Rather than giving a ‘rough’ definition of storytelling, a better way is to illustrate it through a real example. Apple, whether you like their products or not (and especially their prices 😁), is a perfect example of a brand that masters the art of storytelling to perfection. Their commercials feature their users and highlight life moments rather than their products. Their touching and entertaining stories that most people can identify with skilfully use storytelling techniques. At the end of the day, you don’t know what product you’ve seen, but you remember the brand, it sticks.
To sum up, storytelling could be defined as follows: a marketing technique that involves telling a story about a product, service or brand in order to give an imaginary and reassuring dimension to the sales pitch.
With the stage now set, we’ll guide you in putting all this into practice within your company or for your brand.
Here are some tips to get you started:
01 |Know your audience:
Storytelling is still a marketing technique, so it’s essential to know whom you are addressing in order to deliver your message as effectively as possible.
02 |What do you want to tell them?
Before thinking about how you are going to present your storytelling, you need to know exactly what message you want to convey.
03 |Be genuine:
You need to be sincere and straightforward if you want to affect your customers’ emotions. They need to feel the humanity and humility of your company.
04 |Tell stories:
The best way to reach your target audience is to tell a real story. Talk about touching or entertaining moments, something with soul, without giving away too much.
05 |Be direct:
The aim is not to bombard your target audience with information, quite the opposite. Keep it simple, clear and precise. You need to know exactly where you’re taking them.
To conclude this article with something practical, we suggest you run a workshop with your colleagues so you can effectively kill two birds with one stone: bring staff together on this project and work on the story of your company, its products and its Why… The Why being the mission of the company, its reason for existing.
Elements will emerge from this work meeting, enabling you to create an entire world and a story using the main lines of the narrative, i.e. setting the scene, defining the characters and holding your audience spellbound!
Over to you now…Storytelling has the magical effect of turning your customers into true fans.
By tapping into the emotions triggered by a good story, your audience will retain information better because they can visualise the real results they stand to get by becoming a customer of your company. Even in B2B or so-called boring or less glamorous industries, studies reveal that the vast majority of decision-making is linked to emotions.
