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One of the best methods a business can adopt in its marketing is the use of storytelling. For as long as human beings have been around, we’ve shared and swapped stories, at one time around campfires and now via social media platforms and everything in between.
Below, you can learn all about the impact storytelling can have in business and some examples of it in practice. You can also find some useful writing tips to help you start incorporating storytelling techniques in your promotion strategies today.
Let’s start with the basics and take a look at what we mean by “storytelling”.
What Is Storytelling?
Storytelling is the craft of presenting a narrative to an audience through words, images, sounds or video. The aim of these stories is to entertain, engage, inform or in the case of businesses, promote and sell products and services.
Storytelling dates back thousands of years and remains one of the fundamental ways that we share experiences, perspectives and cultural knowledge.
The Psychological Power Of Telling Stories
Storytelling has the power to connect with power on deeper, psychological levels. Some stories may tap into universal themes, emotions, and shared experiences. While on one level the aim is to recount a tale, it also works on another level, helping people process and reflect upon morals, messages, insights and unique perspectives.
Numerous scientific studies have been conducted on storytelling and its impact on people on a psychological level. One study by Brockington et al (2021) found that telling stories had the ability to increase positive emotions in hospitalised children while helping to decrease their pain.
The act of sharing stories also helps with collaboration and connection building. They bring us closer together, in other words.
So how can businesses use this to connect with their customers?
How Businesses Can Tell Stories
Businesses can use storytelling in lots of different ways to help connect with their audiences. As time has gone on, humans are leaning more toward visual mediums to absorb information. Influencer marketing has spiked in popularity as a result, as individuals tell the story of their experiences using a product or service.
Businesses can also utilise customer stories and testimonials in their marketing efforts. Showing others how one person fared can be a big boost to converting leads. In the legal sector, for example, law firms promote videos of interviews with clients who explain what the process was like and what the outcome was. People can find this much more relatable.
Some businesses also utilise emotions when it comes to their storytelling campaigns. A few food products, for example, may show the origins of a family business to show that they’re relatable. Others may opt to pursue humour, telling jokes or using sketches on advertisements to attract attention.
Let’s take a look at some specific examples of storytelling in business.
Examples Of Storytelling In Business
Lots of companies have utilised storytelling in their marketing campaigns over the years. In some cases, the aim is to tell the story of their customer, to show their troubles and how the business’s product or service helped them overcome them.
- Nike – one of the world’s most iconic sporting brands, Nike uses the simple but motivational strapline “Just Do It” to connect with its customers on an emotional level. When it first launched this campaign, it utilised storytelling to show a number of athletes and sports people fighting to overcome barriers.
- Coca-Cola – a powerhouse of a brand, Coca-Cola is always coming up with different ways to keep themselves at the top of the pack. A few years ago, they used storytelling with their “Share A Coke” campaign. This saw people able to buy bottles of Coke with the names of their friends or family on them, which helped create individual stories and personal connections.
- Airbnb – the holiday letting company Airbnb puts the customer at the heart of all of its campaigns, showing the potentially magical experiences you can have. Its business model as a whole is centred around putting the customer in control of their holiday too, which makes it work so well.
Try Creating Your Own Stories With These Writing Tips
It’s easier said than done to start incorporating storytelling in your business strategies. There’s a craft behind how these stories are both written and told. Done poorly, it can fail to win customers over.
If you want to start using storytelling, try these useful writing tips:
- Think about who the hero of your story is. This is your central character, the person you want your customers to relate to and like. If they’re unlikeable in any way, there’s a good chance their story will fail to land. To help you define this person, you can look at the demographics of your business’s target audience.
- What does your character want to achieve in this story? All characters need a goal or desire to obtain something. This can help you work out the plot of your story. As a business, you could base this around what solutions your product or service offers and show through the character the problem that you can help solve.
- Demonstrate a positive resolution, a happy ending. This is what people find most satisfying when it comes to a story. So if you can show your character achieving their goal with the help of your product or service, then this should hopefully chime with customers. A good example of this is the deodorant brand Lynx. Their ads often focus on an average man failing to get attention from women. That all changes when they start using Lynx, with the ads often showing the man surrounded by attractive women.
If you follow this simple structure for telling a story, you’ll find that everything else will fall into place. And with some luck and hard work, you may achieve that all important growth.
David Prior
David Prior is the editor of Today News, responsible for the overall editorial strategy. He is an NCTJ-qualified journalist with over 20 years’ experience, and is also editor of the award-winning hyperlocal news title Altrincham Today. His LinkedIn profile is here.
