We're often told that in order to have an effective marketing strategy we need to focus on storytelling, but how exactly do we tell that story?

To start let's look at a story and why it's important. When you showcase your story every day to the consumer you show them a continuously evolving timeline of the people involved in that story.

When the consumer sees the people involved in the story they feel a sense of connection to the characters that they see in the story and this creates an effective bond that pulls people closer to your brand.

From the characters, the settings in the story become familiar to the consumer and makes them feel as though they know the setting and are extremely comfortable in the environment.

When the consumer already feels like home and feels connected to the environment they are much more likely to come visit you or your online presence and not have any feelings of nervousness or apprehension to purchase.

The key in the story is to build on it every day with the content and information you put out. If you do this effectively you create long term brand awareness and a connection with your audience.

Now how do we actually build the story and continue to tell the story every day, week after week?

In order to do this you need to understand the components of a story and those components are:

• The characters
• The beginning, the catch that draws them in, the middle and the end
• The settings or environment

Let's break this down further and talk about the characters first. They can be either your staff, your customers or both.

One way I like to use my staff in our brand story is to put them into their own little mini series with a few of them together or solo.

We label the mini series by episodes and have a different piece of our facility in each episode with the characters reoccurring in each episode and maybe introducing new characters as the episodes progress.

In each episode our staff uses each others names, talks about the week in an entertaining way and they are always in a different setting or piece of our facility or office.

For example, we have a series we call minute with the interns. It began with our interns talking about nothing for 1 minute, but introduced them as characters and those characters being the interns.

Each episode has them talking about different aspects of their week and it's incredibly funny at the same time. This brings about the "catch" or the piece that draws the audience in by putting them into a position to where they want to watch the next episode and they start paying attention to when the next one will come out.

The story will keep progressing until the interns are no longer interns and they pass the torch to the new crop of interns, which indicates the end of their story and the beginning to a new one.

The reasons this works so well is it introduces likable, humanistic and funny characters, moves the audience to want to see more and creates the attachment, familiarity and bond to the surroundings that the viewers sees often in the video.

When creating your story think about ways that you can use your staff or customers to continuously tell a story in a way that's funny and relatable to your ideal customer. They should work to tell a different piece of the story in each episode you create and eventually pass the series on to new characters down the line.

Create the story and you create the bond, which helps ensure you are focusing on long term brand growth and equity!