Storytelling: What Target Audience?

Telling your brand story is almost synonymous with the success of your business. If you have yet to master the storytelling aspect of your brand you are losing major revenue boosting potential for content marketing efforts. Having a clear brand narrative could substantially increase the value of your product or service by 20x!

Okay, okay… it’s not as easy as it sounds to make your brand significant by telling the right story. Between inspiring copy, utilization across all social media mediums and the website, or the potential to add in video content, straightforward storytelling suddenly has lines that are blurring.

If your story is executed well, ideally, it will clearly define your brand – purpose, values, mission, etc. The story will become a part of the customer experience rather than making your product or service more salient to the customer. It will also, like a typical story you read in school, motivate the consumer to learn more, buy the product, or join the experience of the brand. Ultimately, like any marketing action, it will boost leads or sales and engage your customers.

Sounds great right? Well where do you start!? Well, like any marketing campaign the first step is developing and discovering who your target audience is. Who exactly are you telling your story to? Based on your brand, you probably already have a relatively large audience in mind. This large market can be determined through analysis of your current audience and through your competition or even through supplemental tools such as Google Analytics. You can also expand your audience to customers your brand wishes to be engaged with.  In this process, you should break them down into segments based on each distinct personality. This will help you determine what your audience will react best to based on their segment allowing you to better achieve your objectives by targeting your approach to their needs.  These segments should include demographics, psychographics, and include opportunities and challenges associated with engagement. You have to ask yourself what are these segments going to enjoy? What is going to turn them off from my product? This is all about them.

Let’s look at the Marriott for an example of great storytelling. In Europe there is an increasing popularity to stay at youth hostels for young millennial globetrotters. The Marriott realized this trend and decided to expand their target market to capitalize on this increasingly prevalent young demographic. The Marriott launched ‘The Moxy’ or a new boutique hotel brand. It is a combination of trendy and luxury options catering more similarly to youth hostels found all across Europe. The Moxy, crafted a series of videos to engage and encourage this new target segment to stay in their hotel. These videos include prevalent social media influencers that many millennials may have previously engaged with, utilizes the most prevalent social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram and inspires travel for many of the wanderlust filled millennial generation. This is a perfect example of using a target segment persona to develop a compelling engaging story.

Marketing agencies are well versed in the analytics needed to narrow down to these segments, because it’s not always easy to determine what segment your brand is going to resonate best with. Consult with a local marketing firm in your area to ensure your story doesn’t go unheard.