Story-based marketing is a growing, dramatic change in the way that brands are connecting and building loyal relationships with their customers. This approach is more powerful than you might think. It's developed beyond simply including stories in the engagement process. Four characteristics help define the difference between traditional and story-based marketing.
A common (but outdated) definition of story-based marketing goes something like this:
Values.
For many organizations, this is a concept passed around during high-level board meetings, or developed in the strategic planning or story brand process, but quickly forgotten. Even in a workplace that has their values displayed and posted for frequent employee review, company values still often feel dusty and inanimate -- not active verbs as much as required reading once or twice a year.
But now, more than ever, your corporate values are on display.
In the beginning, there was only one form of marketing. This marketing focused on pushing out advertising that interrupted people (think TV commercials, radio/magazine ads). Called outbound marketing, it used interruption as the primary tool and placed a product or service in the way of the actual information or entertainment that people were consuming. This form of marketing began to shift with the introduction of the internet. In 1999, Seth Godin published a book called, "Permission Marketing," during the era in which search engine optimization (SEO) and inbound marketing began to take shape. But is inbound marketing alone, enough to create growth?
The promise of technology for business is its ability to make big resources available for everyone. It’s an equalizer. The personal applications have changed entertainment, personal networking, finance, job hunting, and many other parts of our lives. In business, we look to technology accelerators in ecommerce, cloud services, software that is developed through broad crowdsourcing, and other systems that allow us to do more with less time and money.
You have many choices for marketing and advertising - social networks, digital ads, print ads, email, direct marketing. Which one rises to the top? If you are in healthcare, technology, education or just about any industry, you may have thought your website was not that valuable because it hasn't been bringing you customers. If this is you, you need to think again. 2017 research reinforces the fact that people who are on their way to becoming customers because they want to expand their learning will go to your website more than any other resource.
What people see when they search for a term that has local services attached is different than what they get when they are searching more globally. Local and global search are both beneficial, and it's important to know how they work to connect someone to your home care marketing. Think of this as two kinds of web searchers:
SEO brings you “organic traffic,” which delivers to customers who are searching resources that solve their challenges. At the top of the same page that the organic listings appear are both the local SEO results and paid search ads. Paid ads are marked with an advertisement symbol, and people know they are click-us ads that appear on the top of the search page. While these ads are working better than they used to, people still trust the organic listings and the local listings more than they trust paid advertisements. But that does not mean they have no value. For most home care agencies that want to grow, a combination of paid and organic listings is most effective. However, reliance on paid ads only is not a good strategy for sustaining business growth.
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