Content is King: Digital Storytelling Basics

In a rapidly evolving digital environment, producing high-quality content is more important than ever. Good content tells a story, which enables your business to connect with a wider audience, share new ideas, and stand out from the crowd.

Make Your Brand into a Story

First things first: your organization needs to tell a story. This simple move can increase brand awareness and add a personal component to your business that resonates with customers. The more familiar someone is with your brand, the more likely they are to trust you and be a returning customer. Your story doesn’t have to be long or complex, but it should answer a few simple questions. How did you get started? What makes your business special? What inspires you and your employees? The answers to these questions can help form an authentic, unique identity and even drive a higher conversion rate.

Make it real, relatable, and honest. Fluffy descriptions and meaningless words will only fall flat. Authenticity is key. According to Ad Week, “91 percent of consumers are likely to reward brands for authenticity and share the brand with friends and family, and 62 percent are likely to purchase from or show greater interest in purchasing from a brand that authentically expresses itself.”

You can be professional without being stuffy. Just be yourself—there’s no need to try to be something you’re not. What works for one company doesn’t necessarily work for another, so while it’s easy to compare yourself to another brand, resist the temptation.

Popular Forms of Content

Forbes discovered that people find videos, blogs, and instructional media to be the most valuable forms of content. 54% of consumers want more video content from a brand or business they support. Due to shortened attention spans, internet users are increasingly interested in media that combines images, text, audio, and videos. Depending on your resources, producing multiple forms of content may seem overwhelming. Luckily, it’s easier than ever to add short-form videos or high-resolution photographs to a blog post or landing page. 92% of marketers make videos with assets they already have, so you don’t necessarily need a production team or camera crew to beef up video content. Play around with a variety of strategies to determine what resonates the most with your audience.

How to Create Strong Content

To keep engagement levels high, you need to offer simple, straightforward, and succinct content that also provides value, like an educational video or how-to blog article. Content is the most impactful when it’s clear, concise, and purposeful. You want to produce materials on a frequent, consistent basis, but don’t publish something just for the sake of it—quality still beats quantity.

The most important factors to consider are what your audience wants and needs. What will they enjoy consuming, what problems are they trying to solve, and how can you help them? If you have more than one target audience, don’t be afraid of segmentation. By tailoring your content to specific groups, you can forge stronger connections and make more of an impact.

As a final tip, don’t forget that proofreading is imperative. Everything in the digital landscape is so fast paced that it’s easy to overlook a mistake, but nothing derails your content train quite like a simple grammatical error or embarrassing typo.

There’s real power in storytelling. Generating quality content enables you to accomplish marketing goals, reach a wider audience, and increase your digital influence. If you’d like to learn more about how Social Link can help you strategically create a content strategy that converts to revenue drop us a line today to get started.