Seven Secrets To Successful Business Storytelling

If you’re wondering how to tell better stories, you’re not alone. Storytelling has been used since ancient times to persuade, sell, educate, and inspire people, and it’s still as relevant now as it was then. From the campfire to the schoolhouse to the office, we all know that storytelling has many benefits when it comes to communicating with others in an interesting and meaningful way. To make your business even more successful than it already is, here are seven storytelling tricks that you can put into practice right away to captivate your audience in new ways.

1) Relate Your Story To Their Life

Everyone loves a good story—and they’re remembered as much as 22 times better than facts. When you have a relatable story to tell, your audience connects with it and connects with you, making it so much easier for them to see themselves in your words. In turn, they will connect more with your business because it feels like yours is their own. With storytelling, there are many ways to do it right. These tricks can help keep things interesting. 

1. Start With Their Life You don’t need someone else’s life to start telling a compelling story; just use your customers’ or employees' lives. This trick uses real-life scenarios to create an emotional connection between you and your reader. 
2. Help Them Imagine What They Can't Seem To Conceive Though people can imagine what they want but just aren't able to bring it into fruition, help them along by sharing how one of your customers did just that! 
3. Get Personal And Reveal Your Failures As entrepreneurs, we can sometimes focus on how we achieved success rather than how we failed at something. We often forget to share those mistakes with others to make them feel less alone in theirs. 
4. Show Them How Many Great Ideas Didn’t Work Before Something Perfect Happened It's easy to fall victim to silver bullet thinking: The solution was obvious when I found it, why didn't anyone else think of it? But truthfully, it wasn't. There were multiple ideas before finally reaching perfection. 
5. Be Someone You Would Pay To Listen To If you're talking about your product too much or not enough about yourself, ask yourself if you would be willing to pay someone else to listen to what they had to say. 
6. Surprise Them With New Information Instead of being predictable, surprise your readers by delivering information they didn't know they needed. 
7. Share Why You Care More than anything else, if you want to become trustworthy and influential through storytelling, show people who are doing it well that you care about them; otherwise no one will listen to anything you have to say. 

2) Help Them See Themselves In The Problem, Benefit, Or Situation

If you’re trying to connect with an audience, think about a time in your life when you faced a similar problem, benefit, or situation. Then create a story around that point of reference. This method of storytelling will help your audience see themselves in your story—and it can be as easy as sharing what happened to you or helping them empathize with you from their perspective. Either way, it makes for effective storytelling because it makes it easier for others to relate to what you’re saying. Tell The Story In A Q&A Format: Another simple way to tell stories is to ask questions and answer them in a sequential order. By doing so, you have control over how they take each step and piece together your puzzle. Not only does it get your audience thinking critically, but it’s also extremely memorable to those who hear it—which is exactly what you want if you want people talking about your brand after an event or speech. Say It First: When telling a story on stage, don’t wait for someone else to engage in conversation; say something like that reminds me of... instead of sitting back and letting someone else steer the ship.

3) Use Stories To Communicate Actionable Takeaways

If you communicate your ideas through a story, you’re far more likely to be remembered than if you just lay out your facts in an inert list. Plus, when your audience is more engaged with what you’re saying, they can get at a deeper level of what it is that you want them to take away from that story—which makes it so much easier for them to then make those takeaways their own. So why not embrace stories? For example, imagine you’re trying to sell someone on going vegan. There could be some numbers about how being vegan can save resources and animals, but it may be much more powerful to share your own experience (and transformational process to becoming vegan). Once people are riveted by your story and personally invested in its message of change, there will no doubt come a point where they have to consider: Can I do what she did? Is it possible for me? Am I willing to try? How does one go about doing something like that? What does it look like? They’ll ask themselves these questions because they’ve begun thinking about how your idea has been personalized. And THAT is when you link back to your products or services and offer them up as a means to guide customers along their own transformation journey. Which brings us back to ... #1. Speaking Directly To Your Audience With Relatable Examples: Say you’re writing copy for a product that helps women quit smoking. No matter how well-written your landing page is, it might not convert visitors unless it speaks directly to their concerns and challenges around their particular situation. Stories are what allows writers to do just that! As content creators, we must know our audiences better than anyone else in order to effectively reach them. We don’t market to women ages 18-34, we market to Jane. Or Cindy. Or Suzy. Each individual deserves her own tailoring. Because let's face it - nobody wants advice that's one size fits all; everyone wants to be unique and treated as such.

