Story telling in marketing and technology is poised to become a huge trend especially as Big Data, Cloud, Mobility, IOT, Digital Marketing trends collide. It always was an art and will now become even more important with the exponential rise in data and competition. The key question remains how will you engage your target customer. There will be a need to keep it simple stupid (KISS) by the consumers to build a brand and generate awareness.

Here are some ways a company can explore to tell a story using

Tell a customer complaint story like TELUS. 

When you see articles like “what is TELUS doing right” in financial post and you wonder what is this article about “While complaints about Rogers and BCE  were up significantly – 32% and 42%, respectively – complaints about Telus were down 27% year-over-year”. You pause and want to read more – how did they do it. On the side of the post you see an ad which says, incredible phone meets unbeatable service. The advertisement matches the article and the reader comes out with a clear message of what is working for TELUS and how are they achieving their numbers.

Build company awareness, like MarkiTech as a startup

Over last several months as a startup – our key struggle was always how will we be able to differentiate and compete with some of the big and established marketing agencies in the marketplace. While we focused a lot on our core differentiation being technology and marketing, we need to also build brand awareness using the power of numbers and focused on projects our partners have completed, the number of products we have launched as a team over last 10 years and so on. This was at the heart of our communication strategy leveraging on the experience of the partners and build brand awareness around it. We believe we are successful thus far due to the growth in our web traffic, increase in customer leads and increase in the number of followers following our company.

Generate leads from your key audience, like IBM or IDC. When you’re going after a specific market or audience, it’s not enough to build brand awareness: you need to generate leads. A smart strategy is to create data-driven content that’s a must-read for your target—like the content IBM has built from its series of surveys with C-level executives, including The Customer-Activated Enterprise. A similar strategy has been deployed by IDC. By surveying thousands of CEOs, CMOs and other top executives—and then gating the results – IBM created a data asset that all but guaranteed it would get contact information from thousands of executives worldwide.

               As these companies show, data can be powerful in telling your story at every stage in your relationship with customers. And of course, there are many more success stories out there, particularly among companies that are in the business of telling stories with data, like media companies, data companies and graphic design shops. But the examples here show that you don’t have to be in the business of data journalism to do a great job of telling stories with data—and keeping your customers engaged.

                 At MarkiTech, we help commercialize technology products and services by focusing on digital marketing, web, mobile application development and meeting all our clients training needs. You can ping us at info@markitech.ca or ping me directly at nauman.jaffar@markitech.ca to connect on how we can help.