Have you ever watched a commercial or read a blog post that resonated with you, that told a story so compelling it made you feel connected to a brand on a personal level? That’s the power of storytelling in marketing. For retail brands, crafting compelling narratives is more than just a strategy. It’s a way to build strong emotional connections with consumers.
Today’s episode of Social Pulse Podcast: Retail Edition, hosted by Agorapulse’s chief storyteller, Mike Allton, is all about storytelling and retail content marketing. We’re going to explore how to move beyond simply promoting products to creating stories that captivate and engage your audience.
Our guest Kaleigh Moore is a CEO. She’s a seasoned content marketer who specializes in blog content creation and editing for retail and e-commerce brands. She’s here to share her insights and experiences on how storytelling can transform your marketing efforts.
Can you start by just telling us a bit about your background and how you got into content marketing specifically for retail and e-commerce?
Kaleigh Moore: I started as a merchant.
I had an Etsy store that I started when I was in college and just did it for fun on a whim—but very quickly was in the right place at the right time. Got into a little bit of influencer marketing. The store took off, leveraged that into my first job outside of college, and then continued to do some social media marketing works and e-commerce work. And then eventually leveraged that into freelance writing on the content marketing side of things after that.
So definitely started from a hands-on place and used a lot of the lessons that I learned firsthand as a seller myself when I began writing about e-commerce and retail.
Today I’m a journalist for sites like Forbes, Vogue Business, and Adweek, and I write about the retail environment and how it’s constantly changing. We’ve seen so many things happen over the past couple of years. So it’s been a very interesting decade or so of doing this through COVID, through the introduction of AI. There are so many things to talk about, but yes, [I’ve] come a long way from those early days when I was just in my bedroom at college, just putting together jewelry and selling things on Etsy. So, that’s where it all started.
Mike Allton: I love that you have that hands-on experience in retail. That’s such a unique and refreshing aspect. Honestly, a lot of marketers don’t have that. So we’ll talk about that today, but I also want to know from your perspective
Why is storytelling important to retail in marketing?
Kaleigh Moore: I have been in content marketing for—like I said—a decade now. And I think I’ve seen a lot of things come back around. So a lot of things have been recycled. This is true for anything, right?
I think the thing that is most compelling to me, though, is I recently rewatched Mad Men, and I was just reminded so much of how big storytelling is to sell products. You know, we see Don Draper and Peggy and all these people who are in the copywriting space, how they’re selling these products, and how central storytelling is to all of those efforts.
I think what’s happened at least from my point of view over the past couple of years is that we’ve all gotten very much in the weeds on SEO and content marketing, and all of those things certainly have their place.
But within the realm of retail, there’s this unique opportunity to tell stories and to put faces to brands and to make a deeper connection, build communities, and build this network of people who feel personally connected to products and businesses in a way that we haven’t been able to do before because we have social media.
We have all these tools that make storytelling easier than ever: short-form video, long-form video, you name it. There are so many tools at our disposal today to do this well—and to do this easier, simpler, and faster than we ever have been able to before.
I hope that we see more retail brands in the future, really leaning into this and telling more stories and just building those authentic one-to-one human connections.
Mike Allton: It’s funny because we’re recording this in the very midst of the summer games—I’m not going to say the “O” word, I don’t want to get in trouble—but we’re in the midst of the summer games. And if you pay attention and look at the commercials that are being aired throughout the summer games, you’ll see story after story after story. It’s sometimes questionable whether it has anything to do with the brand, but it’s always stories of athletes overcoming adversity and achieving success. Right? That’s the trope if you will.
But it’s funny to me that that doesn’t seem to have sunken down to very many of the content marketing departments in retail brands, which is why we’re having this conversation, right? If they just look at the summer games and say, “Oh, yeah, stories work, stories sell, we should use that.” But then they go back to telling features and benefits of their products and that kind of stuff.
Stories That Have Been Thriving
Could you share some examples from that content marketing side, perhaps, of retail brands that, or at least one or two are doing well with their stories?
Kaleigh Moore: One of my favorite examples of this is Curie, so it’s a female-led product. It’s a body care [brand], so they have deodorants, they have body washes, things like that.
The founder’s name is Sarah Moret. She went on Shark Tank and she pitched her product there. She didn’t even need Shark Tank to grow the business. It was already financially doing very well. She had good profit margins, but she wanted the exposure and the ability to say, “I did this.” That was just one of the things on her list.