4) Mix In Statistics

There are a few storytelling tricks to make your business successful. First and foremost, be sure you’re telling stories that interest people. If you’re like most of us, that means you need to roll up your sleeves and do some digging on who your target audience is. (Just make sure not to confuse yourself with your buyer persona!) Knowing who you’re talking to will help shape how you talk about it...and what kind of content resonates with them. Here are three key questions for you to ask: 1) What does my customer care about? 2) How does my product solve their problem? 3) Why should they trust me? Once we have those answers, we can begin weaving data into our story in a way that makes us more memorable than facts. How? Mix statistics in where it serves as supporting evidence for an otherwise bigger idea. For example, if I had written an ad copy for Post-It Notes – The World’s Most Useful Product! – all we would remember from that ad is its title alone. But by introducing numbers at key moments throughout our copy, we give folks something real to latch onto and remember...along with helping to convince them why Post-It Notes deserve a spot on their desk or fridge.

5) Hook Audiences With Emotion

We’re all emotional creatures and stories give us a peek into someone else’s life or their thoughts. The best brands aren’t in our heads, they’re in our hearts, and when we connect with them emotionally, it changes everything. Think about it: you have less reason to care about facts but more reason to care about people. Everyone loves a good story; be one. People don’t buy from companies; they buy from people. And that company is only as good as its people. So find ways to make your brand feel like a person so customers can engage on an emotional level. Don’t get stuck focusing on what your company does; instead show who you are, where you came from, and why you do what you do. Tell everyone how your brand came to be—not just about your product or service but about who started it and why it was created in the first place. When you tell everyone who works for your company (or at least explain it in-depth online) why you got into business, then tell your audience that same thing, too. If there’s even a hint of empathy, emotion will follow. It doesn’t matter if you manufacture toys or textiles; chances are you want your community to feel something, so help them out. Even if it makes no sense and goes against industry norms, think about making sure that your community cares before any sales pitch. You should never think sales first because if people don’t care about you, they won’t buy from you no matter how good your pitch is.

6) Illustrate Pain Points & Solutions In Stories

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that’s certainly true when it comes to your business. If you want to engage someone with your business – show them pictures. They don’t have to be complicated or elaborate, just make sure they resonate. Stories are powerful because they grab people emotionally and create engaging visions in their heads about your topic. You can use those stories to illustrate pain points that your audience experiences in their own life, and how you offer solutions for them. For example, I worked with a client who had an eCommerce startup which sold women’s jewelry online; she wanted to bring awareness of her brand but was finding it hard through traditional marketing channels like Google Adwords and Facebook. We started brainstorming about different concepts we could present on social media channels like Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. One of my ideas was showing women wearing the jewelry in an everyday setting, along with captions expressing emotions such as Feeling confident yet sexy at work!

7) Use Personal Connections To Engage Audiences

No matter what industry you’re in, storytelling is always going to be a valuable skill. All businesses can do some level of storytelling, but if you want to tell stories that attract and engage your audience, personal connections are a must. You need to show off how your product or service has helped people from all walks of life—it allows those people to relate and become invested in your brand. Don’t just list facts about how awesome your company is; actually tell stories about customers using your products and services to fix their problems. The more humanized your business becomes, the more relatable it will be for others. People like helping other people: Your business isn’t about you; it’s not even necessarily about your products. People invest in brands because they care about helping others solve their problems—so don’t waste time on self-indulgent advertising without any kind of punchline at the end. Create engaging content with a clear purpose for readers so they know why your product matters.