From Storytelling to Performance Marketing

What I like the most, are the flavours that come together and create an immersive experience. Sipping coffee in the morning makes me impatient to start my day. Do you see? However a coffee brand produces ‘simple’ coffee beans, it is perceived as an experience by consumers. Storytelling is the ability to bring these feelings to life in words, images and sound, to stimulate people’s imagination. It is all about bringing together brands and customers.

Social media and storytelling

In the past, many brands used social media to show their offers and promotions. It didn’t work out well and created bad relationships with their fans as people don’t want to use social media to see ads. They want to use them to exchange things they like with their friends. After a period of time, brands stopped showing only offers and promotions, and started to create real content and to community management.

And this works, because social media are the perfect way to tell stories. They contribute to developing brands’ notoriety, improving their brand awareness and stimulating brand consideration and preference. This is the primary purpose why brands nowadays use social media. And for a lot of brands, this is also where it ends. Most brands forget that social media can bring (direct) sales.

From Storytelling to Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is the process of capturing interest of an audience, to convert it from a visitor to a customer for your brand. Think about FMCG brands recruiting new customers or enriching their customer knowledge, such as banks targeting just graduated students to sell a loan to buy their first car or a credit card to buy a new television. And what about telecom companies recruiting new customers with a special offer?

This seems obvious. But did you ever think about selling real estate projects of more than 250.000 Euro through social media? You should!Sea Coast generated more than 3.000 leads per month through social media marketing. Promoting their projects through micro targeting has increased the quality of the leads and lifted the closing rate significantly. 180 leads were generated for an investment project for apartments of 250.000 Euro. 50 meetings were planned out of the 180 leads. 1 on 5 meetings resulted in the sale of an apartment.

Much more than smart targeting and adsYou should however keep in mind that performance marketing cannot be used as direct marketing. You are mistaken if you thought that it is only about smart targeting and advertisement. Of course these elements are key, but you have to keep in mind that we see on average 362 ads per day and that our attention span is decreasing. The question you have to ask yourself then is: “How do I break through?”. The answer is creative content & storytelling, media planning and the right tactics.

Over time, we have seen that people enjoy more immersive content in their newsfeed.This means that creative content has become more than ever a key element to break through, to create massive engagement and an immersive brand experience. Just think about photo galleries telling a story, 360° photos and videos, Facebook canvas, short story videos, cinemagraphs, Twitter scratchreels, conversational video, live video, and so on. The possibilities are endless.And then there is media planning.

This still remains a crucial step to transform all single social media posts into a one coherent brand story. When you match this with the right tactics introducing your products as a direct answer to one of their passions or needs, then it will without any doubt change the perception of consumers. Just consider the right tactics as the ultimate X-factor that will do the rest and convert people who engage with your content into real clients.