To adapt to this reality and not miss opportunities to impact their audiences, brands are betting, or should be betting, on transmedia strategies that manage to build solid stories capable of living independently on each medium and that, at the same time, are sufficiently relevant and attractive to capture the user's interest.
Why build relevant stories for our audience? 65% of our conversations consist of stories we tell ourselves, as stories remain the best vehicle for integrating valuable and applicable data into our lives. Our brains process lived and recounted experiences in the same way, thanks to mirror neurons, and stories are memorable and can be remembered even after decades, when other information has been forgotten.
For this reason, we understand that the effectiveness of any message increases greatly if it is transmitted through a story, achieving greater impact, awareness, recall and user interaction on the part of brands.
What is transmedia storytelling?
Transmedia storytelling arises from a change in the agents involved in the communication process.
On the one hand, brands have been forced to give advertising phone number list up their role as “one-way communicators” to start listening to users and reconnecting with them. On the other hand, audiences have abandoned their passive “listener” role to immerse themselves in proactive conversations with brands.
In this new context of dialogue, brands began to bet on a new way of telling stories that appealed to emotions and thus reached consumers more effectively. And this is where storytelling or transmedia narrative comes into play.
It is a story that is told through multiple media and platforms. For example: the narrative begins in a comic book, continues in a television series, expands into a feature film and ends by incorporating new interactive adventures in video games, followed by dissemination by users on different social networks.
Transmedia storytelling, however, is not about replicating the same story on different platforms, but rather creating different pieces of a story that connect to each other on each social network, inviting users to consume them and participate in their development. The message should not be the same on each platform.
The story must be tailored to each of them and to the user experience to encourage their participation, using different formats and content that complement each other, resulting in a unified story that provides much more value. It is about growing and expanding a story, adding the unique pieces of the narrative expressed in each medium.
The ultimate goal of a transmedia product is not to consume content, but to live an experience thanks to the content and involve the audience, which plays a decisive role in the development of the story.
As Henry Jenkins points out in his work Convergence Culture , “By entering transmedia storytelling for marketing, you manage to bring together different media to transmit your messages and take advantage of the wealth of possibilities of the 21st century.”
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What should be taken into account when approaching a successful transmedia strategy?
1. Have good brand storytelling
There is one key element to making a transmedia narrative work: having a powerful brand storytelling that connects with the users of our product or service and achieves the necessary engagement to involve them in the development of the story, making them part of our content. If we achieve this and take into account the ability of storytelling to make us live experiences, we are faced with a strategy that proves to be a great tool for improving advertising effectiveness .
Storytelling is a communication action whose purpose is to involve the viewer and produce a specific emotion in him. If the message touches an emotional chord in the viewer, it is expected that it will awaken a positive emotion in him that encourages him to take a certain action, whether it is visiting the company's website, joining its social networks or purchasing the product or service offered.
It is through these emotions, and leaving aside reasoning, that this strategy transmits values and knowledge and impacts the minds of consumers.
