Are you using storytelling in your digital marketing strategies? Do you know the best style for telling your brand stories? Are you familiar with suitable story archetypes for digital marketing?
In this post, you will learn how to use 7 different types of stories in your brand storytelling to boost your business on social media.
What is brand storytelling?
Storytelling is the use of daily stories and facts to interact with people and let them know your business messages when marketing your product or service. Many brands in the world are taking advantage of this approach to build niche communities and keep their audiences buying from them.
So it’s best for your business to tell your brand stories through texts, podcasts, videos, and images to make your content interesting.
It is possible to build a unique brand story in different formats and share it via different platforms. Storytelling in digital marketing greatly influences every potential customer and increase customer loyalty.
In storytelling, your content often should include all the details of your business from A to Z. The history of your company, objectives, events, mission, potential customers, and totally the reason you’re living for.
Increasing brand awareness is also another beneficial aspect of including the storytelling approach in your marketing campaigns. Your story affects the way your audience remember your content and engage with your brand on social media. So this would be good for your brand if you could create a unique storytelling style telling it via different digital channels.
In brand storytelling, you must:
- Display the human side of your identity in your content to gain the trust of your audience.
- Create and share your brand story with a unique style.
- Constantly update your stories and include the most recent trends in a creative way.
- Encourage the audience to follow your content by making sense of curiosity.
What are ancient story archetypes?
Although there are countless options for telling your story, Christopher John Penrice Booker categorized story types into 7 basic plots in his 2004 book “The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories“. In fact, you can make up all the new and old stories around the world using these story archetypes.
Here are 7 basic archetypes, according to Christopher Booker:
- Overcoming the Monster
- Rags to Riches
- The Quest
- Voyage and Return
- Comedy
- Tragedy
- Rebirth
General types of stories will help you simplify and organize your storytelling approach. You can combine these major types and create the right style to reach your goal.
Now, what do you think? How can these types of stories help your marketing strategies on social media and what is the best story plot?
7 story archetypes for social media marketing
Often, brand storytelling is not inherently different from other kinds of stories. The thing is you need to adopt a suitable style and tone of voice to attract more followers on social media and convert them into your customers.
So it’s good to become familiar with major archetypes in the world of stories to be able to tell your own stories in a new and more professional way.
Try to understand the archetypes below and learn how to take advantage of them in your digital marketing campaign:
Overcoming the monster
In this story archetype, the protagonist should defeat the antagonistic, which is threatening the protagonist’s world.
One of the most famous stories in this type is “Star Wars,” in which a force from the dark side is threatening the universe, and Skywalker should defeat it.
If you want to use this style in your content strategy, you can introduce your brand as a hero that wants to remove a big problem from customers’ lives. Your weapon will be your products/services that enable you to help people.
For example, if you have a vegetarian restaurant, you can use your dishes to help your customers lose their weight. Many brands are using this story type to encourage their audience to buy their products/services to tackle a specific problem.
Of course, you need to be creative enough to use this story plot and draw the attention of your audience to your narrative.
Rags to riches
“Rags to riches” narrates the story of the poor protagonist who gains power, wealth, fame, etc. and suddenly loses them all. In this story archetype, the hero should get his life back.
Cinderella might be one of the most famous stories in this type who will get her prosperous life back.
As an entrepreneur or a start-up owner, you might have been faced with a story like the poor protagonist in the “rags to riches” pattern. You can let people know the story of your success using this story plot in your social media content and make them respect your efforts.
The Quest
In the quest, the protagonist and his/her friends decide to do something important, acquire an important thing, or even get to a promised location. In their journey, they will face difficulties and obstacles but finally, defeat them.
“The Lord of the Rings” is one of the most popular stories that has used this story archetype. If you want to use this story plot to grow your business on social media, you need to consider an objective that benefits people. Then, you must define a journey in which your brand has solved the problem.
Voyage and Return
The protagonist goes or gets exiled to a distant land with lots of strange experiences and threats. After overcoming the obstacles and learning unique lessons, he/she returns as a hero to help people and create a better world.
For example, “The Lion King” is one of the best stories of this kind. To use the Voyage archetype, brands can mention stories of traveling to other places in the world to acquire technology and improve their businesses.
Comedy
Comedy is probably the most popular story archetype in the world. In this kind of story, a humorous character faces several confusing and humorous patterns in his/her life and tries to overcome them.
It is also a really difficult story plot to be included in digital content so you need a lot of experience for that. Of course, including a sense of humor in your social media posts is not enough for creating a comedy. By the way, it’s highly recommended that brands include a bit of fun in their social media posts to increase their engagement rates.
Tragedy
The protagonist in a tragedy is a hero with a great mistake in his/her history. He/she tries to compensate for the mistake and correct everything, but eventually, the story ends with a good character’s death.
As a brand, you might find it difficult to tell your story in a tragic archetype. You can encourage your business customers who have made a mistake in choosing a product or service to buy yours, have a new experience, and finally solve their problems.
Rebirth
The protagonist faces events that change their ways and make them acquire new characteristics to become a better individual. Finally, the main character can help their land to defeat a lethal threat.
For example, “Kung Fu Panda” is one of the most famous animations that has used this story archetype. You can also tell your brand story on social media via this plot. Try to prove that you have changed your methods, tools, products, and services so that your business is now able to act much better.
Remember that many famous brands have started their business from nothing and you can become one example of this kind. If your goal is to revolutionize your company, this story type might be better than others.
Final word
As mentioned earlier, defining a unique style is necessary before embarking on storytelling. You can then choose one or several story archetypes for your content, based on your industry, product, and audience on social media. You can also use social media polls or A/B testing on social media to get feedback from your followers and figure out which plot is better for your digital marketing campaign. Last but not least, remember that choosing the best archetype for your brand might be a time-sucking process. Try to understand them well and use the right one in your social media content.
