A tiny man stands in front of a giant opened book with empty blank pages.
Sponsored Article

How to Prepare Your Digital Storytelling Strategy for the Future

4 minute read
Andie Burjek avatar
SAVED
A recent webinar talked about how companies can prepare for the future and make their storytelling more effective.

The digital world is crowded with distractions. As customers become engaged with more new channels, it becomes increasingly more complex for brands to directly share their story with customers in ways that engage them. To be successful, companies must find a way to tell stories that hold people’s attention and resonate with them.

This is more complicated than it sounds. The most challenging aspect of storytelling is creating a plan and a proper strategy to share content pieces, according to Thomas Peham, the vice president of marketing at Storyblok. Peham recently hosted a webinar titled “Shaping the Future of Digital Storytelling” and talked about how companies can prepare for the future and make their storytelling more effective. Below are some of the key points of his presentation.

Deliver Consistency in Your Digital Storytelling

People expect consistency in their experiences with a brand, Peham says. If someone has a good experience interacting with a company on one channel, that positive opinion of the brand will be disturbed if they later have a bad experience on a different channel. Suddenly, they don’t know if they can trust this company when they need to reach out for important information or to have an issue resolved. How can they know if they should expect quick, efficient, helpful answers or something totally opposite? Consistent messaging across channels is ultimately key to create trust in customers, Peham says.

Embrace Omnichannel to Spread Your Story

Only 6% of companies are actually capable of consolidating data into a single view of the customer to create personalized experiences across channels, Peham says. This begs the question of what the majority of companies are actually doing to personalize various omnichannel experiences. According to the Cisco Annual Internet Report, U.S. consumers have an average of 13.4 devices or connections that they use to interact with the digital world. (This number is 9.4 devices or connections for consumers in Western Europe.) With so many potential touchpoints, omnichannel messaging isn’t optional. In fact, it is expected to play a key role in CX in upcoming years, Peham says.

“[There are] five to 10 interfaces where we need to schedule content in a contextual, personal way,” he says. Just a few years ago in 2015, brands mostly had to concern themselves with browsers and smartphones. Now, there are also tablets, smart watches and voice assistants, among many others. While individual customers may have their own personal preferences for use cases of each device, it’s very difficult to keep up with that and the changing nature of customer preferences.

Learning Opportunities

Collaborate Across Departments

To be successful in digital storytelling, companies need to streamline content operations and make sure that it does not exist in a silo. “Telling stories is not something that sits in one team in one department.” Peham says. “A lot of different teams lack visibility into other teams’ content assets.”

Currently, only 44% of marketing teams have complete visibility into other departments’ content, Peham says. Without this full visibility across the organization regarding which stories are available on which channels at any given time, it’s difficult to maintain a consistent communication strategy. A headless CMS can help scale organizations' storytelling by giving users from any department a single backend from which they can post to any channel.

Prepare Your Storytelling Strategy for Future Trends

Silos hurt personalization. In order to personalize content, you have to centralize it, Peham says. Start with tools that allow you to streamline content as simply as possible in one place. Headless technology is especially helpful because it allows companies to work with the front ends they already have in place instead of having to adapt something totally new.

“We believe that the future is headless,” Peham says. “We have more channels ahead of us. Technology has to be headless, as it will allow you to think about all these channels and connect to them in a faster, more streamlined way.”

Watch the on-demand webinar here.

About the Author

Andie Burjek

Andie Burjek, based in Chicago, sits on the research team at Simpler Media Group, owner of CMSWire. She is a regular contributor to CMSWire. Connect with Andie Burjek:

Main image: Adobe Stock