Tell Your Story And Build Your Own Online Business
As an experienced or aspiring social selling entrepreneur, have you ever heard the term Storyscaping before? Sure there are many marketing buzzwords and terminology, but storyscaping is a relatively new one that requires your immediate attention in 2024 or 2025 to stand out from the ever-growing competition. Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and blogs help you tell your brand's story and world of stories.
Storytelling In Social Media And Branding
In this blog article, you will know what this new concept of marketing is and how you can apply it to your strategy. In addition, you will know some tools for you to carry it out, and thus, get the most out of it to benefit your small business. For years, many brands have used storytelling as a way to connect with potential customers, while communicating brand values. Today, stories are still a fairly effective technique, but in recent times it has undergone an evolution. The new version of storytelling is Storyscaping, which seeks to create corporate stories that seek to seduce and convince audiences at scale.
Now you or your business doesn't have to limit yourself to simply telling a simple story to your limited audience. Thanks to storyscaping, you will be able to design an entire world that is tailored to you and a wider audience.
What Is The Definition Of Storyscaping?
But what is storyscaping all about? Is storyscaping going to be a good tool for your brand? How can you involve your target audience much more? Stay in this post to know all this and solve the doubts you have about it. So what is Storyscaping for marketers?
When you are looking for its meaning, you are most likely to find inspiring phrases and quotes that say the following: "make your client the hero of the story. "
But where does this idea of storyscaping come from? This term was born eight years ago in the book Storyscaping: Stop Creating Ads, Start Creating Worlds by Darren McColl and Gaston Legorburu. In this marketer book, the authors explain this concept in detail. It is a very novel marketing technique whose objective is to achieve more engagement from leads while transmitting messages through a story that conveys emotions. It is a new concept that will combine the power of stories with the experience of creating worlds. In this way, customers will connect much better with brands through software, stories, and sharing.
Why Do Consumers Love Stories?
You know who loves a good story? Your customers and potential customers do! No matter who they are—an end customer who contributes revenue to your business or an internal partner who you support on the daily—they all appreciate a good, relevant story. Why is that? Because customers are just people, and people like stories. They like to be inspired with top tales. They like to learn things that are relevant and applicable to them. So, how can we as marketers always make sure we are telling relevant stories, and even more importantly, making sure those stories get in front of our audience? When you craft a story that is relevant to your audience and then promote it through either organic or paid channels, you can create a great deal of engagement and following for your brand.
Video Is Very Important To Storyscaping
Video is the most powerful medium today. Yet most Marketing and Advertising marketing videos are boring. How can that be when it should be just the opposite? What are the marketers missing? Wish you could simplify your message keeping the science intact? Want to engage Marketing and Advertising audience emotionally and communicate convincingly? Should you leave them charged up to act?
You need to be a skilled storyteller. Facts do not win hearts. Stories do, especially in the Marketing and Advertising industry. Skilled storytelling techniques can turn your video into an engaging mini-movie that tells a story to simplify your message keeping the science intact and positioning your offering as a magical gift.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a single video can tell a story of a million words.
Make sure you are making content that has an intense impact. Wrap your content with the right words, meta tags, keywords, and utilize visuals. One way is to repurpose content as videos, which is now the holy grail in marketing. The one thing standing between a business bright future is a good story. Make that long-form content and go for organic growth. Go for relevance and ultimately be fearless. Tell a true story that will connect and resonate with your audience.
How Storyscaping Differs From Storytelling?
Storytelling in marketing has evolved to become what is now known as Storyscaping. It has sought to advance so that consumers live the stories that brands have, instead of buying them. Therefore, it is going to be a trend that seeks to take consumers on a narrative journey so that they can live the story. In this way, a world of immersive experiences is created, which have the potential to inspire different emotions and connections. This is where the consumer will become the hero of the brand's history. On the other hand, the brand is going to become a mentor via storytime. This is how the user will undertake a search where he can satisfy all his emotional desires while the brand will align with the wishes of the hero.
Storyscaping Is A Strategy With Many Big Business Benefits
This is a technique that will provide many benefits to your marketing strategy, especially for a new online business. Therefore, it is important that you know everything it has to offer so that your strategy achieves the established objectives. Below are the main benefits:
When the client becomes the protagonist of the story, it becomes an active entity and ceases to be passive. What does this mean? Customers are encouraged to carry out various types of actions, such as purchases or reservations, for example. Here the brand will adopt the role of a mentor. In other words, the brand will accompany that user at all times while offering them different ways to solve their problems.
