Storytelling

How can storytelling be used in business?

How can you use storytelling to pitch your business idea?

How can you to tell a good story? What are the main ingredients of a compelling and memorable story?

What possibilities do you see for strorytelling in the Study Trip, e.g. how can storytelling be used to document your study trip? At what stages of the trip (before - during - after) can you use storytelling and how?

Social Media

How Virgin Australia use social media to tell stories that matter

thousands of posts published every single day across a number of platforms.

need to find a way to make your brand stand out if you want to grab some of that attention

quality over quantity. If people aren’t engaging with our content and sharing it with their friends it is a pretty good indication that no one is paying attention

evoke a strong emotional reaction in your target audience through a great story then you will capture their attention.

we tell people stories is to grab their attention for long enough that they absorb the information you are giving them. A Stanford University study showed that when provided with statistics people have a retention rate of about five to 10 per cent, compared to 65 to 70 per cent when those statistics are told as part of a story.

Triggering any strong emotion will work but some of the more common ones in successful brand stories include surprise, happiness, humour, awe, pride or nostalgia.

If people are engaging with your content through comments or reactions it means they have cared enough about your story to take the time to respond. If they shared it, it’s generally a sign that they loved your story.

We regularly have guests get in touch through social media channels or crew email to tell us about something great that has happened on board, which we can then turn into a powerful piece of content to show people what we’re about.

When a story isn’t positive for our brand, this gives us the opportunity to address the issue and do our best to find a positive resolution to the situation. The biggest challenge for us is when misinformation starts to get shared on social media, as correcting something that has inertia on social is an almost impossible challenge.

content marketing—the practice of creating informative and educational content their potential customers want to read.

A Marketer’s Cheat Sheet to Creating Engaging Content for Travelers

click to edit

  1. A picture is worth a thousand words
  1. Create content around the buyer journey
  1. So you’ve created killer content. Now what?

86 percent of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers are using some form of content marketing.

  1. Be your customers’ hero

in order to execute a truly effective travel content marketing strategy, marketers need to make it a priority to understand their customers’ problems and pain points, and create content that answers their questions and concerns. The content needs to inform, instruct, advise, explain or entertain.

In the travel industry, the funnel can be broken down into four distinct stages: inspiration, research and discovery, booking and preference, and lastly, retention. This allows you to create helpful content designed to cater to your customers’ needs throughout each and every step of their purchasing journey.

visual storytelling has become an essential component to any successful content marketing strategy and can be especially powerful when applied to industries that lend themselves to particularly well to visuals—travel being one of them. Visual storytelling allows brands to promote their products or services without having totell people about them.

without a distribution strategy, your content won’treach your audience. The most successful distribution plans incorporate a blend of owned, earned and paid strategies. As you prepare to share your content, assess your goals and your budget to determine which channels are likely to have the most impact for you brand.

A growing paid distribution tactic that travel brands are embracing is that of native advertising—the practice of reaching target audiences with branded or sponsored content. As more brands invest in producing value-adding content, they’re seeking non-interruptive distribution strategies to reach consumers with. Native advertising is emerging as a channel to accomplish just that, because the fundamental premise of native is to seamlessly integrate sponsored messages in a user’s experience.

Five ways storytelling has revolutionised the travel industry

  1. User-generated content
  1. Real life case studies
  1. Live streaming
  1. Influencers
  1. Augmented or virtual reality

VR is a form of storytelling that has come about through a natural "evolution of marketing platforms".

When Virgin Holidays broadcasted live footage of their customers on holiday, it was a pioneering move for the travel industry. During a primetime Saturday night TV slot, the holiday company’s 'Seize the Holiday Campaign' live streamed customers in 18 destinations, meeting Mickey at Walt Disney World, taking a helicopter ride over New York and snorkelling in Barbados.

Before you visit a restaurant or book a hotel, are you influenced by stories you read on user review sites? One in four of us are, apparently. User-generated content, or UGC as it’s known, completely turned the tables when it emerged over ten years ago. And amazingly, 84 per cent of us trust online reviews as much as a recommendation from a colleague or friend.

In the same way that travel companies are embracing UGC sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, some tour groups are taking things one step further by showcasing independent customer reviews on their own websites. Cue companies like Responsible Travel, which features 7,000 independent, unedited reviews on its site by real travellers.

In the same way, ambassador storytelling can encourage us to buy into a travel product, so can the rise of influencers - a buzz word that is dominating the marketing world right now. Bloggers, instagrammers and YouTubers sharing their travel stories worldwide are all contributing to the influencer phenomenon. And it’s claimed it could be most powerful in the travel industry. But why is someone’s Instagram post about a spa in Bali, so influential?
"Social media is about trust," says Nik Hewitt, head of social at digital PR agency Tank. "We trust our friends, family, peers and the influencers who we’ve been following and developed relationships with. So, if we see people have genuine experiences and genuine opinions, we’re much more likely to listen and appreciate what they have to show us than a travel brand which can sometimes appear faceless. This is gold for travel, which is very much a visual experience."

Six reasons storytelling is an essential skill for entrepreneurs to master

  1. Stories communicate values
  1. It helps people learn
  1. It makes things simple
  1. It can offer a glimpse into the future
  1. It helps you stick in people’s minds
  1. It triggers an emotional response

Using Storytelling to Pitch Startups

The best-known template for pitching startups is from “Art of The Start,” by Guy Kawasaki. Guy outlines the following ten components for a good investor pitch:

  1. Title
 2. Problem
 3. Solution 
4. Underlying Magic
 5. Business Model
 6. Marketing and Sales 
7. Competition
 8. Management Team 
9. Financial Projections and Key Metrics
10. Current Status, Accomplishments to Date, Timeline, and Use of Funds

You can quickly capture the interest of venture capitalists by describing your Problem and Solution as an Origin Story.

  1. Kick off your story by describing a real-life problem that caught the attention of the key founder. 
2. What was the founder’s first challenge, and how was it met?
3. How did the original team come together? College roommates? Through an exhaustive search process or a chance encounter? 
4. What were the next challenges, and how were they overcome? In this section of the story, introduce key team members, showing how they contributed to solutions. Use micro-stories to highlight each member’s passion and unique ability to solve a particular problem. Demonstrate the strength of the team and how its members work well together, with enough fire in their bellies to overcome all obstacles.
5. Finish your origin story by showing that your team developed a working prototype or detailed design proving a reasonable solution for the original problem.

Vision Story
A vision story is a brief description of your product or service providing value in years to come

Pitch Your Idea With The 'Star Wars' Method Of Storytelling

12 stages of a hero’s journey; stages that are consistent in myths across countries, cultures, and generations.

in all myths the hero is “called to adventure”
the hero is given a mentor who either dies or moves on, leaving the hero to fight alone and to trust in his newfound skills
the hero is faced with the “road to trials” where hurdles and challenges crop up
the “ultimate boon” where the villain is vanquished
“the elixir” where the hero receives recognition, fame, or a treasure because he or she made the world a better place.

The greatest product launches in business history closely follow the structure of epic stories like Star Wars. Campbell’s 12-stage journey is divided into three acts.

Stage two is called “Initiation,” where the battle between good and evil takes place.

Stage three is called “Return,” where the hero returns and makes the world a better place.

Stage one is called “Departure,” where the world is in equilibrium, but a catalyst prompts the hero into taking action.

Pitch to companies we visit

Pitch to schools we visit

Blog documenting trip

Report after trip

Record experiences, personal feelings ...