AUTHENTIC STORY TELLING
In today’s increasingly cluttered online marketplace, it’s more difficult to attract and keep the viewer’s attention. In order to engage your target audience, your content strategy has to be on point, and storytelling can really help. Storytelling is essentially translating your marketing message into narrative form. Online storytelling, like fiction, has a beginning, middle and an end. It has a hero or heroine—your brand—and takes the viewer on a journey. It touches upon our basic human need to hear and be heard, and it delivers content in a way that doesn’t feel like marketing. In this world of pop-ups and flashy advertisements, a story stands out as an island of calm in a frantic electronic world. Now more than ever, people strive to invest in a brand’s narrative or story. In fact, a recent study suggests that by telling your brand story well, you have the power to increase the value of a product or service by over 20 times.
There’s a well-known marketing axiom that “people buy from people they know, like and trust.” We recognize that human connections need to go before concepts and strategies, you need to connect with your audience first. When it comes to storytelling in marketing, there are two big things you want to focus on: emotional impact and relatability. In other words, when you’re telling your brand’s story, you need to tell it in a way that will connect you with your target audience. The more people connect with a story, the more they remember it, so creating connections with your stories will help create lasting bonds and loyalty between your customers and your products.
Here at Gearshift we pride ourselves as great storytellers, in fact we have won numerous awards throughout the years for our video content storytelling abilities. We have in many ways come full circle with digital advertising and with the flexibility in video length and the consumer demand for high quality video content is at it’s max, there is definitely a sweet spot in the platform for storytelling.
There are hundreds of motorcycle brands out there. Yamaha is a trusted brand that builds exciting and reliable products that happen to kick ass. Yamaha’s loyalists are fanatical about the product and Yamaha needs to show them they get it. It is important to portray to the enthusiast audience that Yamaha understands the insider lifestyle that they live daily. Authenticity is crucial to the consumer and story’s being told have to be as well. Another challenge for Yamaha is to speak to the specific motorsports niche group, which there are many. These small groups would see through anything that might not feel realistic. If we get an emotional response from our clients we know we did it right.