Storytelling is commonly associated with the “Once upon a times…” at the beginning of children’s books or Disney princesses living “happily ever after.” However, in advertising, businesses are also presented with a variety of ways to tell a story. Storytelling goes way beyond sharing your company’s history within a tab on your website—it’s a style of advertising used to humanize a business.
With the ever-growing emphasis on digital and content marketing, businesses are using storytelling to more effectively communicate their brand personality and values with current and prospective customers. And while the main principles of storytelling may remain the same in marketing, its convergence with the digital world has presented businesses with a wide variety of channels to employ this messaging strategy. Here a few exciting apps and tools that will help you tell your brand story:
- Trio – Memes are an easy way to encourage audiences to share opinions and experiences. With the Trio app, marketers can curate movie clips, memes, and music with their own digital content (Instagram photos or Vine videos) and captions. These mashed-up mini-stories can then be shared through email, Facebook, or Twitter.
- Dipity: Through Dipity, businesses can map out the history of anything by creating a horizontal, multimedia timeline. Users can upload short or long entries, links, photos, and videos. This is a great tool for business to share company milestones or announce product launches. Many also use it to live blog trending news stories relevant to their business’ industry.
- Infogr.am: Infogr.am is very simple, user-friendly tool to create both static and interactive infographics. Users can import raw data, and the site will turn the data into a chart or complete infographic in minutes. (It should be noted that infographics get retweeted 832 percent more than articles or images on Twitter.) It’s an easy and effective way to repurpose old “how-to” blog posts.
- Projeqt: Projeqt is a unique tool that allows marketers to integrate live tweets, blog feeds, interactive maps, audio notes, and video into dynamic presentations. Projeqt presentations can be embedded anywhere and viewed on any device with a modern browser.
- Story Wheel: Use Story Wheel to help create a story with your business’ Instagram account. The tool can be used to introduce your company’s staff, highlight products or services, or tell the story of a charitable event, award banquet, or industry conference that was attended. Story Wheel also allows you to narrate your photos’ story through audio clips.
Sources: http://www.edudemic.com/diy-infographics/, http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/trio-content-mashup-app/616619
