Excite customers with video storytelling in your content marketing mix

Storytelling has been around for many years and used by smart marketers to hook you on their brand messaging. Aligning your message with stories that: resonate, entertain, educate or delight your clients, can be used to pull clients through the purchase cycle and enforce bonds with brand advocates.

Typically they focus on a company’s history, morals, virtues and what they stand for. The best, step away from “me, me, me” messaging and yet, you are still left unequivocally knowing that was a “Kodak moment” or “just do(ing) it”.

The combination of storytelling and content marketing is however still in its infancy. Creating compelling stories that move you (hopefully towards a purchase) be it short or long format, is rarely tied into an overarching story, strategy or company raison d’être.

For others though, storytelling and the brand story even takes them as far as changing the company’s direction. For example, Red Bull is now a publishing and media house in my mind.

But there can be subtle new areas to explore too.

A mini pivot through content and storytelling

Here are the results of a collaboration project by Marcio Kogan and the team at Studio MK27 that houses (sorry, bad pun) a story within the results of their services. Portraying a day in the life of their V4 house.

Originally designed for the Brazilian pavilion at the Venice Biennale architecture festival, the film was segmented into snippets that attendees could view through screens. This encouraged them to explore the pavilion and Brazil’s offerings. A neat form of experiential marketing.

Coming home, the clips were merged and re-purposed into a clip that is now with a good 28 K plays on Vimeo. A great case of cross platform marketing. Offline, online, in social media and embedded in a number of key architectural website and blogs. They’ve also sparked a new tangent for the practice and a push in the short film direction. 

The results

NOTE – It’s not really suitable for work, featuring some of the rooms in full ‘use’.

Still it entertained me, and I got a good feel for some of the spaces, dimensions and ambience of the house. I’m now even more convinced Márcio is top of my list to design my future house.

PEEP_ film exercise #1_ La Biennale di Venezia from studio mk27.

The key opportunities

Storytelling is an art all marketers need to master.

The notion of your product as a platform for storytelling is compelling and provides a number of opportunities and angles to explore.

• It gives you the opportunity to subtly communicate features through benefits.
• You can educate clients on how to get the best our of you product throughout the story.
• You can entertain them, give them a feeling for the people behind the brand, while showing off your product

Scaling and ensuring consistency in messaging is the hard part .So ensure your story and strategy are robust and well told. You’ll need fans internally to build support your marketing efforts before that content goes viral.