The Future of Marketing is Personalized Digital Storytelling

The future of marketing centers around a brands' ability to deliver a magical digital experience, personalized to an individual, at the right time, with the right message, and through the right channel.

In a cluttered global marketplace, attention is a marketers biggest asset.

In order to break through the clutter, capture and hold a consumers' attention, and compel them to take action, brands must combine data with powerful stories to create personalized digital stories.

The intersection of digital marketing and physical retail

Imagine walking into a store filled with your favorite luxury brands, scanning a qr code which reveals a 10% discount if you share your email address or mobile number. You do it.

Now you're feeling good because you can save some cash if you make a purchase. You're in the market for a beautiful pair of red boots because it's starting to get cold in Boston, where you live.

You know who else is feeling good?

Savvy digital marketers because if they have the right back-end system setup they now know you're in their store. If you're already in their database, they know your preferences and past behavior. If that's the case, they can automatically trigger a communication to you in the moment.

Now imagine a few moments later you receive a text message from the retailer with a link to a luxury brand story. You click the link and a digital story unfolds about a new product.

You think, that's pretty neat. I walk into a store, scan a QR code to grab a 10% discount, and I get a text providing me access to more information.

Wow! You're amazed because the digital story is about the brand's new winter boots. It's not a product landing page, but an actual digital experience that tells a product story.

You begin consuming story content by swiping right to left on your mobile phone as the story takes you on a journey of how the boots were made and where the materials were sourced. It adds inspiration by sharing feedback from other women who have purchased these boots and absolutely love them.

The story resonates with you because it was focused around a product you were in the market for, the women who bought and loved the boots remind you of yourself, and oh yeah, they come in red!

At the end of the story there’s a message that actually tells you that these particular boots are available in your size and in your favorite red color AT THE STORE YOU’RE IN RIGHT NOW.

The message instructs you to ask an associate for helping trying them on, and recommends either Ashley or Samantha, because they are both working today and are experts in women’s boots.

You try on the boots, and fall in love.

Using your 10% off you make a purchase and leave the store feeling fulfilled, and catered to.

Experiences like this, bridging physical and digital are where marketing is heading for brands of all shapes and sizes.

The best part? With the right tools, the future of marketing is actually here today. It's all possible.

Data, marketing technology, and storytelling shape the future of marketing

By combining rich data, the right marketing platforms, and a proven storytelling framework, brands can create magical personalized experiences and deliver them to the right person, at the right moment, through the right channel.

If you want to capture attention and shape behavior in a cluttered global marketplace, you have to look towards the future of marketing, and start working on it right now.

To execute something exactly like this, it will still take some work, and is probably relegated to large consumer brands. That said, that doesn’t mean small-to-medium brands can’t execute pieces of this right now. Then in the future, as the technology gets even better, and costs come down, all brands will be able to create these magical digital experiences.

Learn more about how you can use the STORYSOFT digital storytelling platform to deliver personalized digital experiences to consumers at the right time and through the right channel.