There is no doubt about the power of storytelling. The ways that we, as humans, connect and relate to one another involves story one hundred percent of the time. We are constantly telling parts of story, whether the story is our personal history, or the collective story. When you are trying to connect your business to customers, you have to have a compelling story to tell.
Personal
As much as it seems counterintuitive, your story has to be personal. For most customers, it’s hard to connect to a generic plotline with static or uninteresting details and characters. When your aim is to reach new people, you have to start with who you are, and most importantly what part of that story they should connect and resonate with. That comes through personal details, value sharing, and laying out the vision. Do you value transparency, and if so how do you work to achieve it? Share those more personal messages in your company’s story.
Relatable
You might be thinking that you have a very specific brand of content to share, and there is no way to connect that to a more general audience. Challenge that thought – and yourself – to think about how to present your story in a more relatable way. We all know that when you are presenting high level ideas, best practice is to bring down the language and jargon to a general level for the layman. In a good story, you don’t have to sacrifice language for likes, because when you build a relatable story it is as much about the emotion you convey as it is about the language that you use. Think about reading the classics; we no longer use language the same way as Shakespeare did, but the feelings and ideas of the story still translate today.
Emotional
One of the most powerful and quick ways to connect through story is to convey an emotion. Perhaps you want to convey a sense of hope, resilience, urgency – whatever it is, your content should evoke that. It also needs to happen fairly quickly with what we will call a hook. Once you have a hooked, engaged audience that person is most likely to connect to your story and want to connect to your services.
Telling stories is a practice that can be traced back to the beginning of time. Good companies use stories to connect to their intended audience, and then to build relationships! Once you have tapped into the art of telling personal, relatable, and emotion conveying stories you will see the benefits.