Story-driven Social Campaigns: How to Engage and Influence Your Audience to Take Action

For thousands of years, stories have been the most authentic way of spreading ideas, including marketing ideas.

Whether you sell to Americans, Europeans, or Asians, great stories can trigger their emotions and influence them to take a desired action. 

Social media can now help you amplify your business stories.

This guide will dive into social media storytelling best practices and the best content ideas to feature your brand stories.

How storytelling works for social media campaigns

Storytelling is the process of narrating events, whether real or fictional, to entertain or push a message.

For your business, storytelling is a way to share your:

• Customer stories and wins
• Product’s potential for transformation
• Business’s social impact
• Employee experiences

While it’s easy to think that storytelling is like writing a novel or a long story about a customer, there are more ways to tell stories for your business on social media.

Storytelling is about narrating events that have happened to customers or could happen to prospects if they use your product. 

It’s about building a mental picture that hits your audience’s emotional pain points to move them to act.

Storytelling is a vehicle, albeit a very effective one, to push your marketing messages on social media.

Story-driven campaign best practices

Here are 5 best practices to create effective story-driven social campaigns:

Connect stories to business results

Business storytelling should go beyond digging up emotions, it should influence the audience to take profitable business actions.

These actions will differ for various campaigns, but must be spelled out before creating stories.

Then, the actions should connect to business goals, such as:

• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Product promotion
• Customer acquisition
• Audience growth
• Sales

Setting these goals will help you determine the best narrative angle and storytelling format for your stories.

For example, Louis von Ahn, Duolingo founder, narrated Duolingo’s origin story in a TED talk. This content increased the brand’s awareness and leads.

At least, this video convinced me to download Duolingo and start Spanish lessons.

Understand your audience’s needs and motivations

No story has a universal appeal, no matter how sticky it may be. Stories affect people based on their needs, experiences, and motivations.

The heavy lifting of your story is understanding what can connect with your audience.

And you can only achieve this by having as many details as possible in your buyer persona, including:

• Gender
• Location
• Income
• Pain points
• Situations around pain points
• Motivations
• Work processes

To have these details, you have to know and speak to your ideal buyers regularly.

Doing this will help you create relatable stories for them.

Get involved in your industry and product use cases

Once you participate in your customers’ daily activities and industry events, you’ll start seeing some story themes.

As you experience the situations your customers go through, you’ll better understand their struggles and why they need to eliminate them.

To do this, you have to:

• Use your product in all possible use cases.
• Meet with customers regularly to discuss their processes and problems.
• Perform experiments with your product to uncover new stories.
• Participate in industry events.

“Storytelling is based on something that you’ve personally observed or are a part of, or something you heard about and pass on,” Nelson Farris, Nike’s Chief Storytelling Officer, said in an interview.

He also explained how having sports people at Nike helped the company get involved with sports events and athletes, leading to better product and story ideas.

The best stories are hidden in your customers’ experiences, and the best way to see those stories is to be a part of the experiences.

Customize the content for each social network

Each social media network has its ideal content resolution and length.

For example, YouTube favors long content while Instagram and TikTok favor short content.

While you can publish the same story on multiple social networks, customize it for the best performance on each network.

Experiment with proven storytelling formats

Marketers and movie writers have refined many storytelling formats to engage and evoke the best emotional effects on audiences.

These storytelling formats include the:

• Hero’s journey
• Three-act structure
• Inverted pyramid
• Story circle

That said, no storytelling format works for all situations.

So, experiment with a few formats to see the best ones for each marketing use case.

Alternatively, study your competitors and try formats that already deliver results for them.

As you create more stories, you’ll uncover the storytelling formats that work best for your brand.

Best storytelling post ideas for social media

1. Testimonials

Testimonials are stories used to push the narrative that your product has met or exceeded customer expectations.

In testimonials, customers explain how your product solved a critical problem for them.

These stories aim to convince prospects with similar problems to try your product.

To create testimonials, reach out to fans of your product and ask questions that can lead to the best narratives.

