Everyone likes a good story; whether you’re ten years old or a hundred, stories capture the attention and hold it like little else. The simple truth is that stories make us feel things. They make us think with our hearts.
As a business, this has a number of key benefits, and poses a powerful tool for branding, customer retention, and marketing efforts. Not only do you make yourself more interesting, but research has shown that utilizing storytelling can help inspire brand loyalty, increase conversion rates, and lower advertising costs.
So storytelling is powerful. But how do you go from storybook to brand copy?
More Than Story
The key to successful implementation lies in combining storytelling with your other branding and marketing strategies. Don’t simply tell a story to tell a story. Tie it in with the rest of your brand message and identity.
When you do this, you create a powerful reason for your existence as a company, something other than making money. In a world where businesses are seen as heartless and self-centered, it pays to have purpose.
Thinking about where you want to lead your customers can help you develop story driven copy that is far more compelling than your standard advertising. Storytelling is a road you can get people to travel; with proper planning, you can use it to lead potential customers wherever you want to go.
Here are a few problems this can help solve.
The Dreaded Glazed Eyes
You’ve got incredible things to say, but how do you make your audience listen?
Better yet, how can you make your audience want to listen?
It’s easy to spot poor branding — the eyes glaze over, boredom strikes, and the whole thing just feels forced and uninspired.
Storytelling is a way to make people sit on the edge of their metaphorical seats, to hang on every word you’re saying. There is night and day difference between a boring and an engaging brand.
If you want your audience to pay attention, give them a reason to. Incorporate storytelling into your business plan. You want your customers to feel a certain way about you as a brand. Storytelling helps you connect on a deeper level, and can foster actual meaning in your professional relationship.
You’re The One
The world is a competitive place. For almost every business, there are competitors to contend with. Storytelling can help you lure business away from your competition, and right smack into your lap.
With so many options to choose from, why would anyone choose you? Logically, there may not be a huge reason. But through storytelling, you gain access to a powerful emotions-driven decision making process. Through storytelling, you make the decision anything but logical.
A story is an emotional experience. Through it, you become the brand a customer can resonate with. By creating this connection, a customer is more likely to buy from you if on the fence, and is more likely to remain a paying customer.
Can I Trust You?
Trust is important in business — if you’re a consumer, you don’t want to hand your money out to just anyone. Businesses that use story to create and alter their brand persona are better able to inspire trust in potential customers.
This poses a number of benefits to a business. First, if a potential customer trusts you as a, you obtain higher value in their minds. Second, trust helps foster a more enjoyable experience, promoting an ongoing business relationship. And third, you gain a competitive advantage over businesses that may not have demonstrated their trustworthiness.
Story is a distinctly human experience; when you humanize yourself as a brand, you place yourself on eye level with your customer base and establish real connection.
Lead by Inspiring
People want to be around things that inspire them. They want more of them in their life, and will go out of their way to associate with them.
Traditional advertising copy is anything but inspiring. By mixing in a little story, you are able to inspire both your potential customers, and your employees.
When an employee feels like they are working for a company with purpose and passion, they do their job better, work harder, and end up happier.
This is important because a company isn’t just about its image and its copy: a company is a sum of everything and everyone.
The Data
While what I’m telling you may sound good, how can you really trust me?
Well, the research surrounding storytelling’s power as a business tool is pretty convincing.
In a study done by Keith Quesenberry at Johns Hopkins, later published as an article in The Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, Quesenberry examined 108 different Superbowl ads and graded marketing strategy vs effectiveness.
He found that, regardless of the ads content, the structure of the ad predicted its success. In other words, the way that it was said was more important than what they were actually saying.
Quesenberry found that the ads which told a more complete story (using Freytag’s Pyramid), were unequivocally more successful.
A study done by the University of Pennsylvania showed that story had the ability to change people’s minds about the patients they were treating.
A study done by researchers in a project called “Significant Objects” showed how story could transform seemingly ordinary objects into the extraordinary, which then sold for many, many times their retail value.
To summarize, it isn’t a myth, or some idyllic fancy; it’s cold, hard fact, and it works. If you’re looking to give your business an edge, story might just be the way to do it.