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If you really want to be remembered – tell a story

YOU can create a strong brand, fill your site with all the features and benefits in the world, but if you want to really engage with visitors then you have to be a good story teller. Since we fell out of the trees and began sitting around fires, stories have been a way of passing on history, entertaining each other, passing the time and developing relationships.

We trust stories.

YOU can create a strong brand, fill your site with all the features and benefits in the world, but if you want to really engage with visitors then you have to be a good story teller. Since we fell out of the trees and began sitting around fires, stories have been a way of passing on history, entertaining each other, passing the time and developing relationships.

We trust stories. They involve us and get us to use different parts of our brain.

If you tell a potential customer that one of your key benefits is customer service then they may, quite rightly, shrug their shoulders and tell you ‘that’s what everyone says’. On the other hand, if you tell them the story about a customer last week who had a problem and how you spent some extra time to sort it for them, you are showing them that you believe in great customer service. They connect with that customer at a deeper level and they appreciate what you did for them.

Show Don’t Tell

Case studies are a good example of how you can include storytelling into your sales provision, showing how customer X had a problem and what you did to solve it and how you went that extra mile to make sure they got everything they needed. Blog posts are another place where you can tell a good story and give visitors the opportunity to become immersed in your vision and the experience of your business and your customers.

Good storytelling can:

* Engage your customer straight away.

* Motivate them to act more quickly.

* Help to build a level of trust that mere facts and promises can’t do.

* Turn dull data, features and benefits into more memorable pieces of information that stick in the consumer’s brain.

Stories are not only rich in language they’re also rich in imagery. Consumers can see things which they can’t when you talk about how many customers benefited from your latest gadget in a recent survey. They see how your product or service is used in reality and the results that follow. Think of your benefits and features as a black and white 15-inch TV. Storytelling sells your product with rich Technicolour, surround sound and a big cinema screen.

Companies mentioned in this article

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