Social media marketing is often perceived as expensive, especially if you want it to be effective. Big brands splurge a huge amount of money on social media engagement with their customers because that’s where everyone is.
You have the highest chance of being seen if you are on social media.
However, this doesn’t work for everyone. Small companies don’t have large amounts of money to spend. They have to watch their budget carefully.
Some believe that the more they spend the more they will get back but that isn’t always true. You don’t want to risk your entire business on the premise that an hour social media marketing strategy will work.
But, if you do this smartly, without spending large sums, you might be able to get more out of it.
Your solution is brand storytelling. Read on for 5 Great Ways To Use Brand Storytelling As A Cheap SMM Campaign
Brand Storytelling helps you grab attention and stand out from the crowd. It’s simple yet effective and it’s not overly assertive and intrusive for customers. This way of marketing slowly increases brand awareness and thus entices more conversions.
Here is how to do inexpensive social media marketing with brand storytelling.
Table of Contents
Follow the familiar story structure
Remember the fairy tales or fables we used to read as children. The same structure can be used in your brand storytelling. After all, it’s used in popular movies, books and so on. This is a simple yet powerful tool that has been enchanting people for centuries.
This is called the Freytag’s Pyramid. This is how the structure goes:
- Exposition/ Inciting incident
- The complication/Rising action
- The climax/ turning point
- Falling action/Reversal
- Release/ Resolution
This concept is still used by writers and movie makers to this day because of its power. Of course, it’s a bit harder to recognise with so many effects and additional story elements.
For instance, Jaguar launched a campaign with David Beckham in China where they targeted local social networks like WeChat and Weibo. They asked them to guess Mr. Jaguar’s identity before revelation. They had a series of events before that which served to build suspense.
Tell a story in series
One thing that people like even more than this story structure is this story structure in series. You would follow the same concept but spreading it across several episodes in order to build suspense even further and gain more engagement and attention.
Mystery and suspense is something that people will always respond to, even if they had no previous engagement with the brand.
Refinery29 tested this by posting sequenced Facebook ads and it brought them 56% conversion and 87% rise in views. An increase was also noticed in in-store purchases by 7% and online purchases by 10%.
Showcase your values
Storytelling allows you to let go of product-oriented branding and shift towards lifestyle and customer oriented branding. This is great for social media because people are looking for that sort of value. The goal is to define your target group and offer valuable stories and insight into your company’s process and belief system.
This is effective because it allows you to raise your brand awareness, creating more price flexibility, engagement, and more brand advocates.
“One of the most important things that you as a brand needs to do is show your value system. This helps the right people – your target market – engage with you on a personal level. People are no longer looking just for a quality product but rather for the quality product from someone they believe in,” says Tony Turner, an SM manager at 1Day2Write.
Share stories
One of the perks that you as a brand have is the wide reach you have and engagement of people who don’t have a voice. All of these people have their own personal stories to share and you have the opportunity to help them in their goals.
Instead of being passive, capture and promote local stories. This will raise your brand awareness and improve your brand reputation.
Appeal to emotions
“With storytelling, you always have a chance to appeal to other people’s emotions. You can make them cry or smile with good story effects. Your brand story can be a powerful tool. Have you experienced any struggles? How did you get here? What did you do in hard times? All of these things are inspirational to the average reader. If you hire interesting individuals or have a goal outside of making a profit, it’s worth mentioning and creating a story out of it,” says Amelie Benllech, a Branding strategist at Write My X.
Takeaway
Branding on social media doesn’t have to be expensive. You just have to be creative and honest with your audience. Follow these tips for inexpensive SMM.
Author Bio
Adelina Benson works as an email marketer and writer with AcademicBrits. She’s an avid follower of trends in marketing and SMM strategies. In her free time, she enjoys writing articles on social media marketing and other topics that interest her.