And so what she did well is she brought her audience along with her through that entire experience, start to finish. And so it wasn’t just, “Hey, we’re on Shark Tank, go watch it,” point to the thing. It was, “I got the call when I was on a hike, and here’s the story of how this all unfolded. I had to race to the airport to get a plane so I could go and shoot this on a whim. I was somebody that they needed at the last minute.”
And so she built this whole story and took this whole hero’s journey with herself and her product where we all got to come along with her and she put that on the company blog. She sent it out in their email marketing, and I just think it was such a great example of really pulling the curtain back and saying, “Come with me on this.” It’s so much more interesting that it even appears to be on the surface because, of course, it’s exciting to be on Shark Tank—but it’s so much more compelling as a story and as a buyer to, say, get the opportunity to know how nervous she was behind the scenes and how she got from point A to point B and what was it like afterward? And how did the ripple effect of being on the show impact the business?
Getting that full spectrum picture of this entire journey that she took, I think, is just a great example of how more companies can do things like this. You don’t have to be on Shark Tank, but if you have interesting things that come up or things that you learn through trial and error, maybe even failure stories of, “Hey, we tried this, and it didn’t work, but here’s what we learned.”
Those are the things that bring people in and make them feel connected on a much deeper level.
Mike Allton: That’s such a great example because, on the one hand, you’re right, that’s an example of a behind-the-scenes kind of story that brands could tell often don’t, but it works just as well as so many other kinds of stories that they could tell.
But I also like it because I’ve heard that story. I’ve seen her talk about that story in various interviews and that sort of thing, which reminded me that when you have a great story for a brand, you don’t just tell it once you can tell it over and over and over again. You make that part of the very fabric of who you are as a brand. So I appreciate you sharing that, but I’m also wondering: You spoke to some of the elements that went into that story.
Is there a difference between what makes a great story in general and what makes a great compelling story for a retail brand?
Kaleigh Moore: I think it’s a good idea to look at the classic storytelling structure.
So the hero’s journey—or the inverted pyramid, if you’re taking a journalistic approach—there are a lot of frameworks that you can use to help you build these stories. It can feel a little bit intimidating to go in and look at a blank page and say, “Well, what stories do we tell? How do we tell them? In what order? What things are people going to find interesting?” And that’s why I think taking either the storytelling angle where you’re leaning into a narrative style approach, that’s one way to do it.
Or, like I said, you can go the news-and-journalistic angle where you are reporting and using data to build a case for the point that you’re trying to make.
There are a lot of ways you can do this, and I think that it’s great that they have these frameworks that already exist. It makes the whole process easier. I think it’s just a matter of really bringing people from your audience in, and maybe it’s a focus group. Maybe it’s your best customers, but having them be part of this process and say, “Well, what do you think is most interesting about this?” That can be one of the most powerful things.
I recently heard of a marketer, Grace Clark, who has a Gen Z board of directors. And so for companies who are marketing to an audience of Gen Z consumers, they go to this board of directors and workshop ideas for ads, for blog posts, for all kinds of things. And it’s this great resource, immediate feedback loop, where they can iterate based on, “Here’s what’s resonating. Here’s what’s not.” And so sometimes you have to invent things. Sometimes you have to put things together on your own. If you don’t have a Gen Z board of directors, you don’t have focus groups. These are things that you can easily put together and build and they pay for themselves.
Mike Allton: That is a fantastic piece of advice. Thanks for sharing that. And I love the framework point because you’re right. If you’ve got a framework in place, hopefully, a couple of different frameworks that you can draw on, if you’re building stories for your brand, each of those frameworks has those elements that it needs to have to be successfully outlined.
Brand storytelling
One of my great friends and authors, Miri Rodriguez wrote the book “Brand Storytelling”. I’ll share a link to that in the notes because she outlines, I believe, eight different frameworks that you can potentially employ with your brand. And if it’s your job like mine to create the stories for your brand, having that toolbox if you will that you can draw from is super helpful.
I’m also wondering, though, how we balance the fact that we still need to sell as a brand, right? We’re not media companies, even though there’s an argument to be made that in today’s world, every company should be a media company, but we’re not. We’re not selling movies, we’re not selling the stories we need to sell our products.
How do you balance having that requirement for promotional content alongside this need to tell stories and to try to make both of them engaging and effective?
Kaleigh Moore: I think it’s often a long-term play.
You can have the storytelling pieces running in tandem with the more direct sales-oriented pieces. Sometimes, they can feed into each other, you can do interlinking, you can plant videos where there’s maybe a more direct pitch within these pieces—but then you also have the opportunity at the end for a call to action.
