How Virtual Tours Can Tell Your Brand Stories

Businesses are, in essence, static. Whether you want to communicate to potential customers or internal audiences, getting your brand story across is difficult if you don't visualize what that brand actually stands for. That's why, when it comes to storytelling, many organizations leverage images and videos to great effect.

But even that approach still tends to be fragmented. A single image or video is not typically enough to actually tell brand stories. That's where virtual tours enter the equation.

The concept of virtual tours has been around for a few years, but its uses are often limited. Don't think of them as simply selling real estate or an empty space. Instead, look at them as a vital content marketing and storytelling medium. Use your virtual tour software to its full potential, and this medium can play a core role in telling your brand stories.

The Essence of Brand Stories in Content Marketing

If content marketing intends to attract your audience through relevance rather than promotion, storytelling is the perfect approach. Our innate need to hear stories that matter to us draw us to the brands that can couch their messaging in a compelling narrative.

At the same time, these stories have to remain closely tied to the actual brand. Enter brand stories, a long successful tool of even the largest organizations to engage their audience in the digital realm. Today, content marketing is almost impossible to imagine without this type of storytelling. 

Adding Interactivity to Static Brand Stories

In isolation, the integration of storytelling and content marketing makes perfect sense. In reality, though, it's difficult to put into action. Words are powerful, but they're not always able to convey the emotions and deeper meanings that make the stories so persuasive.

That's why brands are beginning to change the game. Content marketing has long reached beyond mere words. Now, videos, images, and other visual media seek to immerse audiences and help them connect with the story.

Newer technologies like VR and 3D only help in achieving that type of immersion. The most popular content marketing channels and tactics today are all visuals, and many of them are interactive.

3 Ways 3D Virtual Tours Can Tell Your Brand Story

That, in turn, leads us to virtual tours. You might not think of it as a storytelling medium. In fact, most organizations still use the tactics to show off the space to remote audience. Think campus tours for students who live too far away to actually visit in person.

 Consider these three ways in which 3D virtual tours can tell your brand story and make your content marketing efforts more immersive and engaging.

1) Showcase the History of Your Brand

Perhaps the most straightforward brand story is also the most natural fit for most brands. A virtual tour can show rather than tell your history by allowing your audience to quite literally walk through the past. Through historic videos and photos, you can narrate and explain both your origins and how far the organization has come since then.

Imagine the possibilities. A college can show off historic images and footage of its campus. A hospital can introduce famous doctors alongside current personnel. Even an office building can show off the first few desks that still build the legacy of what the company has become. A Transportation area can show where to hangout when waiting for a train or bus. 

In most cases, you have the photos and/or videos. A virtual tour helps you put them into a narrative format. The deep dive into history becomes a linear journey that you can share with your audiences. With the virtual tour as the backbone, you can write a variety of 'then and now' pieces that further expand your content marketing possibilities.

2) Offer Behind-the-Scenes Looks

Who doesn't want to know what happens at their favorite brand on a daily basis? Sports teams are perhaps the best brand example for this: a simple look behind the curtain can get fans into pure euphoria. VIP passes that include locker room tours can go for thousands of dollars. Showcase your business to make your company seem transparent.

Now, think about virtualizing that same type of tour. It might not quite be like the real thing, but it certainly gets to the same point. And it's far from limited to sports teams, either. By offering a tour behind the scenes, you can show off the personality of your employees, as well as your executive suite. And again, the virtual tour can become the heart of a content marketing strategy that pulls out individual pieces (such as interviews with employees) as their own long form pieces.

3) Tell a Product's Origin Story

The third idea combines elements from both of the first two. Your company might sell a particularly popular product or service among its larger offering. That product, in turn, becomes a core part of your brand story. So why not give it the attention it deserves and that your audience craves?

That deep dive might include a look into the history of the product, and how it's produced right now. You can even follow it, in a behind-the-scenes look, from first concept all the way to the time it ships out the door. It helps your audience understand how the product works, and how various decisions within your company led to its production to begin with.

Finding the Right Virtual Tour Software For Your Brand Storytelling

Virtual tours, in short, are much more than just space-sellers. Used the right way, they can turn into vital storytelling media that turn the static into movement, adding an element of immersion to your story that you could not otherwise achieve. 

This is all possible as long as you have both the right strategy and the right platform for your needs. Concept3D specializes in virtual tour software designed to help companies enhance their marketing in more ways than one. Work with us, and we'll be happy to share examples of how our clients have used 3D virtual tours to tell their brand stories.