Part V: All Together Now
If you’ve been reading the entire series it won’t be a surprise to hear that a Storytelling Marketing strategy is the approach that organically integrates marketing, communications and sales. The steps taken to create a Company Story Map, a Customer Journey Map and an Execution Plan resemble the outline for a book - like this:
Book title – your brand
Chapter titles – headlines for your communications
Chapters – optimized content to deliver to customers
Plotline – integration and touch points between you and the customer
Every good story is essentially a conflict and a resolution with a plot that keeps you engaged. How’s that for simple, and integrated. Your company story is the resolution to your customers conflict. The content you deliver keeps them captivated throughout the story, so they stay to see how the story will end. Clearly not every customer will convert, there are too many factors in play, and so many competitor stories being told. But you’ll have a better shot at keeping customers on a path to purchase and get your opportunity to make the sale when you use a storytelling strategy.
Integration becomes organic, or natural if you prefer, when all the steps are taken and executed together as a whole. A Customer Journey Map, mirrored to a Company Story Map not only displays integration points, it shows the gaps to help you form a more effortless buying journey. Your story and your customer journey become the path to purchase. This concept may be difficult to visualize, but I think it is captured well in an article that quotes a fictional book called “The Last Marketing Method” written about the future of marketing --
“Even with all the strides we’ve made with Consumer Generated Pathway Marketing Strategy, we are still at the forefront of a movement that still does what marketing has always done, and that is to try to create demand for a product, regardless of customer needs. When the consumer journey and company story perfectly align across every channel, then CGPM strategy will form an organic path to purchase for the consumer as intended. As marketers we still affect too much of that path to purchase. When the entire pathway is originated, initiated, piloted and accomplished with no apparent influence from the producer, marketing will truly become integrated into the marketplace itself.”
Marketing is clearly moving in the direction of this story. Research shows that by telling a story, the retention rate for your content is over 70%. If you deliver that same content with statistics alone, the retention drops to 10%. Customer Generated Pathway Marketing may be fictional now, but the concept is solid. Sometime soon, someone, somewhere will create an algorithm that mirrors a company story to a customer journey and the content delivered will put consumers on a path to purchase without the appearance of marketing intrusion.
Until then, we have Storytelling Marketing. It takes more time and effort, but the results are the same, organic integration for your company and a more effortless buying journey for the customer.