The truth is that every business can succeed in engaging customers by telling their story. Every business has a story to tell – even if they don’t know it. Here we will explore how NASA engages the audience to tell their story.
Need to know: Positive Attitude Is Everything for Customer Engagement
You might be wondering …
This blog is where this article steps in to give you the nudge you need to find yours. Here are four narrative elements that will make your storytelling stand out from the crowd. It includes some inspirational examples as well:
Why do you stand out?
What’s your angle?
What uniqueness can you exploit to make you more visible, get people’s attention and give them something to relate to? Giving your business that personal touch and building your narrative around it will make it truly memorable.
Take the Mast Brothers. If you haven’t heard of these guys, you will soon. They make chocolate. But they don’t just produce it – they love it. They craft it and pour themselves into every step of the process. And it shows. They are quirky with a strong personal style.
And, more than any other chocolate manufacturer, they are totally dedicated to producing top quality, luxury, handcrafted chocolate. They made this video to tell the story about themselves, what they do, and how and why they do it.
The video ticks all the boxes: it demonstrates their uniqueness, it’s beautiful to look at, it shows personality, it’s engaging, and it takes the audience on a journey. And I, for one, couldn’t wait to get hold of one of their chocolate bars after seeing it.
NASA engages the audience … they tell their story creatively
Here is the kicker …
Be dynamic with your storytelling. Nothing is more important to narrative content than imagination, so give vivid descriptions and use emotional hooks and humor to get people fully engaged. Be creative, not only with words and images but also with the methods you use to convey them. Don’t be traditional. Be edgy. NASA definitely is.
Take “The Waffle Shop” in Pittsburgh, PA. Part of a trend to support performance art within the urban core, it is run by college students. The shop brought together people from all walks of life united by the draw of their live streaming talk shows and their waffles. The shows were shot in the middle of their busy restaurant and included “Waffle Wopp” for teenagers with live music and fun interviews.
Anyone could take part in these shows. The aim was to produce a creative non-profit and for-profit combination model with social impact to stimulate local public dialogue, while simultaneously generating revenue to sustain itself. They had a runaway success, too, so much so that the experiment became a permanent fixture for four years running.
NASA develops their narrative in ways and formats that appeal to their target audience and makes it easy for them to share. Take advantage of the full range of media with potentially global reach that the internet has to offer.
Think apps, videos, audio, and images for high-level engagement, and ALWAYS give your audience the opportunity to share easily with incentives and social share buttons.
Whatever techniques you use to tell your story, always factor in the nuances of those particular platforms, as the things an audience expects and how they interact differ vastly depending on the arena.
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NASA engages the audience … they get customers involved
As entrepreneurs of the modern age, we are blessed with a plethora of creative ways to convey our message and get people involved. Interactive content offers a much more open-ended platform through which to tell stories and get people highly engaged.
Your audience can be involved in the stories you create as part of your narrative. They even can be the central characters. This can be seen working particularly well across social media where campaigns often seek to involve individuals in this way.
Here is the deal …
Ask your audience members to tell their narratives, and then intertwine them with your own. This makes them feel valued and also gives something back by involving them as part of something bigger. And it gives them a place to return to on your site again and again. Let them share their experiences with your brand through product usage ideas, advice and tips, and, of course, success stories.
A great example of this kind of strategy can be seen on the Google website. Google wields the awesome power of their customer success stories with style. Their “Google Apps for Business” webpage (below) features a photo collage of happy customers. Through sharing their stories, Google’s clients are doing all the marketing legwork for them, enticing new customers to be part of their exclusive Google business community full of real people who have experienced real success.
Click on any of these images and a window pops up, complete with quotes and some blurb on the ways Google Apps has benefited that particular business (see below). But the most powerfully persuasive feature, by far, is the accompanying video where those aforementioned real business owners give glowingly positive testimonials by sharing their own unique stories.
This highly engaging technique offers potential customers solid and believable social proof, while simultaneously emotionally involving them in the personal stories of people similar to themselves. Formidable stuff.
The potential for social proof that customer success stories like these can generate is phenomenal. And that’s a key ingredient for small or start-up businesses that need to demonstrate their value as they struggle to compete with major players.
Your audience is much more likely to socially share these kinds of stories, thereby exponentially spreading and endorsing your message and increasing your exposure. A boost in your social proof also will significantly improve your Google rankings.
Personal experience is extremely powerful when it comes to persuasion. Use case studies and testimonials in your narrative to prove your position and success. This will establish your authority within your field and inspire confidence and trust.
Now …
If you listen to your customers, you can leverage their stories to drive innovation. By analyzing their stories of how your products and services fit into their lives, you can gain valuable insight into their needs and desires, which can be hugely beneficial to other aspects of your business, like product design and development and ongoing marketing strategy.
Telling your story … think practically
Cohesion is vital to successful storytelling. Simply collecting a bunch of stories without much consistency is a quick way to lose the interest of your audience. You must have a strong central narrative theme to tie them all together. The theme should support your core values, goals, and vision.
So what does this mean in practical terms?
Well, rather than thinking of each storytelling campaign as an individual tale, think of them as stand-alone elements sheltered beneath a pervasive umbrella theme.
In other words, the umbrella is the core narrative that subtly but distinctly unifies all the little pockets and strands of stories built around the experience you want your audience to have.
Thinking of your narrative strategy in this way gives you an incredible amount of freedom with your content. As long as your content follows the same theme, storytelling will bind it together. In the recent “live positively” campaign by Coca-Cola, all of the content is based on the “live positively” theme. The scope for content that fits within that umbrella is endless, which means they are never short of ideas.
Incorporating such a wide range of topics shows their versatility as a brand and gives them a multitude of ways to connect with their audience, thus widening their appeal. In this particular instance, the folks at Coca-Cola also cleverly have positioned themselves as having a very human, caring side.
This draws attention away from any bad publicity over negative health issues regarding their products, and instead, develops their reputation and association with positivity and vitality.
That’s very sharp on their part, as such a lifestyle choice is something that people relate to and aspire to be part of. As a result, the content and narrative is incredibly engaging and has a real impact.
Here is the kicker …. the bottom line
In social media marketing, the line between competitors and friends often becomes very thin or blurry. And that is ok. They are your competitors and not your enemies. Most of the time you can both profit from each other.
If your niche is too small to feed both of you, it is not their fault, and both of you should probably look for new niches to enter. And maybe you can work together on expanding into new markets?
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