Everyone loves a good story. Well-told stories can make you laugh, make you cry, make you think…
Think about it, when you were in school, you likely didn’t remember history based on numbers, dates, and static information. You remembered it based on the stories. Paul Revere’s dramatic midnight ride to warn of the coming of the British Forces. Henry VIII and the unfortunate ends of his six wives. The courage of Rosa Parks and her refusal to surrender to segregation.
How can storytelling be applied to your inbound marketing strategies?
By using your company’s buyer personas, you can target your marketing initiatives and increase your lead generation, simply by telling them the story of your product or service. Your buyer persona will eventually want details about your product or service, specifications, prices, sizes, etc… But things like prices, sizes, storage capacity?
They’re not fun.
They’re not compelling.
People remember marketing that tells a compelling story. Do you remember the Apple Christmas commercials? That one with the music box from last year?
Or this unexpected Apple commercial, showing Christmas Day through the eyes of one person?
Or, if you’re Canadian, the infamous #TheSudburyIncident from Coffee Mate?
These campaigns were all engrossing. The viewer stuck with them until the very end, the big reveal. Coffee Mate’s #TheSudburyIncident went as far as to have a series of commercials and a call to action to find out the ending of their story. And people were driven to find out.
Those are all marketing concepts that people remember because they tell a story. They play on the natural curiosity of human beings to learn and to find out ‘What happens next?’
So where does that come in for your own marketing strategies?
The answer is quite simple. Find your story. It doesn’t have to be a grand, elaborate saga that you’ve made up. It just has to be yours.
- Did you come up with the idea for your company in the shower (#JustShowerThoughts)?
- Did your first pitch meeting involve going to the zoo?
- Did you gain your first customer by pure accident?
- Did you search for a product to help your dog, only to find that nothing existed, so you created it yourself?
These are all things that a new, potential customer is going to find interesting and engaging.
So tell your story. Tell your company’s story. Tell your employees’ story.
It’s going to make you relatable.
And in today’s world, where you can Google ‘digital marketing companies’ and come up with 14,400,000 results in 0.84 seconds (I checked), relatability and likeability is a big factor in client engagement and ultimately, client conversion.
Relatability, to your clients, shows them that you simply ‘get them’. You understand their pain points, because you have been there too. And understanding and showing you care about a client’s pain points is the fastest and most effective way of gaining new leads, cementing current leads, and gaining traction in your industry.
So tell your story. Tell your company’s story. Tell your employees’ story. Make sure that your clients always want to know what’s happening next for your company.
