There is one online dental marketing strategy that is often not spoken about – the art of storytelling. This is not about actual bedtime story-reading sessions, but about giving your brand a method of communicating that immediately makes its presence felt in the heart and mind of the audience.
The reality is that brand stories are very impactful but most brands cannot handle them. This is because brand storytelling is about blending a bit of creativity in an ocean of facts and creating content that is easy to relate to, humanizing your brand, giving it a personal touch that would make your competitors envious.
The Art of Storytelling
The story would need to be told in a certain way to keep the readers interested. From established dental practices to the emerging ones, any brand that can tell a story about the journey of a new procedure, product or technique, or describes a service ideology, or presents a client-centric case study, it stands to gain a lot in terms of more website clicks and rapid social sharing.
When people present their ideas in a way that the narration looks less preachy and more realistic, they have a higher chance of engaging the audience. The same applies to any brand. Here, storytelling is about quoting from real life to make the brand’s journey more readable.
A good brand story is sprinkled with lots of real-life anecdotes. It also helps the readers relate with the human aspect of a brand. A good story infuses confidence among the audience. A poorly narrated story can quickly lose attention of the readers or might stand neutral, giving you little to lose or gain.
The best brand stories are expressive. Perhaps, this is what makes them more believable. For a brand, sharing something like the long commuting hours that the remote sales team has to endure provides a glimpse into the backend struggles that keep a business afloat.
During times of transformation, businesses often choose to talk about their struggles to come-up with coping-up measures to handle something disruptive. This is about giving a brand a more non-corporate identity, a dimension that helps to bring-in more clients. The narrative, once published, might not lead to immediate rise in sales conversions but allow it to mature and get more online visibility and you will find out how it lends more credibility to your brand.
ACE – One of The Most Popular Brand Storytelling Approaches
- Audience: Define your audience. Millennials seeking cosmetic dental services might need a different narration as compared to seasoned clients. To define the audience, you should have data capturing and collation processes in place. This means listening to everything out there being said about your brand, capturing silos of digital data and extracting information that reveals anything about your targeted demographic. Brand stories that can appeal to any demographic are a fallacy – they don’t exist and should not be the goal.
- Channel: You should know where you want to hook your audience. You may or may not want to use video clips but YouTube-like platforms are highly pictorial/image-heavy whereas LinkedIn blogging platform allows you to publish a longer, more textual narrative.
- Emotion: The best brand stories are often interspersed with instances of real-life struggles of the employees and the top-most decision-makers. This does not give away the authority or trustworthiness of a brand, but only adds to it.
How to Make Brand Stories More Relatable
Your audience can vary and the demographics might evolve and change. You need a brand story that packs the same degree of engagement irrespective of these variations.
Try to create a story that addresses different challenges that the audience can actually relate with – for business owners this can be about finding initial funding whereas for buyers, this can be about a brand that chooses to stay real, consumer-focused, not falling to mindless profit-making.
If your target audience tends to be sensitive towards the environment, the narrative should touch upon how being green can be a challenge for young businesses or how driving community-wide green initiatives can sometimes seem impossible. Reveal the slightly vulnerable phases of your business too. This makes the story more realistic.
When to Get the Story Out There for Maximum Engagement?
This is perhaps the most critical and non-creative aspect of a brand story strategy. Everyone does not want to read about a brand’s creation or its struggles over the years. Buyers might dislike hyperlinks that keep guiding them to the webpage with the narrative. The challenge also lies in surfacing the brand story at the right time.
You don’t want to do this during a checkout process but email campaigns that are more informative rather than being a push-for-sales carry the story rather well. Decide when you want to pitch the idea of reading a bit more about the brand, when you want to present the option of baiting readers to boost brand familiarity. A relevant story showing-up at the right time can make the biggest impact.
Try to Offer Some Solutions
The audience is unlikely to read a brand story that is too lengthy and does not provide a perspective. The story should try to clearly highlight some problems and how solutions were created. This is the immediate takeaway. Audience interest levels will rise if they can associate with the highlighted problem.
Invariably, the entire story cannot have too many of these questions and answers but try to use a handful. This makes hopeful entrepreneurs, brand observers and the consumer demographic curious, raising chances of bringing them back to a website’s blog or social media channels.
Keep it Simple
Brand stories should not read like a long business report. This is about sharing experiences that lead to an idea or opportunity being converted into a business. A brand storytelling effort that uses complex jargons is unlikely to make the desired impact. It should be simplified to the extent that average readers can easily understand it.
Concluding Thoughts
Writing a brand story takes thoughtfulness and expertise. Brand storytelling can be a beautiful blend of ambitions, creative journeys, struggles, and accomplishments. Enrich the narrative with real-life examples to make it more memorable and sellable!
About the Author
Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete internet marketing company that focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education, and the online reputations of dentists. With a team of 180+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps dentists who know where they want to go, get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call 855-598-3320 to speak one-on-one with Naren.
