The evolution of storytelling in SMM marketing

SMM marketing

Brand Storytelling has been through an interesting journey in recent years. It has in many ways been a balancing act of core fundamentals and usage of new technology and insights. Digital platforms have been evolving every day and the job of a marketer is only getting more complex. But storytelling can help brands create a social listening environment in the industry.

How do brands tell stories and how has it evolved?

People go from one platform to another. We are moving from a situation where a single message is broadcasted to everybody to a two-way conversation that is personalized. Social Media is the biggest mediator between brands and their audience.

In the last few years, people have figured out multifarious ways of interacting with each other. And that is why social media branding comes into the limelight.

Consumer Journey has been disrupted. A dramatic switch has been seen in the way people approach ideas. Brands and people are getting comfortable saying that idea is all that matters. And the way it reaches people. One doesn’t have to think much about the constraints of the medium.

The switch happened faster when implementing the idea with technology became easier. There was a time when people would be stuck in the ‘how’. And that how was too overwhelming, one would be wary to try.

How do you stitch a team together?

There is no playbook for that but having a great ecosystem helps. The brand team needs to be holistic where you have researchers, analysts, sales professionals, etc. The brand team should ideally take ownership, execute and measure results to yield an outcome from SMM marketing.

Is Technology helping in reducing the human touch?

Technology reduces the repetitiveness of the content. Seventy percent of the work can be automated these days. A lot of unproductive time is released. Thirty percent is the thinking part. This is where the team needs to invest most of their time. And when this happens brand can easily trach the performance of media marketing and advertising.

Advertising during the Pandemic

Consumers have evolved a lot lately. The way the audience connects with the brand, its content, and creatives has changed. Since the pandemic, there has been a shift in the mindset of consumers in terms of how they see and perceive brands. But the relationship has remained the same. The number of time spent on digital platforms has increased undeniably high. People are consuming more content. Thus making it very easy for brands to execute social media monitoring.

There is a much greater desire for brands with a purpose. It can be seen that people have become more aware of the sustainability aspect. It has intensified in the new normal.

There are 3 changes that that one can see

● The amount of time spent consuming content and the engagement between consumers and brands has increased

● Empathy, brand purpose, and sustainability has become important for consumers

● Brands and consumers have become woke. People have become opportunistic and want to come off as woke.

Consumers call out wrong behaviors of brands and don’t entertain things that don’t resonate with them. This is making marketers more disciplined.

What does modern marketing require from professionals?

Modern Marketing requires you to have an ability to connect the dots, engage with data, and have the mental agility to learn, unlearn and experiment. A passion to build and not just participate makes a good marketer. People who can solve problems in a non-linear way.

First, one needs to have a futuristic approach. If you have a growth mindset, can face your fears, and are comfortable with data then you have a long way to go. A balance of right-brained and left-brained is a good skill set to have.

Second, having a strong orientation towards business. One needs to have an ownership mindset. This is because every brand wants to go global and every agency wants to manage global brands.

In the last 5 years, in the start-up ecosystem, founders are able to build a brand at a very fast rate. Having a commercial mindset and delivering things with regards to that has become important.

What lies ahead?

The fundamentals will never change. The excitement is in how engagement is getting more disrupted in different ways. For example, your brand might have done some experiments in audio but you haven’t cracked it yet. There are a lot of opportunities that you can explore. We are reaching the scale outcome of offline to the online journey of brands and that is opening the gates of the metaverse. One can almost think of creating another universe.