Story telling has been an integral part of successful marketing for many, many years. But as content marketing and social media marketing continue to rise and develop, story-telling as become even more crucial to marketing your brand and growing your business.

Telling the story of your business has always been essential to help people to understand your mission, your positioning and they type of market you are going after. The story you tell will link to the way you have positioned your brand and help to make it clearer for your audience to understand just what your company is about.

In our faced paced digital world attention spans have reduced considerably. It is now estimated that you have 1.2 seconds to capture the attention of your audience before they click away from your post. So marketers have to make content engaging, and quickly. Telling a story is a great way to capture attention.

“Storytelling is in vogue, and there are a lot of people saying, ‘We have to tell stories and be on all platforms,'” says John Sadowsky, author of Email, Social Marketing and the Art of Storytelling. “Few brands are doing it well or authentically. Good storytelling is more about listening than people think. To tell a good story and involve your community takes a lot of groundwork, which many brands aren’t willing to do. They just throw things out there. That is dangerous.”

What is clear is that you need to ask yourself some basic questions – who are you? Where have you come from? What do you stand for? Why do you want to tell your story? How? Will anyone care? – before you take your story to the world.

“As brands take up storytelling, there are lots of little stories about families and people appearing on TV that are quite engaging,” says Giles Lury, executive chairman of strategic brand consultancy The Value Engineers and author of The Prisoner & the Penguin. “The danger is that so many of them are not distinctive. They haven’t found the grit in the oyster. There are thousands of stories behind every brand. The art is finding the right one, the one that isn’t just a ‘nice’ story, but makes a point about a value you rate highly, or a principle you hold dear.”

Giving people information through narrative means that they are more likely to emotionally connect with information, thereby retaining more of it and being more interested by it.

With so many marketing channels available to the marketer now it is important to have an integrated marketing approach so that your audience can recognise a consistency in your message and brand positioning. Being clear about your brand story can really help with this.

In a OnePoll survey participants were asked who they thought successfully told their brand story. Unsurprisingly Apple came top. Apple’s top ranking is the result of its almost evangelical commitment to creating technology that improves people’s lives and the clarity with which it tells that story. “Its sense of mission manifests itself in everything it does: from the design of its products and stores to the simplicity of its advertising,” says Ed Woodcock, strategy director and co-founder of Aesop.

Successful brands differentiate themselves through storytelling, and developing a narrative around your brand is the first step in getting a stronger buy in and loyalty from your client base.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment box below.

By Harriet Thacker

Harriet is a marketing expert, social media enthusiast and Shake Social’s champion blogger. Struggling to maintain your own blog? We can help!