Storyteller. When you hear this what comes to mind? Maybe it’s the memory of a grandparent sharing an old tale, or your favorite novel you’ve reread again and again. But, if you’re a marketer, you should be thinking of yourself. Storytelling is increasingly becoming a part of marketing just as social media or blogging. One company who has taken the call of storytelling to heart is Pitney Bowes. By producing creative and powerful content, Pitney Bowes is connecting engagement to demand.
Lorena Hathaway, Marketing Director of Demand Generation for the Americas at Pitney Bowes, explains how marketing and storytelling partner to create strong content that generates demand in a recent blog post. Hathaway dives into a Deloitte CMO study that reports most marketers “believe that our role in driving growth is to serve as the chief storyteller.” However, the study also shows that marketers must move to a new phase to get into storyteller mode.
“The next evolution of the CMO will likely be to shift from brand-builder and experience-orchestrator,” Deloitte said, “into an executive who directs and drives long-term, sustainable growth by introducing new points of distribution and identifying opportunities for expansion and acquisition.”
Over 82 percent of marketers surveyed felt they were already tackling storytelling and brand development while only 21 percent reported leading global expansion. Hathaway asks how marketers can make the leap to the Storyteller-in-Chief mentality and says that building a long-lasting story is key.
“We marketers spend a lot of time focused on narratives that build up our brand—and campaigns that generate quick hits. When we do it right, these work in lock-step, each strengthening the other—and the results can be strong. But we mostly stay within these two spaces. When it comes to revenue growth, it’s hard to measure brand-building’s impact; and campaigns quickly come and go,” said Hathaway.
“We could think about each campaign like a pilot. It needs to keep the customer tuned in. It needs to stand on its own. But, for true success, it needs to build into a series and evolve with enough ingenuity and appeal to carry it over successive seasons as well,” Hathaway explained.
To read the full blog from Hathaway, click here.
