DEVELOPING A VISUAL STORYTELLING ROAD MAP: FROM STRATEGY TO IMPLEMENTATION 127 cycle, align your visual storytelling strategy with your company’s goals and vision for the future. Whether it’s corporate, marketing, branding, or customer relationship management (CRM) goals, a visual storytelling strategy will resonate more with your target audience if it’s shaped around key business objectives. It’s easy to think of this as limiting, but the reality is quite opposite. Having a clear understanding of the role visual storytelling can play in achieving your company’s goals on social media is a creative catalyst. It will help you to define your vision and identify the components that will bring your visual story to life. It will help you identify the supporting themes, content buckets, visuals, and social media platforms at the heart of your strategy. And it will help you identify what success metrics to eval- uate as you ramp up your visual storytelling program. The key is to keep your goals reasonable. Select several goals that are the most important to your business and that are feasible to achieve through social media. Here are examples from leading companies regard- ing their visual storytelling goals: • Awareness and education • Branding • Competitive differentiation • Consumer engagement • Corporate social responsibility • Customer retention • Fan and community growth • Lead generation • Loyalty • Positive press • Product launches • Promotions • Referral traffic • Sales • Thought leadership