Marketing Storytelling: How to Craft Stories That Sell

In today’s competitive content marketing landscape, capturing your audience’s attention even for five minutes is a monumental achievement. Yet movies and TV shows can keep people’s attention for hours and make it hard to leave. We know this as binge-watching. What’s the difference?

Marketing Storytelling.

What is Marketing Storytelling?

By creating an effective narrative, you can capture your audience’s attention for longer periods, generate a greater sense of loyalty, and make a more memorable impression. Businesses must start telling customers the story behind their brand, why it exists, and why it is important. Consistently across all communications. Stories about brands are no longer nice to have. It’s a must!

Business visibility, profitability, and impact can be maximised through it. Your brand will be as profitable as it is captivating if you use it as a guide for your marketing strategy.

How to Craft Effective Stories?

People actually remember stories 22 times more than they remember facts and figures. If you can come up with a great story about your brand, you’ve got more chance of not only standing out, but people remembering what it is that you do, and storytelling in your content is actually a great way to boost conversion rates and to build a following.

Although you may find this scary to do, here are a few tips to guide you in creating effective stories that will help you market your business to your ideal clients.

1. Make Your Story Personality-Driven

If you give your brand a personality, it will become more human. Personality-driven stories are necessary because they provide customers with someone they can trust. By telling a story, you can communicate to your ideal client why they should care about what it is you do or offer. It will inspire viewers to take action.

So how do you create a personality for your brand?

• You should start by defining your core values. Which values are most important to you? After you’ve identified your brand’s values, document them in your value statement. The value statement will serve as the foundation for your brand’s personality.
• Consider your audience as inspiration, since they already represent what your brand should be. For this reason, you must always consider your audience’s preferences, behaviours, and expectations before anything else.
• Consider your brand as a human being. You can refine your brand’s personality by asking yourself (and your team) questions as if it were already a person.
• Establish a brand style guide for your team. Over time, if you do not have strong guardrails defining what your brand is and is not, you risk dilution of the brand’s identity.

Here at Marketing Leap, we use Google Sheet files where we save all branding information both for our brand and for our clients. This file gets converted into a definitive brand guide and serves as the guardrails to keep us consistent with the brand messaging and voice.

2. Keep it Simple

Less is more when it comes to stories. Avoid creating complex stories that might confuse your target audience. There is always a beginning, a middle, and an end to a story. Keeping this in mind allows your stories to be more natural in terms of progression.

• Begin by stating the problem you can solve.
• Explain how you came up with a solution.
• Then end with what your solution accomplished. Was it successful?

Short, straightforward stories are easier to believe. The complexity of a story can undermine trust, as some of the world’s most famous brands have shown.

3. Why Do You Exist

Share your visions, goals, and mission with your audience.

What is your brand’s purpose?

Why are you in business?

What is your story?

Stay authentic.

The essence of a brand goes beyond an image, pretty colours, or a cool logo. You create a brand by creating a message, an experience, and value for your clients and customers. There is always a problem that your ideal client wants to solve or something they want to improve.

When you lead by purpose, you’ll have confidence in your direction. Businesses usually attract new clients by highlighting features and benefits of focusing on what makes them stand out from the competition. These strategies can be effective, but none of them actually solve a problem for your client.

The difference between solving a problem and offering a solution is that when you solve a problem, you are really offering some sort of alteration or transformation experience, a solution that changes something about their lives. Communicate your customer’s journey in a way that focuses more on the journey and less on the service or product.

Storytelling is the framework for the life of a business. Rather than begging for attention, the story should inspire action. A story never dies. Stories that matter keep on being told, keep on progressing and keep connecting with people. Don’t let your customer’s experience die by continuing to impress them. It is your story that will build the foundation for trust, but it is a customer’s experience that will make that trust last.

Stories about your business or brand is no longer nice to have. It’s a must!

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