Is The New Storytelling Strategy Of Modern eCommerce Business Impactful?

If you look at the web content strategies and the design elements across the web and mobile apps, you must have got an air of how brands are increasingly focusing on storytelling. Storytelling effect after remaining active with web design and contents now silently made an entry into eCommerce stores as well. Yes, thanks to storytelling, brands in eCommerce stores are now capable to generate more traction than ever before.

Why Storytelling Is So Important?

Human being are born storytellers and they never get rid of stories and threads of narratives in their everyday life. Whenever we encounter an incident or an object it always reminds us of the interconnected development of events leading to what appears before us. Every big brand also tells a story, in however a subtle or loud manner. Now, this storytelling has become the marketer’s secret weapon to engage customers and promote products. Just because we are habituated to stories, by storytelling brands can take advantage of this natural weakness of customers. When we feel like part of the story, we easily nod to the concept and buy the product sooner or later.

eCommerce Storytelling: The New Promising Kid In The Block

Storytelling after its successful stint as an engaging design concept and strategy for content development now has made an entry into the world of eCommerce with a lot of promises. In eCommerce, it is nothing but the company produced a narrative about all the products it sells. It is also about what the eCommerce store tells to customers about its becoming, its values and the specialties it achieved in customer service.

All the things mentioned above can be told in bits and pieces and in a very detached way. But that hardly connect customers emotionally. Such a dry presentation of information fails to make customers feel part of the brand’s becoming. On the other hand, when the same set of information is presented with an emotional narrative relating the customer contexts it makes sense and makes the audience feel like part of the brand’s story. This is how storytelling really plays an important role in boosting business conversion.

In this context, it is important to remember storytelling is never means howling about your brand and how great it is. You need to invoke emotions that connect your audience best and by doing that you need to help them find your brand relevant in context to that emotion. To do this your eCommerce store needs to consider a few strategic, design and development elements like the below mentioned.

● Your store must have a clear business objective.

● The store must have a proper target audience.

● The store must invoke certain feelings, emotions, or ideas with its look, feel and on-page content.

● It must use appropriate and relevant images that elicit the same feeling and emotional content. You need to use only high-quality images.

● The design should be totally devoid of all sorts of visual distractions and offer a clean layout.

● The website must have clear call-to-action buttons to help customers to progress towards business conversion as the story unfolds and motivates them.

● As an additional boost to their engagement, it is important to use product reviews and comments.

● You also need to allow customers to easily interact with the store with straight questions and queries.

Using The Storytelling On Social Channels

Let us start our discussion with the social media channel where instances of storytelling run galore and where eCommerce stores can really take advantage of this marketing approach. But it is easily understood that storytelling doesn’t work in a similar manner with every social channel. Let us explain here some effective ways eCommerce stores can utilise storytelling in every social channel.

● Facebook is where young people irrespective of gender spend a lot of time and this is why stores selling consumer products enjoy better traction on this channel than elsewhere.

● Twitter as the microblogging channel is best for delivering news updates and for keeping your audience abreast of all the new development in your store.

● Pinterest is a channel for visual contents that enjoy more traction among the audience of the fair sex. Naturally, clothing, fashion, and decorative items nicely fit into this channel. It has been seen that food and beverage products also get good traction on Pinterest.

● Instagram is another popular visual channel where stores selling fashion, clothing, and entertainment products enjoy great traction.

Mastering The Craft Of Storytelling For Products

Great stories are timeless not just in the literary world. But timeless stories are found in the world of ads and promotions as well. Beside a Henry James masterpiece like the “Turn of the Screw”, we easily remember the craft of every Johny Walker ad concept. Both are examples of the storytelling craft they carry for the timeless charm. Putting the entire story together by using the context, available product information, sense of humour, design and visual elements is what matters. The storytelling is all about progressively revealing your brand with a charming narrative consisting of mainly visuals and scraps of relevant text.

Let us explain the key elements of eCommerce storytelling in brief.

● First of all focus on telling a story that orients the audience with solving their problems. You need to explain how your products solve problems for your audience in real life situations.

● Set an achievable and measurable goal first. Instead of having a sky-high girl have a realistic and measurable goal. For this start with a small target like 1000 monthly visitors. Accordingly, set the exact steps to achieve this. To ensure the set number of visitors target an achievable number of long-tail keywords. Now track the performance of these keywords through Google analytics. Now break down the tasks into a schedule making the entire task more achievable and systematic.

● Instead of only weaving texts with visuals, always utilise the power of infographics or statistics used in combination with appropriate images. The statistics weaved into your eCommerce storytelling only enhances your credibility.

● Use the power of persuasion for effective storytelling. Without persuading people you can’t influence them to purchase your products. Persuasion works like a silent push towards sales. Persuasion works best by presenting reviews and comments that come as credible social proof ending up influencing lot many people.

● Lastly always embrace stories that enhance the chances of making bigger sales. For example, when you are selling an innovative kitchen product, you need to tell stories that help people connect to such innovation as part of a stylish or creative lifestyle. That’s how you need to craft stories that cater to your audience and boost sales.

Conclusion

Storytelling will continue to hold the key for branding and business conversion across eCommerce stores. What was just a design strategy for years now has become a strategic design and development approach for eCommerce stores to push business conversion.