To understand why something is important – we need to perceive something that is important. Not everybody perceives the world the same way. Some people look at things in a different way, right? That’s why there is a saying, ‘we don’t see things eye-to-eye’. How many times have you encountered somebody who is a great person but you didn’t agree with them on some topics? Let me guess, multiple times.
I’m not going to try to convince you that storytelling is a great tool – I’m not going to try and convince you that you need to use storytelling. Because the truth is – if you want to grow a business and increase sales you can use different strategies, like coupons and running ads all the time. But if you want to create an emotional connection, if you want loyalty, if you want to build a meaningful brand – that’s a different ball game.
In today’s world, the word storytelling is overused. Everybody thinks that storytelling means pictures on social media or a nice video. It’s not true. We will not discuss what a story is in this article but in short, let’s say that a story doesn’t mean it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story means that there is a character that needs to achieve a goal, and to do that they need to overcome obstacles (problems).
What is the alternative of not using an emotional story? Well, the alternative looks like this: a company promotes their products and services, shows that they are a great fit, their pricing is reasonable, they show testimonials, reviews from other clients, use social and google ads to promote their message and other offline activities. While all these methods are used to attract potential clients most of them are ignored because they look the same: boring, in other words. And the people that see the message are not creating an emotional connection with the brand because it’s all logic.
This becomes a vicious circle as some clients buy, some clients leave and there is no loyalty..
We can’t really expect to get something when we don’t put the work in, right? I mean, what’s the point? Some business owners want clients to be loyal to them yet they are not willing to give them something to stay loyal.
This is where emotional storytelling comes on board. When we use emotions in our story, when we have obstacles and communicate what problems we solve with our customers we give them an opportunity to connect with us on a more personal level. What do I mean by emotions? Well, adding intentional emotions in our story means that we add something that is personal, something that will make them understand and see the brand as a human. Because at the end of the day, brands are not just entities. Brands are like humans – a team of humans that believe in the same cause.
So when we start using emotional storytelling in marketing something magical happens. People start to connect with the brand on an emotional level, they start to ‘love’ the brand and slowly it gains more loyal customers and converts people that are just customers to loyal customers, and converts loyal customers to brand loyalty.
With storytelling we can be as creative as possible. We have the opportunity to wow a customer, we have the opportunity to communicate in ways we couldn’t before. I mean, if we think about how amazing it is to use creativity, that’s just brilliant. We don’t have any limits and this will definitely help us create a stronger bond with our customers.
Another important by-product of a great story is that it enhances memory. Which means when the buyer is ready to buy – or is looking to buy in your category, your brand will be the first company to come to mind because of a great story you created that he or she consumed. Isn’t the goal to be remembered?
You might be wondering if using storytelling will increase your bottom line. The answer is, it depends if the execution of the story is done right, if the product is right for the customer and if it’s the right time. There are many components to sales – but storytelling is one of the most important for differentiating, enhancing memory, creating an emotional connection and increasing the perceived value the right customer sees.
Increasing sales is a by-product of executing the right story.
So if we want to build something that is meaningful and grow it, we have an option – we either choose the easy route or the harder route which has bigger pay offs.
