4 Ways to Make Your Online Community Vibrant Through Digital Storytelling

“Building a brand means knowing your story and building and sharing that story.” -Tamara Mccleary

It’s no method or technique. It’s simply art.

Storytelling, today, has become a crucial element of a brand’s marketing and engagement strategy. And what better way to get your target reader’s attention than to market those stories through online communities?

Be it brand storytelling or any other form, it requires creativity, vision, and skill to garner the attention of your audience and sell them your story.

Storytelling via online communities wins the attention of your regular customers, giving them something to stay hooked to your content and remain loyal buyers of your products and services. It empowers brands to build more connected customer experiences and maintain the vibrancy of their online community.
The invaluable tool that storytelling is, you must be wondering about the ways you can use it in your online community and reap better engagement.

Let’s dive right in.

What is Digital Storytelling?

Storytelling can be defined as the art of conveying your ideas to your customers in an interactive and appealing way.

Brands can use storytelling in different forms such as video storytelling, narratives, images, and more to ignite the interest of their customers and stay connected with the brand throughout.

Here’s an interesting example:

Salesforce, a popular CRM solutions provider, understands the power of storytelling, which is why they encourage their customers to share their experiences and stories. Their customers sharing their success story is how Salesforce tells its brand story to the world.

When brands tell a true story about their success to the customers, the message comes across as authentic and relatable. There are a lot of platforms for brands to practice storytelling and build customer connections and one of the strongest platforms being online communities.

4 Ways to Practice Digital Storytelling via Online Communities

Customers long for more humane conversations with brands and admire visual communication. Storytelling is a strong medium that brands can incorporate into their marketing strategies. Online communities are a powerful network where people exchange ideas, give authentic reviews, and participate in conversations. Conveying a story through an online community enables brands to establish a more emotional connection with the users and get a conversation started.

Here are four proven ways that will empower you to leverage storytelling and maintain the vibrancy and authenticity of your online community:

1. Make Your Stories Impactful: The sole reason for you as a brand to convey a story to your community users is to resonate with them and give them a fair idea about your business culture. In order to make that happen, you must work towards making your stories impactful. Make sure you use real facts and figures to prove the authenticity of your story. You can also use videos to convey short stories using animation and doodles to make them more interactive.

2. Ask Your Users to Submit Real Stories: User engagement is the key that unlocks the potential of online communities. An online community carries real conversations between community members, thus, it is a great opportunity for brands to ask for real customer stories that they can showcase in their community and give recognition to the customers. Real user stories encourage fellow community users to contribute, taking engagement a notch higher.

3. Humanize Your Brand: Communities provide customers with a medium where they can express their opinions openly, give genuine product feedback, and develop personal and meaningful relationships. Brands can use this opportunity to show their consumers what their company culture is and that they value their user’s opinions. Brands can create short video messages to explain something the user is struggling with to make it a more personalized and humane experience for them.

4. Convey Complex Ideas Through Stories: Storytelling is an ideal medium to break down complex pieces of information and convey a message in a much simpler format. Brands can create an engaging story to present product demos that highlight the indeed to purchase a product and how it can make the user’s life easy. Communities are all about solving complex customer issues. What’s better than allowing your customers to do that themselves in a fun and engaging way?

The informed consumer today is more inclined to know the story behind ‘why’ you’re selling something. They don’t take decisions based on what the product/service is. Storytelling through communities is an effective method of conveying the ‘why’ to them in a more descriptive yet creative way.

Community storytelling allows brands to bind the interest of the users and strengthen their relationships with them. Users can convey their own true experiences and stories with fellow community members, inspiring them to keep visiting the community, taking the engagement quotient a level-up.

Infuse the power of storytelling in your online community. Learn more.