Why Storytelling Is Key to Designing A Successful Customer Experience
Brands have heavily relied on visual content like brand videos and power of visual storytelling to sell products and make an emotional connection with consumers, and for good reason. Individuals process visual data thousands of times quicker than text, and retain 80 percent of what they view versus 20 percent of what’s read. Most suggestions for developing impactful visual story experiences concentrate on the creative components of visual storytelling.
However, within today’s digital realm, how your customer experiences this visual, well-crafted story matters. There’s a physical experience a viewer goes through, and it’s crucial that marketers consider not just what is going to be seen, but how, where, and when it’ll be seen.
Experience Your Story Through the Customer’s Eyes
The majority of brands worldwide study their buyer personas to recognize their customer’s needs, buying journey and concerns. It is how a visual storyteller recognizes their audience. Those personas are an influence on visual storytelling creatives. But, an oftentimes overlooked element of the persona includes the buyer’s “glasses” — how are they actually going to view the visual story — and buyer’s glasses may widely vary.
Channel Energies
Social channels are important visual storytelling experience channels which promote more interaction and social sharing with consumers. Visuals can be magnets for sharing, with content that has visual elements getting as much as 40 percent more shares than content that is heavy on text. Mobile apps, and especially social networks, provide a method of delivering more engaging, richer visuals and improved user experience.
The standards and formats around mobile apps and social platforms, unfortunately, aren’t consistent. Developing different optimized visuals for each platform and obsessing over micro data that guides image selection might be bothersome; however, ensuring that your client is experiencing the visual story without any distortion or cut-off images is key to its success on those channels.
Connect Emotionally, Connect Locally
Global brand marketers ought to consider regional differences around their buyer personas. It encompasses not just the choices of visual media and storytelling arc, yet additionally the regional preferences for channels which will be utilized for seeing the stories.
Consumers are favoring brands more and more which reflect their local values, and 75 percent of global consumers state that brand origin is an important purchase driver, according to Nielsen. But, the relationship the consumer forms with the brand also can be a leading reason to choose global brands over local ones. In placing an emphasis upon local preferences for viewing platforms and visual impact, visual storytellers in global organizations may build experiences which emotionally tie viewers to brands.
Visual ‘Win’ Occurs at First Glance
Evolution ingrained us with the capability of “thinning slice,” the science of first-impressions that Malcolm Gladwell made famous within his novel “Blink.” The concept is that we’ll make snap judgments based upon patterns seen in a small quantity of time. Sight being our main sensory input results in 90 percent of the data our brains process being visual. It isn’t any surprise that our thin slicing for visuals is very fast. Where the majority of research states that brands have 7 seconds to make a good first impression with their marketing efforts, for a visual which dips to 1/2 a second.
And why should it matter to visual storytellers? A viewer’s thin slicing clock begins at first glance, even before a first image fully renders. According to a Mobify report, consumers are 48 percent more than likely to drop off slow sites. According to WOW Local Marketing, 52 percent of consumers are less than likely to interact with a brand due to a poor mobile experience. Maybe not all that shocking, ecommerce companies often are way ahead of other industries as it’ll come to leveraging image formats such as high efficiency image file format (HEIF) that offers richer colors, as well as file size savings of as much as 40 percent over conventional formats such as JPEGs. Generating compelling visuals completely and quickly is crucial to accomplishing the desired storytelling effect.
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