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8 Ways that Corporate Narrative Leads to Marketing Results
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To uncover and to integrate an organization’s authentic story. This is my job. I love this gig because everyone loves a cleverly reported, smart story. The work is most effective for people who value revelation and who want to undergo creative development with a team. It means I must understand your organization’s core values, who you are, who you want to be, how you are perceived. The corporate narrative can become an amazing asset, when we employ this core story across the marketing mix to great applause.
Here are eight ways that corporate narrative leads to marketing results:
Integration. Maintain consistency, cohesiveness and clarity of messaging with story elements that work together across the marketing mix. This maximizes marketing campaigns’ effectiveness throughout a season and helps us easily repurpose content for future savings.
Engagement. Honest stories attract audiences. All brand professionals know this. Bright colors also work, as do artwork and masthead with compelling offers. But armed with a new story bible, we have the best of these engagement tools. A well-crafted narrative helps brands stand out in noisy markets.
Brand awareness. We want to engage audiences and we want to remain memorable. This is especially true for purchasing decisions that take days or weeks. Brands are created to help stand out in commoditized markets. Well-crafted, authentic corporate narrative does this trick. Of course, so does a duck who quacks Aflac. The advantage of corporate narrative is that while we increase awareness, we also have the tools to support sales and education.
Sales. An authentic story helps frame your values and key selling propositions. This leads to improved tools for the sales team. When we communicate these stories in campaigns, they generate better sales results for traditional media, SEM landing pages, and direct mail.
Targeting. When we know the corporate narrative, we know the sales stories and how audiences move through a cycle of decision making processes. We want to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Corporate narrative work supports targeting because a narrative requires knowing your audiences’ hopes and needs around your offering.
Consumer education. It’s been well known for like, maybe 5,000 years give or take, that stories help educate humans. When we work on corporate narrative, when we have story mechanics in place, we can tackle any business education challenge.
Retention. A well-crafted corporate narrative is authentic. Authentic stories lead audiences to deeper connections, making happy customers. Through the corporate narrative, we can encourage superfans to share and to craft stories. We see increases in brand loyalty and retention.
Team building. In the fight to find and retain top talent, corporate narrative is an unlikely talisman. But it works wonders. Stories are fun and easy to understand, especially when they convey authentic messages from your core values. Employee satisfaction increases. Internal messaging is easier. Communication between departments improves when we map the corporate narrative to internal efficiencies.
Corporate narrative can work wonders. Of course, it’s all in the execution. Lots of stories just suck. But when you hit it right, you’ll enjoy off-the-charts success across all of the metrics mentioned above. In my experience, the path to ensure success is to be authentic. It builds trust. If you can reveal and share your core story, I know you’ll find success.
Image Notes: The corporate narrative for DOJO Agency includes our namesake, a martial arts school on our property. This shot was from a sword seminar. I ran it through a Photoshop filter.