to showcase your products and services, then this is the year to start. If you aren’t sure about what content to include in your first video, then consider repurposing your blog content into video format. High-quality stock images and video snippets are available from stock image sites to help you give your videos and content a professional vibe. Need more custom clips to send out your marketing messages? Making short compelling videos can be an easy task with the use of video-making tools available online.
Pull on Their Heart Strings
Photo shot by gpointstudio.
You can use emotional storytelling to improve sales, depending on your country’s seasonal festivities. This is a big one. On the Asian front, brands use seasonal ads for holidays and celebrations to play on emotional themes, particularly on familial scenes. It’s not so different from the Western side. We’ve all seen those popular Christmas videos from big brands that never fail to stir up our emotions whenever we see them, for instance. You may not have as big a budget as some of the larger brands, but you can still gain plenty of inspiration. For example, check out the likes of John Lewis with the #ManOnTheMan video or Aldi’s popular Kevin the Carrot videos. There are various ways to use storytelling to improve sales for your online business.
Increase Sales With Seasonal Product Launches
Black Friday vector designed by catary.
Promoting seasonal products will create more sales, partly because of the urgent time frame. Naturally, because they are seasonal, there’s time-limited demand built-in. For example, a line like “Get it before October ends!” works well for the fall and Halloween season. Seasonal products have a unique advantage in that they bring out feelings of nostalgia.
In a similar vein, social media stories are an excellent way to promote seasonal products. Dunkin’ Donuts used them to good effect in their pumpkin line-up, for instance. They came up with unique strategies to increase the hype, including guessing the next participating city and seasonally rebranding a few of their locations a week before launch. They then took to social media to inform customers there were free products available for the first 250 guests. All in all, social media can be a pretty useful tool to grow your customer traffic.
Likewise, the phrase “Facts tell, but stories sell,” perfectly sums up the power of storytelling in your seasonal marketing campaigns. Truthfully, people don’t want blatant hard sell, but they do love a good story. The trick is to create engaging stories to stir up emotions that will convert into action. Consequently, once you land on a storytelling formula that your audience will relate to, your holiday sales will increase. Integrating newsletters into your sales and marketing strategy? Check out why images work better in email marketing than plain old html.