Wedia : How to Support Branding and Storytelling with DAM and Boost your Business

Posted at 13:01h
in DAMby Lynn Klemke

Have you ever wondered why, even though you put a lot of effort into content marketing, your brand isn't growing, while some of your competitors are becoming established references in your industry? Most likely, it's because you have some catching up to do in terms of branding and storytelling. Stories offer integrity, emotions and a deeper meaning to your brand message. Plus they are easy to recognize and memorize - things that simple content marketing cannot do. Discover how storytelling can transform your business and how to support your branding with DAM in order to take your marketing to the next level.

Chances are high that you have already heard about marketing storytelling. The fact is that the majority of successful brands have been using storytelling for a long time and it is here to stay. Unsurprisingly, storytelling is predicted to be one of the hot marketing trends in2022. So what is marketing storytelling exactly and how can you implement it in your marketing strategy?

What is marketing storytelling?

When diving into your research about storytelling, you'll find manyTED talksexploring this powerful marketing strategy. But what does the buzz-worthy topic of storytelling, which claims to create more engagement and sales, really mean?

Think about a typical brand story: The world is in trouble and you are here to save the day with your business' unique value proposition. It's about your brand'swhy: why you are different from other brands and your unique brand values. All of these messages matter a lot, especially in our day and age. With consumers becoming more cautious about the people behind big brands, ethical topics etc. your values and your overall branding better be clear, transparent and even maybe updated from time to time. In the worst case scenario, we have seen companies becancelled. People want to care about your brand, but customers also like it a lot if the brand cares about THEM.

This is the major difference between telling your brand story and using another narrative: your brand story is business-centric whereas narrative marketing is customer-centric. It is focused on their life, their feelings and their troubles. Here, the customer is the center of attention, not you. It engages your audience so they become active listeners, and brings clarity to what you have to offer them.

In reality, we see both approaches in marketing storytelling (and often even combined). Telling your brand story can be truly inspiring and connecting, but let us tell you that customer-centric stories are proven to be even moreeffective.

How to set up your storytelling strategy

As you know by now,brand storytellingis the act of using an emotion-evoking narrative to connect your brand to customers, with a focus on creating empathy by linking what your brand stands for with the values you share with your customer.

Classic storytelling elements include a hero, an obstacle and a resolution. The perfect story should be universally and easily understood. Good storytelling always simplifies and never complicates. You also have to make sure that your audience identifies in some sort with the hero of your story.

Let's move from theory to practice by answering the following questions:

• What is your brand' core message, values and purpose? How do these elements contribute to your customer lives?
• What is your target audience and what do they care about?
• What story do you want to tell? A brand-centric or customer-centric story? Do you want to inspire and educate or to put the focus on your products and the problems they can solve?
• On which medium do you want to share your story?

Once you decide on the story you want to tell, the actual work can start: Telling an emotional and engaging story.

Successful storytelling with Digital Asset Management and accurate branding with a DAM

This means to orchestrate your creative team effectively and to guarantee brand consistency all along the way for a complex and multinational campaign which contains emotiontriggering visuals and images. One easy way to store all relevant and validated content is via aDigital Asset Management solution. A DAM also figures as "co-creating"- a platform which comes in handy when supporting your creative team since creating such demanding storytelling campaigns involves various different experts such as screenwriters, graphic designers and movie makers. Moreover, Digital Asset Management ensures brand consistency and brand coherence by making sure that every person involved is working with validated assets that are in line with your branding.

Wedia's content pickerallows your teams to find and access media directly from within their modern workplace solutions, including InDesign and Photoshop. A real time saver which makes the work of your employees easier and allows you to bring all pieces such as imagery and music together.

Once the campaign is set up you want to make sure to diffuse your great stories on every channel needed. Speaking of stories: Storytelling on social media via stories is essential in today's marketing. These elements can be prepared in advance with the help of ourDigital eXperience modulewhich adapts assets to every channel and device.

Thanks to DAM you can also easily share your assets with external partners, such as influencers, who play a major role in brand storytelling and branding.

Examples of excellent branding and storytelling

With the right tools, successful branding and storytelling don't have to be rocket science. Let's look together at some inspiring examples of branding and storytelling:

Nike

The American multinational company can without a doubt be seen as a pioneer of effective storytelling. Their slogan "Just do it" has been around for over 33 years now and was established together with a TV commercial which features an 80-year-old man jogging across the Golden Gate bridge. This ad puts the customer at the heart of the content and makes the audience watching ask themselves, "if he can do it, why can't I?"

Since then Nike has stayed true to its customer-centric storytelling and adapted it to current topics likewomen's rights,motherhoodand cultural diversity.

Nivea

The German skin care brand proves how effective brand consistency and choice of theright colors are for your marketing strategy: The typical Nivea blue was established in 1925 and stands for the brand's values: Trust, closeness and care. Today the entire global design of Nivea is oriented on its blue brand identity, which offers very high recognition value, according to thebrand.

Nivea also gives a great example in how to create emotional storytelling around your products: Their campaign "human touch" wants to point out the importance of human skin(!) touch in everyday life. One of their commercials tells the story of a twin girl who survived thanks to her sister touching her. An ad which goes straight to the heart!

And you? Are you ready to take your marketing to the next level with storytelling and support your branding with a DAM?