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Channel 1: Storytelling In Your Small Business Marketing

Author: Rick Braddy   |   March 18th, 2010

In 2008, I began incorporating stories in communications with my subscribers and customers.  As it turns out, stories are an incredibly powerful way to communicate – especially in today’s age of marketing communications saturation, where everyone is so fatigued by the constant bombardment of ads.

So, I decided to try a few story-based campaigns back then – tests designed to find out for certain just how well this story-based approach to marketing works.  In short, the results were truly remarkable, as applied to one of my niche online businesses – an online training and storytelling marketingmembership club site.

I had been emailing my subscriber list of around 25,000 regularly since 2004 (a list that still steadily grows), but I had noticed the list had become increasingly unresponsive in 2007 and 2008.  I thought at first there might be an email deliverability issue, due to spam filters, for example.

The biggest issue was in how I was communicating with this audience and how they had “tuned out”.

In short, they were simply “bored” – tired of the same old dry offers, advertisements, free giveaway promotions, and regular communications like newsletters – what a friend of mine affectionately calls “SOS” (same old stuff).

He says that unless we’re really careful, most of today’s communications ends up in the SOS bucket in people’s mind – they quickly recognize the form factor of an email, landing page or sales page as an advertisement or a cleverly disguised promotion designed to sell them something and just filter it out.

I agree with that assessment.  The old models are just that – old, boring and largely ineffective in this new age of personal channel communications.

Today, people want content – content that’s interesting and useful to them – that meets their own selfish desires as consumers.  Yet as marketers, we have our own selfish needs – to promote our products and services.

So, how can we get our message through these increasingly sophisticated “filters” that our prospects and customers have erected to protect their time from being constantly invaded and to avoid being sold?

Short Answer:  Story.

Stories provide an “envelope” within which we can deliver our messages – an envelope that will actually get opened, its contents read, understood, remembered, and even repeated by word of mouth and acted upon.

Not just any stories will work.  To succeed, stories must be interesting and relevant – and provide an appropriate context for learning about what we have to offer – but without hard or soft-selling.

For example, relevant stories about authentic customer successes (not some dry, boring “case study”) are interesting to both business people and consumers.

Personal stories about what we’ve been through that our readers can use to relate to us as fellow human beings are even more powerful.  Stories of our biggest triumphs – and our biggest failures and lessons learned – are another favorite.

Stories make use human to our readers.  And people will make time to listen to a good story!

Stories help to build trust with our readers.  And properly-crafted stories build a relationship – one that creates enough interest and desire to cause our reader to actually want to listen to what we have to say.

The key is in how we carefully weave our marketing messages into these stories so they are readily consumed by our readers – while our readers are in a receptive frame of mind.

So, back to my story here…

I sent an email to my subscribers, telling the story of one of our members who was frustrated and desperate for a solution.  The story took my readers through the emotions this person experienced, creating empathy and the desire to see the situation resolved.

Then the story shared the solution – how this person discovered this site, which helped him overcome what had seemed like insurmountable obstacles – by joining a particular membership site, meeting like-minded people and learning to avoid the costly mistakes that he had been making, it virtually turned his life around.

The support this member received from other members on our site via our private forums, as well as direct personal assistance by one of the site’s coaches who reached out and helped this member, was the key to his rapid turnaround.

At the end of this story, our member had transitioned from being a “drifter”, losing thousands of dollars a month, to being a respectable “member” who was paying off credit card debts and enjoying thousands of dollars in excess profits – in just 6 weeks.

As soon as I published a couple of these stories, a number of things happened:

  1. Our blog started getting comments – people were now interested enough to get involved, and THEY became a part of the story themselves.  This provided my readers with an outlet – a way to be heard, to share their feelings and points of view.  Prior to this story, the site’s blog had rarely garnered any participation by its readers (who were obviously bored to tears with my random ramblings and musings before that).
  2. Our private membership site forums came alive – our members became more passionate, engaged, starting talking more about the site, and referring more of their friends to join us.
  3. Sales started pouring in. Our new sales during the month we sent just two of these email stories to our subscribers tripled.  Let me say that again.  We TRIPLED our sales – by sending just two stories to our subscribers over a 2-week period!

Over that same quarter, these same stories doubled our sales.  That’s when I knew for certain that I was on to something important and valuable.

Now, there’s an art to crafting stories so they have the desired effect, and combining the power of the storytelling with social media to produce an interactive environment that creates and fuels “social proof” – one of the by-products that causes increased sales results.

Story-telling in marketing communications is something that companies need to do more of.  Our listeners, prospects and customers are tired of the SOS and broadcast style communications we’ve grown accustomed to using with them.

I have used this story-based marketing methodology long enough now to say for certain that it really does work – and it works surprisingly well, too.  Since 2008, I have learned a lot more about the key underpinnings responsible for these methods’ success – a combination of story-telling, relationship-building and authenticity.

Storytelling provides marketers with a way to show up in people’s personal channels and fit in naturally.  Good stories are interesting, engaging content that commands an audience’s attention.  And stories can teach people about the virtues of your product or service without selling.  People learn by way of example by reading stories and seeing how others have applied a product or service in their business or life.

When your company, product or service is involved in a story, it gets noticed.  People pay attention to it because it’s an integral part of the story.  So we can use stories to convey our marketing message in a much softer, more subtle way so that our messages actually get heard, consumed and acted upon.

Finally, the reason stories work so well is that it “frames” the decision-making processes within our prospects mind – setting up a framework for that decision-making that creates influence over how facts are interpreted and how decisions are made – “implicitly” instead of explicitly.

Explicit decisions are what traditional advertising attempts to do – to “sell you” into submission through repeated exposures, compelling copy, impressive claims, strong benefit statements, great offers and solid calls to action.  While these traditional methods certainly have their place, it’s increasingly difficult to use these traditional approaches as the “starting point” – or we risk falling into the SOS bucket and being ignored.

Implicit decisions happen when we’ve shared a few authentic stories with our prospect, and she decides for herself that she wants to take action.  She makes her own decision to take action, without the need for prodding, cajoling or hard-selling tactics.  And once she makes this kind of decision, she’s much more passionate and active than if we’d pushed her into taking an action *we* wanted or requested directly.

Incidentally, if this success story sounds interesting and like something you or your company could benefit from learning to incorporate into your marketing campaigns, let’s discuss how to craft a story-based campaign for your business.

See how that works?

I hope you find the power of story as interesting and useful as I have in connecting with people who are tuned into their personal channels.

Rick

About Rick Braddy
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