For example, Slack featured a testimonial from one of its customers on X (Twitter):

In this testimonial, the customer explains how they use IT agents to improve customer service.

2. User-generated content (UGC)

Customers create user-generated content (UGC) to show their experience with your product.

Since this content is created by customers, it’s way more relatable and convincing than your brand content.

To get the best UGC:

• Specify a branded hashtag and tell customers to use it in their content.
• Repost the best stories to encourage customers to create more content.

BMW reposts an image of a customer’s car on the beach to celebrate National Beach Day.

This post tells a customer’s adventure story that BMW made possible.

3. Case studies

Case studies are a form of testimonials that go deeper into a customer’s processes.

Case studies are often used in software and other technical products.

These deeper stories help prospects see how your product can fit into their processes.

To create a case study, you have to build narratives around:

• The problems your customer encountered
• Why they chose your product
• How your product helped them solve their problems
• The improvements (in numbers) they got as a result of using your product

So, your questions should lead to the best narratives around these pillars.

Then, reach out to happy customers to get their responses. A case study can be written or in video format.

Here’s a HubSpot case study featuring Elizabeth Boyer, VP of Business Unit Marketing at Kelly Services:

She went through the company’s struggles when it split into multiple business units and how HubSpot helps the units collaborate effectively.

4. Behind the scenes

Successful products and companies often pique people’s curiosity about what goes on behind the scenes.

These include employee workdays, manufacturing processes, fun facts, and more.

By showing behind-the-scenes content, you can better engage and connect with your audience.

To create behind-the-scenes content, think of the best stories to captivate your audience and put your brand in a good light.

Patagonia shows behind-the-scenes process of designing its jackets, which took elements from nature.

5. Influencer collaboration

Collaborating with industry influencers helps you leverage their popularity to push your brand’s narrative.

Collaborating to create engaging stories can improve your brand’s reach, emotional connection, and reputation.

To do this, find influencers whose stories align with your brand values. Then, reach out to them about stories that work for them and your brand.

Red Bull tells a story of perseverance in collaboration with one of its athletes, Janja Garnbret.

It also shows that athletes often go through many failures before achieving success.

6. Product promotion

Using the right stories to promote your product builds emotional connection with prospects and encourages them to try it.

Stories make your product messages sticky, helping you stay on top of prospects’ minds.

To create the best product promotion stories:

• Build stories around the problems your product will help users solve.
• Dig deep into their pain points and the right emotional elements to connect with them.

Adidas tells a story to promote products for runners planning to run 100 kilometers.

The story shows how each product will help the runner during the long-distance race. 

7. Employee stories

Employees toil in the background to serve your customers with great products.

While many work to take care of themselves and their families, they also develop motivations around serving customers.

This often develops from seeing how their work changes customers’ lives.

Employee stories celebrate the unsung heroes behind the products customers love.

Since most customers are employees, they’ll appreciate this gesture from your brand and cherish your products more.

To create these stories, find suitable themes, including sacrifices employees make or how they serve customers.

Then, build a narrative that aligns with your brand values.

Duolingo often publishes employee stories showing how they work to help language learners.

These stories promote some of Duolingo’s work and hiring values.

8. Causes

Whether you commit to green manufacturing or offer homes to the homeless, causes show your business is committed to more than profits.

Apart from contributing to humanity, causes also improve your brand reputation.

When promoting causes, make sure they’re relevant to your product.

For example, Airbnb tells a story to promote its free emergency housing for people displaced by disasters.

9. Business milestones

Business milestones like raising funds, serving a number of customers, or opening a new location should never be just about your brand.

It’s also an opportunity to tell a story of why you got into business and how you plan to serve customers better after this milestone.

This story will renew your emotional connection with customers and attract more customers.

In one of the most effective business stories I’ve seen, Owner.com CEO Adam Guild announced the company’s Series C funding.

In this story, he not only narrated the origin story of helping his mother’s business, but also exciting features customers should expect soon.

Conclusion

With the right stories, you can reach a bigger audience, convert more prospects to customers, and keep more customers.

Bookmark this guide so that you can refer to it for your story-driven social campaigns.

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