I think it’s all about when it comes to storytelling links. This is a long game. So this is how you’re getting the audience to root for you as the main character in this story that you’re trying to tell. It’s not always a direct ask when you’re doing this type of work. It’s more of a brand-building effort. It’s a way for you to build up your audience, you’re building engagement, loyalty, and all of these important things.
And so for the people, it’s a long game. It’s for the people who are a little bit invested in the story that you’re telling already, and for the people that you’re trying to bring into the fold. So it’s not always a direct sales ask, but I think it feeds in nicely and is very complementary to those efforts because it’s a soft sell. You are not just hitting somebody with the ask every single time. You’re telling stories and you are again educating, and you are welcoming them in, you’re pulling back the curtain on the operation and the people and the human beings behind your operation. And so it’s all part of this bigger picture, even if it’s not a direct ask every single time.
Written vs. Video Content
Mike Allton: You mentioned interlinking, which I love ’cause I’m traditionally a blogger. I love creating written content and having that flexibility, as you mentioned, to be able to link to other articles that might be a little more, let’s say, sales-driven or promotional-driven or information-driven and less storytelling, per se. I’m wondering, though, since we’re talking about written, are you seeing a difference between written and video content?
From a content creation perspective, how do written and video content differ?
Kaleigh Moore: I think with video being what it is today, it’s such a great avenue for telling short-form stories. And because attention spans are shrinking so much, I think it’s a compelling format for that. Because, if you do it right and have the proper planning and structure in place, you can tell a very interesting story in 10 seconds.
And so, especially with social media and all these tools we have today, shopping is often integrated into those tools directly. You can link products you can sell directly from these short-form video pieces—but I think there’s also a great avenue in long-form, too. You have YouTube becoming one of the world’s largest search engines. People are going there to answer their questions. And so again, this is a way to educate. So, so many opportunities. I don’t think that there’s one correct answer here. There’s just so much optionality.
And so I think the real question is, “How do you prioritize correctly?” And where do you focus your time and energy? And it’s often a matter of what’s most important for your audience. Where do they spend time? What do they care about? And again, without that feedback loop that we talked about just a second ago, it’s really hard to get answers to those questions.
So I think the voice of the customer is a huge piece of this equation, no matter if it’s video or written content.
You need to know, “How is this resonating?” Because you can look at the numbers all day long. You can look at Google Analytics and get in the weeds on how many clicks your articles are getting, but what does it make people feel? And I think sometimes to get actual words and human feedback to those things, it’s so impactful and it just helps feed this engine moving forward.
Mike Allton: What does it make people feel? I love that. And the whole point about video makes complete sense to me.
One of my other podcast shows is the AI and Marketing Unpacked Show. I was interviewing Chris Penn, and he was telling the story about how through his agency. He was able to help one of their clients completely revolutionize and audit their content marketing developer personas. And they were able to do it—instead of three months or six months—in two weeks, due to AI, it was incredible what he was able to do when he described actually how they did it. And what was cool is it took him 60 seconds to share that story, right? That even you and I were able to go, “Wow, that’s cool.”
So that was just an example of a short form video that I was able to turn into a Reel and a TikTok and that sort of thing, sharing an impactful story. So it is possible to share really good stories, detailed stories in that tiny amount of time. Thank you for pointing that out.
The Role of a Customer in Your Brand’s Story
Mike Allton: So you mentioned the voice of a customer earlier, and that got me thinking: What role does the customer have, particularly when it comes to feedback and data?
How does [feedback] shape the stories that you create for retail brands?
Kaleigh Moore: I think that this is a great avenue for finding out what resonates, which we talked about a little bit, but also just going to it.
One of my favorite things to do is to go to Amazon. If you sell on Amazon, go to the customer reviews, and do what I would call language mining. So what are the common words and phrases that people use when they talk about your product? And then once you have this working list of common terms and phrases, things that people like about the product in the customer’s voice. Those are the building blocks that you can start to leverage as you begin telling stories, because what you’re doing then is you’re reflecting that voice-of-customer back to the people who need to hear it because then they feel heard, they feel seen, they feel understood. And you’re telling a story in the right words.
I think that that’s another big piece of all this: You can’t just tell stories and hope that it goes well. I think you need to do it in a very strategic manner. And so by, again, leveraging voice-of-the customer—whether it’s through focus groups or, community building, on-site events, whatever it is, review mining—you can find these words and then literally copy and paste and put them into the stories that you’re telling and have them be more effective.
