With the financial sector being a highly emotional and often stressful area of individuals’ lives, telling customers stories as a marketing strategy can create relatability, build customer relationships, and generate greater brand trust. Whether it’s someone getting out of debt, investing for the first time, or purchasing a home, creating a marketing strategy around digital storytelling can capture the attention of interested customers and appeal to them emotionally. Your goal with digital storytelling should be to connect and educate customers, help and inspire individuals to take control of their financial struggles, and generate greater engagement. Here we’ll share why your finance brand should focus on digital storytelling and showcase the brands that are nailing it.
Benefits of digital storytelling
Digital storytelling attacks the pathos of consumers, drawing them in emotionally through relatable and shareable content. By sharing aspects of the finance industry everyone can relate to your finance brand can build authentic relationships with customers. In fact, 86% of consumers say authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they like.
By sharing customers’ financial stories you can provide an inspiring resource for consumers that offers solutions to consumers’ financial struggles. This enables customers to form a personal connection with your finance brand contributing to greater brand recall, long-term customer retention, and increased credibility. With companies that provide an emotional connection for customers outperforming the sales growth of competitors by 85%, it indicates a growing desire from consumers to see their struggles reflected in financial marketing.
“ 86% of consumers say authenticity is a key factor when deciding what brands they like indicating a growing desire from consumers to see their struggles reflected in financial marketing. ”
How to share your stories
Finding and capturing your customers’ stories is the first aspect of digital storytelling. Identifying the raw and emotional aspects that are both inspiring and relatable is critical to engaging with your customers. It’s also important to consider your specific target audience. If you’re a health insurance company wanting to target young people, then sharing a story of someone much older who has debilitating health conditions that utilises your services may not be the right story to tell. Be smart with selecting your stories and ensure they’re tailored and personalised to your audience.
Once you have captured and created your customer’s story it’s important to share it in a smart but authentic manner. While sharing across social media is vital, it’s also important to ensure the story remains tailored to the platform. While on YouTube your finance brand can have a longer video, sharing it in its entirety across Instagram, Facebook, and X wouldn’t be recommended. Instead, cutting it into short, digestible videos and images will do much better on your other social media channels.
Creating a content hub is also a great method of sharing your digital storytelling. This offers a valuable resource for consumers as it offers an opportunity for them to find and locate stories that resonate with them.
Finance brands nailing it
There are a few finance brands nailing digital storytelling by sharing and creating emotional and authentic stories from their customers.
The NRMA’s Story of Help content hub has won several awards, like best finance brand at the International Content Marketing Awards, for their real and inspiring digital storytelling. Centred on telling the stories of Australians who have helped others, NRMA is creating authentic relationships with consumers. In fact, since its launch this project has increased NRMA’s ranking for social share of voice from 11th to 1st.
In America, Allstate’s award-winning digital storytelling campaign ‘Worth Telling’ has seen them tell the stories of 3-8 people who are making a difference. Using a combination radio, social media, and its own content hub, Allstate is effectively reaching its target audience on a range of different platforms. By promoting their customers’ own stories it builds trust and relatability driving consumer engagement enabling lead generation and business growth.
Digital storytelling and the financial industry are a match made in heaven
By appealing to customers’ emotions and sharing relatable content your finance brand can build strong connections with consumers and generate greater engagement with your distribution channels. Not only that, but digital storytelling can improve brand awareness, build trust, and improve long-term retention as customers are educated and inspired through others’ stories.
