One of the best ways to successfully market yourself, your product or your company is to tell your story. Admit it, as a child, your fondest memories are of being curled up on Mom or Dad’s, or Grandma’s lap while they read you stories. As they say, those were the best of times. Times of closeness and relaxation.
The older you got, the more adventure those story books contained. As they read your favorite story – or a brand new story – the inflection of their voices made your mind go in new, exciting directions. Your imagination took you to faraway places you had never been. Why not share this experience with your customers? Tell your story.
Tell Your Story to Get Prospects’ Attention
Nothing gets a prospect’s attention faster than listening to a story. Stories are far easier to absorb than a bullet list of product features or company experiences. Stories grab readers and drag them in, gaining their interest and holding their attention. Isn’t that exactly what you want to do in your marketing? Tell people something they want to hear, how they want to hear it? Take away the boring angle found in so much of today’s marketing. Make readers resist the urge to ‘delete’ or just move on to something more interesting.
One of the best examples of how storytelling works in reality is the DirectTV ads running on television the past couple of months. To convince customers they shouldn’t make the mistake of subscribing to cable TV instead of DirectTV, they have created and aired a series of ‘what will happen if you do…’ commercials. Each one ends with the premise of ‘don’t let this happen to you.’ “Don’t have a grandson with a dog collar….”, “Don’t be left in a roadside ditch…”, “Don’t have to sell your hair to a wig shop…” Each is funnier than the last one, but you can’t stop watching them and following their logical path from making the wrong choice to what will happen if you do. They may be a bit bizarre, but step-by-step, viewers are drawn into the logic that it could happen… maybe.
Tell Your Story as a Marketing Strategy
What stories can you tell about yourself and your company? How about the one about struggling for years and then that one perfect client came along and opened new doors to you? Or, how the one about how you finally found your niche, miles from where you started… accidentally? You can make the stories as creative as you care to get…. how many people do you know who ordered cable TV and ended up with a grandson wearing a dog collar? Hey, it could happen.
[…] management, etc. Some posts are more general, giving some examples concerning how you can leverage the story of your business to build brand and business awareness. Others are more specific to certain elements of your business, such as tips on how to develop a […]