Who doesn’t love a good story? We love telling and sharing stories. Storytelling is a unique trait of human beings giving us a sense of belonging and identity. It is also one of the best ways to establish a connection with people. If you’re selling a product or service — it is an effective way to connect and build relationships with your customers. So, it is only befitting that storytelling should be an essential marketing strategy for your business.
Why Storytelling?
An excellent, compelling story will enable marketers and advertisers to develop relationships with people of a particular demographic. If you’re offering a service/product, chances are there; your competitors are providing similar if not the same service/product to your target market. All of them are vying for your customer’s attention. Even if you don’t have competitors, you still have to compete with other market forces. Take Facebook, for example.
According to The Social Skinny, 510,000 comments are posted, and 136,000 photos are uploaded on Facebook every 60 seconds. Things are even mind-boggling when it comes to Twitter. Almost 500 million Tweets are being sent every day. That’s 6,000 Tweets every second! That’s not all. More than 2 million blog posts are published every day. That’s 1,400 blog posts every minute. As a marketer, you need to get your message pass through all that noise to your customers by creating a human connection, and storytelling is the best way to do it.
Storytelling Can Help Strengthen Your Brand
Storytelling is a great way to inject new life into your brand, especially by incorporating content marketing into your marketing strategy. A compelling story about your products and services will give them an identity that will help your audiences to enjoy the experience they yearn. But as we mentioned before, your company’s stories must be compelling, emotional, authentic, creative, and inspirational because these attributes will help your customers to form a personal connection with your brand.
Emotional branding is a progressive marketing strategy that can potentially increase sales and revenues as well as enhance customer retention. When a person buys a product or service of a particular brand, it is because he or she feels an emotional connection to it. When you tell a story, it should create an experience that resonates with their skills.
Fundamentals of Storytelling
When crafting a story of your brand, you must determine your point of view or voice, what you stand for, and why your story matters to your audiences. It would help if you also kept in mind that your viewers have their own stories to tell, and they’re yearning for something that resonates with their personal experiences.
Storytelling in the context of marketing should have characters that are the reflection of the people involved. It would be best if you fixated who is facing a problem, what is the solution, and who will be providing the solution.
Your reader is the principal character in your story, and to address the issues we listed above; it’s imperative to know your reader. By constructing detailed buyer personas, you can do that easily. Buyer personas are sketches of your target audiences based on educated guesses about your personalities and accumulated data. Buyer personas help marketers to visualize individuals consuming their content and identify the best possible way to connect with them.
Storytelling Is More Than Just Inventing A Story
Most people assume that storytelling is all about telling a story, but it’s more than that. The reason your business exists is that you have developed products and services with stories regarding what your customers can do with them. Your products and services should be capable of fulfilling needs, responding to questions, listening, and engaging with your audiences on an emotional level. The stories you’ve developed will provide the solutions and value to your products and services.
Good storytelling shouldn’t necessarily involve you, your brands, your products, your services, and your solutions. It’s all about experiences, emotions, needs, and images associated with the feelings and needs of your customers that your brand evokes.
Identifying Stories To Tell
Stories must be personal, compelling, and often factual. Tell your audience how your brand was born, what inspired you to create the company, and what your mission was. But, most importantly, your story should address the problems your target audiences are facing and how your company has worked with them to solve the issues. The customer should be the central character in your story while your company will serve as the supporting character providing all the tools to create successful resolutions.
For instance, if your company is donating equipment for a daycare center, the story should focus on why the equipment is needed and how the parents and kids can benefit from it. The story’s point of view should be of the recipient, not from a company spokesperson.
Last but not least, the ultimate goal of marketing is to inspire, motivate, and encourage your target customers to buy your products or benefit from the services you’re offering. A compelling, emotional, and well-crafted story will direct your audience to your desired direction.
Hello, my name is Al Mamun. I am an experienced freelance writer specializing in technology, business, finance, product reviews, and social topics. I have been working in the content development and content writing field for over seven years. I also work as a guest blogger and providing my services independently through various online employment forums including Upwork. My work has been published in various sites such as TechGadgetsCanada.com, Broker Choices, and Best Trampoline Reviews.