Unlike storytelling for marketing, stories don't have to end. Here you can develop many adventures, trips, experiences, etc. These are going to be connected to each other. In this way, the user will evolve along with the brand.
Storyscaping's 4 Primary Components
Storyscaping is a concept that has four pillars. As the 4 are connected through shared experiences and values, they create what is known as the "hero's way. " But what are these 4 primary components of storyscapes?
1. Brand Strategy: It is in the brand where the hero finds his mentor since they share the same values and purposes. It is the discovery of purpose.
2. Consumer Insight: Here is the fight, the call, and the search for that mentor. It is about the meeting of desire.
3. Product Positioning: The mentor, in this case, the brand, will give a magical gift (service or product) to his hero, in order to satisfy his desire. The product is defined and an experience is created.
4. Consumer Journey: The hero is going to return home to complete his story, which in this situation are necessities.
A Hero's Journey
An example can help you understand this concept of storyscapes. The hero's journey or the hero's way may be learning a new language. In this way, the brand or mentor will give a course where you can practice the language, which will magically improve your fluency and understanding. A shared path will be created, where the hero will improve his command of the language while interacting with people who are native speakers. In this way, your brand will show the value of your service or product, while creating an emotional connection with your customer.
It's a strategy that encompasses five advantages for marketers. This is a methodology that is going to be very important for you to get the most out of your marketing strategy. For this reason, it is essential that you know what are those advantages will help you so that your marketing strategy obtains the benefits you are looking for with your business:
1. Creates Lasting Ecosystems
The data that has been collected from your storyscaping campaigns can be observed for an extended period of time. That information can help your online business in story development, long-term product evaluation, communications, and services.
2. It Improves Customer Experience
How can you adapt storyscaping to a set of experiences that seek to more efficiently produce behavior that produces a purchase by the user? Adapting these experiences to make the experience more memorable is easier than many businesses think. But it is not easy to prevent experiences from looking like fiction. By following this technique you should try to do everything in an effective way, although many times these dimensions are not entirely in agreement.
3. Connected Thinking For Companies And Customers
You should always ask yourself if you are working from a point of view where you “focus on the brand” or if you are “focused on the answer”. Very rarely will you find competitors who seek to break boundaries in order to connect with these two worlds in their business stories. However, it is important that you follow this connected thinking since it will generate better results with company or brand storytelling. In this way, a set of new and evolved skills will be necessary, which are called "brand response". The result that is obtained is much more effective communication, as well as better positioning of your brand.
4. It Will Favor Decision-Making
The goal of creating a storyscape is that it can answer these crucial questions: What marketing efficiencies are going to be spread across the channels? How are social and non-traditional connections going to amplify other channels? What is the return on investment that drives non-traditional marketing? Because this is information that is modeled through channels, it will offer a much more true and holistic view of what the results are. In this way, more efficient and effective decision-making is generated for businesses, entrepreneurs, marketers, and franchisees telling tall tales.
5. It Will Promote Systemic Thinking
What new ways will you be able to use to measure the effectiveness of the customer experience? You have to take into account the five dimensions of customer experience: control, access, adjustment, meaning, and continuity. These are used to evaluate the performance of a campaign, design, or interaction according to the experience that storyscaping has provided for consumers. The goal is for you to be able to undermine these realities so that when you use them, you drive the creative execution of your story while informing the dynamics of systems thinking.
How Should Your Business Utilize Storyscaping In Its Marketing Strategy?
One of the best ways for you to use this storyscaping strategy on social media and the world wide web, and thus create a significant distance with your competitors, is to create experiences that have your user in mind. In them, you have to invite him to continue enjoying and knowing much more about your brand. The stories are not going to end, but you are going to develop many experiences for the consumer to evolve with the brand. It seeks to take clients through the storytelling journey to live their stories while creating a world of unique emotional experiences. All of these journeys and experiences will be interconnected in the story like a complex web. Customers will love it, and so will your company's bottom line.
Be unique with your storyscaping. Don't copy some other business story and try to make it your own, that would be storyscraping, and could damage your brand's legitimacy permanently.
Start Storyscaping On Social Media
Now is the time to start implementing this storyscaping marketing strategy in your brand on social media. With storyscaping you can retain your consumers so that in the near future they can go from social network ambassadors to become walking and talking referrals for your brand. Create a storied past for your brand years or decades from now! So what story will you tell about your company and customers? The stories you tell about your business can make or break your brand and bottom line!