Advice for Small Businesses and Small Budgets
Mike Allton: One of the things we haven’t touched on is why stories are so powerful. When we see behind the scenes, that gives us sometimes potentially an insight into the values of the brand or the founder, the CEO, [or] whoever’s a part of that story—but when we’re talking about customer stories, that’s an opportunity for us as the brand to show our prospects what it would look like for them to be a customer.
We’re allowing them to relate, to see themselves in the shoes, and imagine whether it’s conscious or subconscious, what it would be like to be part of the community that we’re creating as a brand. So that is just brilliant. Going into the actual language that your customers are using in the reviews or other places and pulling that out and using that in your stories and your sales copy and your marketing company, absolutely do that.
What if you’re a smaller retail brand, though, and you have a very limited budget? Are there other ways that they can leverage storytelling? Any suggestions for them along those lines?
Kaleigh Moore: Like I said, I think most companies have a good well of stories to pull from. It’s just a matter of how comfortable are you with sharing maybe a story of a time that you failed or a story of a time that you had to troubleshoot and work around a problem.
How did you solve that? And how did the customer win in the end?
I think, again, this is another important piece of telling stories that you always want the customer to be there. Be the hero. Of course, they’re rooting for you, like the Shark Tank example. You want them to be rooting for you, and they’re excited that you got this opportunity. But ultimately, the customer is the hero in the story. So how can you tap into very old formulas from copywriting 101, which is before [and after]?
That’s what you were touching on: You’re here right now. You have a problem. You have a pain point. Here’s the bridge of how you get to this place where your problem is solved. The company and the story that you tell is the bridge. And so you can do this in several ways (through video, through written content, whatever it is), but you’re building that bridge of how do I get the customer from this initial point where they have the problem to this final point where the problem is solved and they’re happy and they are feeling better, right?
So before/after bridge, it’s an easy way to think about storytelling. And again, if you look at it through that lens, you can probably very quickly come up with a handful of ideas of stories you could tell about. “We know these are problems that our customers have. Let’s tell them stories about how they can solve it and how we can help them do that.”
Mike Allton: One of the things that you said at the outset that I want to underline is that we have more stories than we’re aware of.
I was in a meeting just this morning for Agorapulse because we’ve got a bunch of different squads that we’re pushing new projects and initiatives that we’re running this quarter.
One of them is specifically about customer stories and trying to create a single repository for customer stories. Because the more we thought about it, the more we realized that we have customer stories in a dozen or more different places throughout the organization. Sure, we have case studies. Those are published on the blog. Those are easy to find.
But what about the feedback that we get from prospects on customer success calls? What about the information we might get from a sales call or testimonials that have been given to us? So now we have a project to try to combine all those into one single place so that anybody who needs a story, whether they’re content marketing, sales, or something else, could go to this repository and say, “Hey, I need a story about X, Y, and Z, and we can surface that.”
And that also helps us identify what we’re missing. So that’s my advice. On top of what you just said to those listening, don’t assume, “Oh, we don’t have any stories because we haven’t published any case studies.”
You’ve got stories. You just need to take steps.
Common Mistakes in Retail Storytelling
Mike Allton: Are there common mistakes—that they’re maybe trying too hard or they’re just missing the boat when it comes to incorporating storytelling, authentic storytelling?
Kaleigh Moore: One of the easiest traps to fall into storytelling as a brand is that you get so close to.
You’re just very down in the weeds. You can’t zoom out and get this perspective of external, how this is going to sound or be perceived outside the organization. This is where you get problems like we use too much jargon, or we use acronyms that not everybody understands, or we refer to things in a way that’s almost shorthand. That can be very exclusionary to a reader who maybe doesn’t know as much about your product or isn’t up to speed on the kind of lingo used within the industry.
I think that that’s one pitfall to be aware of is getting some external perspective and making sure that it’s not sounding too secret-handshake-like because again, you want it to be inclusive. You want to bring people in. And when you do the opposite of that by sounding a little too formal, a little too technical, it leaves people feeling left out or feeling silly or feeling like, “Hmm, this isn’t for me because I don’t understand this.” And that’s absolutely not what you want to do. So that’s my first tip.
And then I think another one is making it very company-focused.
“Again, the hero in the story is the customer. So often brands fall into the trap of making it all about them, just really going all in on features like you talked about. Features, benefits—it’s very navel gazing, almost.
You want to remember that, in this story, you want the listener to feel like part of it. And so you have to find common threads throughout the story that you weave in where the customer is part of that journey.”
And it’s not just “We’re so great, we’re so wonderful, we figured out how to do X, Y, Z, read a story about it.” Instead, it’s “As a company, we did this for our customers. Here’s the process of how we did that. And here’s what it’s going to help you do better in the long run.”
