What’s the feeling you want to evoke in your audience with your content?

It’s important to develop story-driven content with a core of emotion. This encourages your audience to engage with your content, instead of scrolling past it with indifference.

The power of storytelling is evident in its lasting power. Compelling stories contain powerful emotions that your audience can resonate with, which then makes these stories more memorable and shareable.

Depending on the story you want to tell, your content can elicit different responses from your audience. You can’t create quick, generic stories just for the sake of posting them; that’s a surefire way to alienate your audience with inauthentic content. 

A story must have an emotional pull to be impactful, and including heart applies to story-driven content in your marketing too.

5 ways to incorporate emotions in your story-driven content

It’s important to balance the heart of your story with the key messages you want to convey to your readers. We’ve shortlisted five ways you can create impactful content full of heart and ingenuity.

1. Develop inspirational themes

Before you start creating content, you must define the central themes and key messages you want to use for your content.

Answering these questions about your business can help you develop your brand stories:

• What led you to start your business?
• What are the business challenges you’ve faced?
• How did all these challenges change you as a person?
• Why is your business solution best positioned to help your target customers?

Your answers can serve as a jumping point to identifying the values and themes you want to incorporate into your content and share with your audience. A deeper understanding of your “origin story” as a business can also help you build a stronger brand identity.

You have a discerning audience. They will see the depth of your passion for your business and commitment to your customers from the stories you share. Sharing your vision and mission with your audience through engaging content can inspire them to act positively towards your brand.

2. Incorporate a believable conflict 

The word conflict might have negative connotations, but this is necessary for a good story. This catches your audience’s attention and keeps them invested in your story. 

When you apply this concept to marketing, conflict translates as a problem or challenge that we are compelled to solve in the course of the content. This creates tension in your content and encourages your audience to interact with the story and, by extension, your brand.

This doesn’t mean you must create a conflict of epic proportions to stand out. The most important thing about incorporating conflict in your content is its believability. It needs to resonate with your customers and reflect the insights you want to share about your brand.

Your customers’ pain points are a great starting point for creating believable conflicts because they connect with your audience on a personal level. This also makes it easier for you to introduce your product or service as the solution to addressing your audience’s real-life struggles.

3. Use relatable characters in your content 

The characters in your content can be anything, depending on your business and your products and services. Your content might highlight characters that reflect your target customer’s profile, or it might include characters that represent you or your brand.

In a traditional story, a character should make at least one of the following contributions to the narrative:

• Contributes to moving the plot – If you’re introducing multiple characters in your story-driven content, they need to be essential to moving the story forward. This also ensures that your audience can easily keep track of the cast in your story.
• Contributes to the main character’s development – Supporting characters must have a strong impact on the protagonist and the story. If you include a secondary character that embodies your brand, it must help the protagonist (i.e. your target customer) overcome the conflict.
• Contributes to the resolution – This can include characters that mediate an argument or resolve a misunderstanding, and they are essential to bringing the story to a satisfactory conclusion.

Featuring relatable characters can enrich your content and draw a bigger audience to your brand. 

4. Localise your content 

Localised content marketing allows you to create story-driven content that matches a customer’s cultural expectations and norms. This allows you to attract new customers from different regions (or countries) and connect with specific audience segments on a personal level. 

Content localisation will look different in each stage of the customer lifecycle. If you’re at the discovery stage, it’s important to tailor-fit your branded content from the region you’re trying to enter. 

Meanwhile, the education stage will require you to tweak your native-language content. Depending on the country or region you’re targeting, this might require you to partner with translators to make your content accessible to the locals.

Localising content is a great opportunity to reach new markets and make your existing content more accessible, particularly if you’re aiming to expand your business to new regions. 

5. Celebrate milestones with your brand community

As you continue growing your business, it’s important to celebrate major milestones with your team and your brand community at large.

Different business owners will have different ways of celebrating milestones, but what’s important is to incorporate storytelling in your endeavours. If you’re acknowledging a change of the guards, it’s important to recognise the efforts of your founding team members. Celebrating this milestone is central to marking the transition from one generation to another.

When you’re celebrating a sales quota or an acquisition, creating stories can communicate your values and goals, which serve as a reminder of why your business is committed to serving its customers. 

Highlighting the stories from the past, like how your business started, can give you and your audiences a better appreciation of where your brand stands now and where it’s headed.

Getting to the emotional heart of your stories can elevate your content marketing and enable you to forge higher-quality connections with your audiences.

We are experienced storytellers who can help you achieve your marketing goals. Contact us.