The ability to tell an engaging story can pay dividends for your marketing strategy. We’re not talking about spinning a yarn here, that’s yesteryears advertising strategy. We’re talking about creating content with a beginning, middle and end.

Story-telling is an ancient art that is used to build a picture. If you have a way with words you can create a vision in imaginative minds. And if you don’t have a way with words, use images. This is the beauty of digital marketing.

And it’s about to become the next big trend in content marketing. Why? Because it works! And it works because this is how the brain works.

When we read content which is information packed, the language part of our brain decodes the meaning. But it doesn’t retain all the information afterwards.

When we read a story on the other hand, the cognitive wheels kick into overdrive and our neural systems relate it to our understanding of the world. When we can relate to a story we are charged with emotion and remember more details later.

So good story-telling in your marketing content generates emotion and allows the reader to recall information. It’s a match made in cyberspace.

Story-telling ideas

Telling a story in your marketing set-up is of course, quite difficult. It helps if you have a story you can draw inspiration from. But you do – everybody has a story to tell.

You can write about personal experiences; things that happened in the office or even in your personal life. Providing you can relate your story back to the point of your business message, it should work.

There is of course your brand message; how your company was formed. You don’t have to take the reader on the rollercoaster all in one piece of content, but you can flag up the significant turning points.

Content marketing tools

If you think you might struggle to project your marketing message in a story, check out Twitter’s publishing and storytelling tools.

In October, the social media network only introduced a new eco-system of tools that help you turn content into great stories.

Known as Collections API, the tools enable content curators to organise tweets that tell a story. This is much more effective that single, one-line tweets that slip of the screen within a minute.

Not only do the API tools make your content more interesting, it gives you more visibility in what is a pretty saturated social platform.

So there you go, storytelling is the way forward when developing your online marketing strategy and creating great content that engages and retains readers.