Storytelling as a marketing strategy is more than just telling stories. In contrast to classical PR, storytelling does not only focus on information and not only on individual texts, products or people. Storytelling no longer focuses on the famous six questions:
- What is the topic?
- Who is relevant to the topic?
- Where does what makes up our topic take place?
- When did or does the event take place?
- How did it happen or will it happen?
- Why did it happen or will it happen?
Storytelling is about connections, about interpolation, but above all about interpretation. The interpretation contains ambiguity. It takes into account the effect of communication. The paradigm shift from the own intention of communication to the effect of communication is based on the fundamental change of modern communication.
Why is storytelling so important today?
The complexity of communication has increased considerably. We are experiencing a flood of stimuli and information, but also an increasing commercialisation of communication. This is why the avoidance strategy is a fact: Consumers and customers are increasingly withdrawing from classic communication channels.
The customer hates advertising and avoids it. He increasingly mistrusts the providers. Instead, they increasingly rely on tips from their circle of friends and acquaintances and on supposedly independent experts. Every second person relies on personal recommendations when making purchase and investment decisions. That’s why corporate communication is increasingly about personal experiences, about stories.
We tell good stories
Every consumer is increasingly being asked for advice on his or her own issues. He becomes a “temporary expert”. Anyone can become an decision maker for investments at any time. The communication structure is evolving from a multicentric concept of the Internet to an interaction network of social media:
Storytelling: A Developement of Communication
Therefore, the focus is no longer on our communication with the customer and his satisfaction with us, but on the customer lifecycle and finally on customer experience. Here the customer, partner or investment decision maker is interesting for public relations work around the clock.
In social media, companies seek to communicate with decision-makers at eye level. They address a wide variety of topics that extend far beyond their own product or service offering. And they do so at all possible times. The topics are defined jointly by all stakeholders.
Storytelling: From Customer Lifecycle to Customer Experience
Companies are communicating less and less about themselves and more and more about the topics of their decision-makers.
Thus, autistic corporate communication is increasingly developing into topic-oriented communication.
The 3 Steps of Storytelling
Storytelling is a complex process
17 Steps to Storytelling
- In the first step, the topics from the roadmap and from the egocentric topic planning for brand and company are summarized.
- The second step for topic generation requires a key media list.
- A content analysis of the key media leads to a second list of topics. This content analysis must be carried out at least once a year as an individual project. A continuous analysis using a monitoring system such as the vibrio I³-Issue-Monitoring solution is of course better.
- An initial topic plan is generated from both sources and converted into an editorial plan.
- A keyword matrix is part of the editorial plan. Here all search terms are listed with which the company wants to be found in search engines such as Google.
- The topics that are to be worked out as blog posts, social media postings and/or press releases must be prepared in such a way that each relevant keyword is represented with a landing page or a post on the blog. Here you can already see that the blog is of central importance as an address for the relevant landing pages.
- Influencer monitoring via vibrio I³ or tools such as Socialbro identifies the most important opinion leaders on the topics of the editorial plan.
- The most important key influencers can be identified from the list of influencers.
- The most relevant influencers have a similar function for corporate communication as key journalists: a contact management program should be set up for them. So 1:1 contacts have to be established.
- The editorial plan is generated from the topic plan. It contains a time schedule, an allocation of keywords to blog posts (or on the website) and an allocation of social media activities.
- All social media postings are coordinated via a multi-channel publishing tool (e.g. Hootsuite) by the agency and/or company employees. Tools such as bitly are also used here.
- As a third component of the monitoring, an image monitoring – optionally via the vibrio I³ Monitoring with Brandwatch – is set up in addition to the issue and influencer monitoring. This image monitoring corresponds to the classic clipping service of press work: Contributions (postings, but also comments) are collected in forums, blogs and social media for the company’s own brands and optionally for competitive brands.
- Image monitoring is also part of a crisis management system.
- It triggers an alert system, which uses a prepared crisis management plan to …
- …crisis management.
- Image monitoring is compared with a KPI system focused on qualitative measurement values. This must be considerably more complex for social media than in traditional PR. As a rule, 10 to 15 KPIs are defined here. It applies to all media that the virality of the platforms and the quality of the followers must be captured.
- The knowledge gained from measuring success ultimately flows back into the further development of topic and editorial plans.
(Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator)
Storytelling as a Process
In this short video, Michael Kausch outlines how storytelling works as a process in corporate communications (German language):
Would you like to know more about storytelling as a prerequisite for modern and successful PR work? Are you interested in content as a success factor in social media marketing? Then contact us by e-mail or telephone: +49 89 3215170.