How to level up the connection with your audience
Stories within marketing are everywhere and serve an important purpose. Look at the hot sauce bottle on your dinner table—I bet there’s a little story on the label. Look at your menu the next time you go to a restaurant or your favorite local boutique’s website. We are surrounded by stories. But why?
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Why?
People feel more connected to stories. This Forbes article says it all:
- Stories create a deeper connection with your audience.
- Storytelling can help teach something.
- It gives us a different format for delivering our message.
As marketers, we want to connect with our audience and engage. So instead of simply sharing information, it may be more useful to tell it in a story. By packaging your message into a story, it can also serve as a wonderful teaching tool. It’s way easier to remember something if it’s in the form of a story than just a list of facts, right? It’s a better way to comprehend a subject when all of the details relate to one another somehow.
Before humans wrote on tablets or developed other forms of writing, communication was largely through storytelling, and for a good reason!
When?
You may want to integrate storytelling with your message when you want to:
- Share why or how your brand was created.
- Teach a new concept.
- Offer a new perspective on a familiar concept.
- Add entertainment value.
- Make a concept better understood.
Again, adding a story component can communicate a message in a more relatable, engaging way. For example, this LinkedIn post by the extremely talented copywriter, Eddie Shleyner, demonstrated this concept perfectly.
It’s a simple story about how he helped an elderly man fill his car tires with air and the man offered him a cigar in return. Eddie used this story to demonstrate the Rule of Reciprocity where we are inclined to return a gesture and he states, “Give away your content, expertise, your time—it will come back to you in spades.”
He could have easily written the post with the last four paragraphs to make his point, but the story that he paired with his message added another dimension and proved the point even further.
Dave and Buster’s
Some stories may be long, and some may be short (only so much text can fit on a little hot sauce bottle, right?). Take this Dave and Buster’s story for another example:
I visited there a few weeks ago and this caught my attention above their front doors. In three sentences, they told their story in the simplest terms. There weren’t any more details needed to paint the whole picture, so why add more?
I’m sure there was more to the conversation about starting a business, but this is what it was at its core.
Sometimes, the simpler the better.
How can you use storytelling to better connect with your audience? Leave a comment below!
