The role of storytelling: Using a narrative in your marketing strategy

If you have read any of our previous blogs you will know that we love storytelling at Marketing Moments and think it has a key role to play in a marketing team. Today, we wanted to explore the role of storytelling and creating a compelling narrative in your marketing strategy.

There are two types of marketing strategy that exist in the world. The ones that get written and put in a drawer and forgotten about and then the ones that are treated like a living and breathing document, often referred to and updated as a marketing team. Our preference is always going to be the second, as your marketing strategy should be underpinning all of the projects and tactical activity that your organisation is doing.

We are mentioning this, because the recent brand values research we did spoke about marketing teams struggling to prioritise and have a clear sense of direction and your marketing strategy should help with this.

A marketing strategy has a narrative, a story in its own right it has a beginning that explores where we are now! A middle that looks at where we want to get to and our vision and how we are going to get there. And then it has an ending which shows the controls and measures of what success looks like along that journey.

At Marketing Moments we like to use the SOSTAC model.

However, even though we may work through these steps when developing our thinking and getting team input, when presenting it the document needs to flow, connect and feel like a story and you may not present it structured in this way. For example, one thing we tend to do is organise it by strategic pillars to make it really clear how it all links together and pull in customer data, insights and quotes to bring this to live further.

The document in its purest form is not going to appeal to everyone in your team, everyone thinks, absorbs information and learns differently, so have your pure document for yourself and make it available to your team, but think about how you’re going to present it to your team. For example, do a presentation version and include what our marketing strategy looks like in year 1 and how this will affect your team.

Remember, to look outside your immediate team when you’re embedding the strategy and get buy-in from any teams or stakeholders that will be impacted by the work you’re doing and really focus on how this activity is going to benefit them.

Another consideration is to take a strategic pillar and develop your story or narrative around it. A common challenge we see is to many products aimed at the same audience and this might make you want to do some work on value proposition work, or work on product bundling. To sell it into teams think about the following:

• What internal challenges is this going to solve? And what feedback from internal stakeholders can you bring in to back this up?

• Why is this pain point for your customers and what data, insight, quotes do you have to back this up?

• What are the key benefits?

• What is the end result and why is it important?

Then this is what you pull out when talking, presenting, or motivating the project team, as it moves forward.

Top tip: Try not to have too many narratives/stories going at one time, to really be able to focus on repetition, recall and aligning your team against the strategy.

If you do find yourself with a lot of strategic priorities or even competing priorities, why not instead develop a strategic road map, involving senior stakeholders in rating the different areas of focus and regularly reviewing this with them. So you can take an agile approach to how you achieve the overall strategic vision. For example, you might reprioritise customer service over brand depending on business need.

This also gives you the opportunity to develop those narratives and evidence points by priority area, rather than trying to do everything at the same time. And remember every good story needs retelling multiple times and needs a good hook to help people to remember it.

If you would like help with developing or creating your marketing strategy we would love to hear from you. Enquire today.