Create the perfect storytelling strategy to drive your marketing efforts and increase product awareness
Stories are an account of events, and a story-telling strategy is an approach you take to tell your story so that it achieves the intended goals.
What goals do you intend to achieve with your stories?
According to Aristotle, everything happens for a reason. If you do not have a purpose or goal, there is no need to move forward with product storytelling or any business/product initiative at all.
Why have you decided to leverage product storytelling? You might want to increase product awareness. You might want to increase feature adoption.
You might also want to leverage product storytelling to push/change some narratives about your product.
Whatever your reason is, clearly defining your goals is the first stage in developing a solid product storytelling strategy.
Who are you telling your stories to?
You must be more strategic than your competitors when using storytelling to raise product awareness. You must be very selective and specific about who you tell your stories.
You need to clearly define who your target audience is. There is no way "African small enterprises" can be your target market. That is too broad. This could be rephrased as "African small businesses that desire to transition to remote form of working and tie the remuneration of their employees to the goals, milestones, and key results they achieve."
Keep an eye on the characters in your stories and make sure they represent your target demographic.
Do you know your story’s protagonist?
Given that your product will be the protagonist or hero of your stories, you must be well knowledgeable about it. You must understand your product's value proposition.
You should request the product team's user stories or create your own, using what you already know about the product.
User stories are a reliable source for obtaining the problems that your solution helps your target market solve, and you would need this in product storytelling.
The purpose of connecting every story you write to a user story is to highlight the solution your product is offering.
All your product's functionality and features solve a specific problem, and it is best if you understand their values and write about them (not as features, but as solutions).
Visual Story Telling
Apart from creating amazing characters and scenes, adding visuals of your product to your stories would direct the imagination of your readers to where you want.
By inputting visuals in your story, your readers imagine what you want them to imagine.
At least, remarkably close to what you want them to imagine. Add mock-ups of your product, and let every screen in your story display your product.
If you want your readers to know that your product is for Africans, intentionally create an African setting in your story.
Where to tell your stories
You can share your stories on social media. You can post slides on Instagram, and you can turn your story into a thread on Twitter.
Your story can be a video script (which is highly recommended), emails, or any other channel you consider appropriate for your story and audience.
The general rules governing these channels' use would remain in effect.
So, for your emails, a catchy subject is essential.
Other points to consider include:
Employ suspense, climax, and anti-climax in your stories
Incorporate emotions (anger, sadness, disappointment, humour, happiness, etc.) in your product stories
Track the conversion of your stories and measure success.
Draft short stories: The attention span of people reduces yearly. If it is a video, 2 minutes is enough. If it is an Instagram post, 5 to 6 slides are enough.
It is critical to approach product storytelling strategically. Knowledge of your goals, target audience, product, and communication channels for your stories, and an obvious display of this knowledge in your stories will put you two steps ahead of your competitors.
Now that you understand what your story is, why you are writing it, who you are writing for, who your protagonist is, and how to control your readers' imaginations, go ahead and write your first product story.
