So I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. The rest of your life is a long time, who can blame me? Only two years ago I changed my major so that instead of loading myself down with science classes I wasn’t the least bit interested in, I could write and read, and research. I changed my major from Communication Disorders to Online Journalism and Public Relations because I didn’t care about the speech disorder that affected the young child, but I cared about what the young child liked to do after school, or where she came from. I cared about her story.
Storytelling has shaped my career path and much of my life. Now, about to graduate, I have had to opportunity to tell stories, hear stories, and to read a ton of stories. Somewhere down the line I picked up a minor in marketing and have fallen in love with the relationship between the world of business and the not so distant world of media. I have found that storytelling is equally as important in marketing, and equally as exciting to me.
That’s only part of my story in becoming a StorySeller. So, how can a storyteller become a StorySeller?
The first step to selling a product is to first know your customer. The best way to understand your customer is to connect and relate to your customer. Consumers are more emotionally attracted and willing to connect to a sale if there is a story behind the sale instead of just advertisement or traditional marketing. There are two sides to story telling, the story and the facts. It is important to balance both aspects of the story in order to sell.
How to tell a marketing story?
- Get personal. Get emotional. Chipotle reigns as a company who uses storytelling in their marketing reaches. Instead of just saying they use organic produce in their product, the company tells creative stories to visually show their customers where their products come from and how they make their way into the Chipotle restaurants and ultimately into their customer’s stomachs.
- Current News. Capitalize on current news stories. Being a journalist I know first hand that storytelling in news stories is effective in readership results. Heavily popular news stories are basically a ‘gimmie’ to marketers to piggy-back off of for a marketing story spin off… that is if the story is appropriate.
Why it works?
- Storytelling marketing is just in-depth content marketing. Companies like Coca-Cola and Allstate use storytelling marketing consistently to sell their brands to consumers and have been extremely successful. Coca-Cola’s latest marketing tactic, Share a Coke, is the epitome of storytelling marketing. By allowing and encouraging the customer to create their own stories with their brand and share them with other customers and friends, Coke is dominating storytelling marketing.
- The Nielson study is among many tests that prove that storytelling is a part of the human condition. We spend hours of our days day dreaming of stories we have created within our own minds so it is only natural that we seek stories elsewhere.
- The online market place is growing at lightning fast speed. This means larger audiences, more knowledgeable and targeted audiences, and more opportunity for story telling. Trends for 2016 marketing say that between the continuing mobile rise, and video necessity, the need for virtual reality is emerging.
What a better time for more innovative storytelling.
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