Stories get people engaged.
Narrative is how we make sense of the world around us, and storytelling is probably as old as our species.
Because it's so closely intertwined with our cognition as a whole, storytelling is a powerful tool for marketers.
There are many opportunities to tell stories about your brand online, and one of the less obvious is Facebook ads.
You don't have to have your various ads display to people at random.
In fact, creating a sequence of ads connected by a narrative thread can be a lot more impactful.
You can use Facebook ads to tell a story using this simple three-step process, recommended by SEMRush in a recent article.
From framing your brand in terms of a desirable lifestyle, to presenting the product, to closing the deal, this simple sequence of ads takes your audience on a journey from beginning to end.
Here's how you can structure your narrative ad sequence for maximum engagement.
Sequence Your Ads to Shape a Story
Paradoxically, ads’ sequencing is a quite obvious technique, but for most brands is still a vague idea to try. The core trick here is to post your ads not randomly, but according to a particular scenario. The goal is to stepwise turn your readers into customers, so your ad plot becomes a variation of a funnel, the bottom of which contains a CTA button. The classic example is Refinery29.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/value-of-storytelling-on-facebook
The scheme is the following:
1. In the first post, you introduce your brand and its lifestyle niche. At this stage, you are not only presenting your product but give it a context that helps the targeted audience to associate with your brand.
2. The next step is presenting your product. This post aims to show what you can particularly offer to your audience. How you work for the lifestyle and values you’ve presented before. It can have a form of a products’ page with a clear and stylish description of items. The visual side of the page is critical here.
At this step, you can strengthen your game plan by using ad carousel. It gives a fuller impression of the product since each picture adds new details to an item description. Besides, here you can work with original design decisions. For instance, Primary.com put the shorts in the rainbow-like order, which also shapes a kind of a plot with a development and a final point. To learn more about carousels read the comprehensive Facebook guide on the topic.
Source: https://www.elirose.com/2017/05/best-facebook-carousel-ad-design/
3. At the final stage, tell your audience what to do next. In other words, place a clear CTA that plays the happy-ending role in the whole story. The button should encourage users to participate and make their move: sign up, shop or go to the webpage to learn more.
This year ads’ sequencing gains its momentum. The tools for social media storytelling prove the point. For example, the Flighting feature helps to organize sequencing according to the type of storytelling strategy you opt for.
The described 3-steps scheme represents the funnel-based storytelling. Yet, it’s not the only way to tell a story on social media pages.
You can learn more about using the power of storytelling to connect with your audience over at the SEMRush blog.
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