Storytelling in Business: How to Pull Customers in by Telling Stories

Everyone loves a good story.

It is the reason Disney is one of the biggest companies in the world.

Stories make people feel things and transport your customers to entirely different worlds.

Stories give you a chance to capture your prospective customer’s attention without boring them with facts and figures.

Stories ensure that you leave a lasting impression on your customer and they are 22x more effective for conversion than facts and figures.

Let me give you an example, this is the about page of Warby Parker, an eyewear brand.

This is another about page of a random eyewear brand that I found.

These two about pages have basically the same message, which is providing affordable eyewear, but after reading both, which vendor are you more likely to buy from?

Leveraging storytelling in your content can be a great conversion tool for your business if you do it the right way.

Good storytelling can help transform the way prospective customers see your business and turn it into something extraordinary.

But in order to do that, here are the 4 basic principles of content storytelling that you have to follow:

1. Define your target audience

Before you can successfully tell a story, you must successfully identify the audience that will most likely enjoy it. When you know your target audience, then you can write a story that resonates with them. But how do you define your target audience?

There are several ways to go about it, but a good place to start is the list below:

1. First, list out the demographic information you know about your top target audience. Is your target market made up of single black women with bachelor’s degrees who earn more than 100,000 Naira per month? Or are they middle-aged black males in their thirties and forties who are at the top of their professions?

2. When you have determined their demography, you can pin these audiences down by describing their psychographic/personal characteristics. With psychography, you can be as specific as you want, are they deeply religious? What is their social-economic class? Where do they live?

With these, you can answer the question of who exactly they are. The next step is creating a persona. What are the age, gender, job, and hobbies of your target market? This can further improve how you tell the story so that it becomes more relatable. Here’s a sample persona: “Ada ” is a 28-year-old, unmarried female. She holds a bachelor’s degree, works and lives in Lagos, Nigeria. She loves going out to eat, and drink with friends. She’s a freelance chef so she doesn’t have a specific day to day schedule. She makes most of her purchases online, with pricing and convenience being the key factors. Once you have successfully identified your audience you can begin to tell a story and craft your content.

2. Create a relatable character

A story is incomplete without the main character or hero. Creating a hero for your story gives people someone they can connect to. This character can be either a real person or a fictional one.

Either way, when crafting a character, you need to create one that makes it easy for audiences to understand your story. This character should be interesting enough to leave an impression in the minds of your audience.

The character needs to be one that your audience can empathize with, and for this to happen, your character needs to have a similar persona to that of your target audience – their likes, dislikes, motivations, aspirations, and pain points.

When you create a character with such a persona, chances are your target audience will instantly connect with your story.

A brand that recently put this to use is MTN with their “we move” campaign. The TV ad for this campaign features a young graduate who tries to find a job albeit unsuccessfully, and after so many tries decides to start a food business. It is a struggle many Nigerians can relate to.

3. Include “conflict” in your story

Including conflict in your brand story helps keep your audience engaged.

Think about all the stories you loved as a child, would you have enjoyed them as much if the heroes were not fighting a “big bad” or going through a conflict?

I do not think I would have enjoyed Avatar as much if I didn’t see him struggle to master all 4 elements and defeat the fire lord.

The great thing about including a conflict in your story is that you do not need to drum up an entirely fictional one, you can just capitalize on an existing problem your brand has and create content out of it.

At least that is what Domino’s Pizza did when people kept saying their Pizza tasted like cardboard. Domino’s took this criticism and ran with it. They created pizzaturnaround.com where they uploaded a documentary about their journey to creating a better Pizza and created a media campaign based on their new recipe. Part of this media campaign was a taste test of the new recipe where 3 out of every 5 testers claimed Domino’s was better than Pizza hut, and Papa John’s.

Here are a few steps that can help you create a good conflict for your brand story:

• Make your target persona the hero of your story and give them an issue or a problem they need to solve, or a desire or action they want to achieve. This is usually the stage before they find a helpful product.

• Allow them to fail at the beginning with whatever they are trying to achieve. If they immediately get what they want, there’s no story. They are testing out other things that don’t work here

• Add obstacles that get in the way of the hero achieving their goal. This could be the research stage of a consumer trying to find a solution to their problem.

• Finally, the protagonist overcomes the barriers and achieves their goal when they discover your product or service

4. Keep your story as authentic as possible

Authenticity in brand storytelling refers to how genuine a brand is in its messaging. Authenticity helps brands win trust with their customers and incite emotional responses in them.

When telling a brand story, you should avoid being fake at all costs.

The reason many people connect so much with Apple’s brand message and their story is that they have always been authentic to themselves and never for once veered from their tagline of “Think different.”

It is also the reason Nike could afford to run the Colin Kaepernick campaign for the 30th anniversary of their motto “Just Do It” despite Kaepernick’s public reputation being tied to his protest of police brutality, racism, and social injustice. They have always done things like that. They were being authentic.

Authenticity is why if Coca-Cola decides to run a politically centered campaign today after years of having a “feel good” message, people might not react well to it.

People love authenticity so it is up to you to create a story that is genuine and unique to your brand, and as long as you stay true to your brand, it will be easy for people to react and connect to your story.

Conclusion

Brand storytelling provides many benefits for people who do it well. Chief among them is that it helps you meet your conversion and engagement goals. It will also help pull customers in.

If you can tell a good enough story and incite a strong emotional response, there are no limits to the results you can get from your target audience/customers.

Jon Morrow is a living example of this, as he was able to create his blog, Boost Blog Traffic, with over 100,000 monthly visitors after sharing his experience of becoming paralyzed. In fact, he earns over $100,000 every month from his customers.

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