Thinking about it through that perspective is a helpful way to take a step back a little bit and make sure that you’re doing it in a way that has more ability to connect.
Mike Allton: That’s such a terrific point, and I love that. Let’s avoid navel gazing.
I was talking to one of our users last week. I’m going to be interviewing her soon to share her story. She runs a digital marketing department at a Midwestern college, and we worked with her to allow her to use Agorapulse to teach her students social media management and marketing and that sort of thing. As a result of her doing that, the department went from one person, one student, to 20 to 25 students. So it basically saved the program. And they also had an off-campus, basically an internship. It was a functional agency that was owned by the college where their students go through that and do real-world work for other businesses.
And again, the use of Agorapulse saved that entity. It’s not that we’re the hero, to your point. She’s the hero. She chose to use us. She implemented us. She worked with the kids. She talked to the Dean. She did all the real work, right? We were just a tool that made part of her job a little bit easier. So I can’t wait to put that advice in mind.
Kaleigh Moore: It’s the bridge, as we talked about before after the bridge. Agorapulse was the bridge. That’s a great way to do that.
Measuring the Success of Storytelling
Mike Allton: My last question for you, Kaleigh, is all about measurement because particularly in today’s environment, we’ve talked about how the last couple of years have been crazy, particularly for SaaS companies and retail companies.
We’re all facing issues with budget and further demands and higher and higher pressure to measure performance.
How do we know what’s working? When it comes to storytelling, we already touched on how there are probably some innate challenges there because we’re using it for the words that my CEO hates brand awareness.
How do you go about measuring success, particularly when it comes to storytelling with content and social media?
Kaleigh Moore: That’s a great question, and it’s always a point of contention, especially in this world of content marketing, which can be very objective-oriented.
- Storytelling.
- As I said, these soft sells, where you’re maybe not making a direct ask every time, become very much more important. (More difficult to track.)
- I would just encourage teams to remember that this is a piece of a larger strategy. It’s all feeding in towards the same end goal.
- Even if it doesn’t have a direct impact right off the bat, it’s the same way that people use out-of-home advertising.
Think about the billboards you see on the side of the road. Those are hard to track. You can track them. Maybe traffic patterns and estimate how many eyeballs that those are getting. But think about how many people in the cars these days have their eyes locked on a phone. They’re not necessarily looking up at a billboard anymore.
And so I think that we have to reprogram and reframe how we think about measurement because we have to remember that so much of our attention these days is directed at these handheld devices. Our phones are with us all the time. That’s where the eyeballs are.
Related episode of Retail Edition: Bringing Old-School Retail into the Digital Age
So, even if we’re telling stories and they’re not immediately converting into a KPI that we can measure and track, it’s all feeding into this end goal of building fans, building people who are rooting for us as a company. Again, you think about the customer journey and the whole sales funnel, and all of that is part of it.
It’s very high in the funnel to bring people closer to that point, to when they’re ready to buy or commit or ask more questions about the process as they start researching and get in the frame of mind where they’re ready to buy.
But storytelling is a great place to start high in the funnel because again, it’s such a human way to connect with people. We’ve been telling stories for thousands of years. It works. It really works. And so even if you can’t track it and say, “Hey, we made $100,000 in sales because of this blog post that told a story,” it is part of that larger mission to bring people in and keep them long-term instead of just being the brand that’s selling a quick one-off conversion.
Mike Allton: That is such a powerful point. In just a few episodes in the future, we’re going to be talking to the social media manager for SafeLite Auto Repair. And it’s such a great example because they repair broken windshields, which you don’t need until the very moment your windshield has been broken. And so it’s, that’s the moment that you decide to, you know, Google or you remember the jingle or whatever it is that decides in your mind where to go to reach out to them, but. The moments up until then stack up all the times you might have seen unconsciously or consciously their tales, their stories, their social posts, and so on. It all builds. So thank you for sharing that and emphasizing the importance of that entire body of work. It’s just not a single campaign or a single post.
Thank you, Kaleigh. You’ve been absolutely amazing. This has been such a fantastic conversation for those who want to reach out to you and learn more. So thank you for coming. This has been fantastic, folks. That’s all the time we’ve got for today.
Thank you for reading this Social Pulse Podcast: Retail Edition, where we’re digging into the challenges, successes, and stories of social media and community professionals in the industry, just like you. Subscribe to gain valuable insights that you’ll be able to apply to your work and social presence from each and every episode. [And check out our past episodes so you can keep up with all the latest in retail marketing.]
