Example Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge & Selection  I work as a Global Marketing Manager and Creative Strategist for a South Korean tech company  and our mission is to market our group communication app in the US and generate an active  user community. Our product is a utility - something that is handy and solves the everyday small  problems of group communication. This is the challenge as we are not a super innovative  news-worthy product that is easier to get people’s attention and to market effectively. This is  where I selected ‘Storytelling’ as a tool to create marketing campaigns that worked.         Application   We advertise our app on social where content is king and people are there to be entertained or  to find knowledge that is useful to their lives. When we advertised with ad creatives that were  dry and simply explained the various features it had, the ad campaigns had very poor  performance. People are not computers that are just looking for information - they are emotional  beings who have jobs, families, beliefs, and values. This is why storytelling is so powerful. In  order to create better ad creatives, I first researched our target audience to understand what  they think, feel, and value in their lives - and also how they communicate with their group. With  these insights, I began to script and produce ad creatives that have a narrative element relevant  to the target audience’s lives. This could be a situation they faced in their daily lives or a strong  belief they held. Storytelling was carefully considered in both the visual and copywriting parts of  the ad. Visually, people can relate to the things and scenes that they see everyday, Also if those  things are portrayed in an intriguing visual style it will help to catch people’s attention while they  fast scroll through their social feed.         Insight & Approach  After applying storytelling to our marketing campaigns, our target audiences resonated strongly  with our ads and we saw a tremendous increase in performance. Because we were trying to  think from the audience’s perspective and telling a story relevant to them, our audience were  engaged and happy to learn about our product. they were commenting, tagging, and sharing our  ads with their friends who they thought the app would be useful for. As a result, we were able to  acquire hundreds of thousands of installs from our campaigns and build out an active user  community in the US market. I would say storytelling is a key tool that is absolutely necessary  for all businesses to understand and to utilize.

