Making it Personal: How Storytelling Can Drive People to your Business

Making it Personal: How Storytelling Can Drive People to your Business

Successful online marketing involves engaging with your target customers. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most effective is to tell a good story. A story told well will grab your visitors’ attention and help to convert them from visitors into leads.

People love stories. Stories instantly capture our attention and draw us in. But how can you use them for your own marketing efforts?

Here are some of the best ways that you can use storytelling to drive more people to your business.

Use Stories to Get Links

The first thing to remember is that you can use stories anywhere you want to. Whether that is in your blog posts, on your About page, in your press releases, in your social media updates, or anywhere else.

There is nowhere in your marketing that stories cannot be used effectively.

If you want to drive traffic to your website, SEO is one of the most important techniques and this involves building links to your site. One of the best ways to build links is by creating engaging content that people want to share.

You could do this yourself, or you could use PosiRank for SEO or another service. It doesn’t matter how you do it, you should just focus on telling compelling stories and this will lead to more engagement and more shares.

Tell Your Brand Story on Your About Page

The About page is one of the most visited pages on any website, and it should not be an afterthought. It is the perfect place for you to tell your brand story where you can engage visitors and direct them to contact you, follow you on social media, or carry out some other action.

So use your About page to talk about why you started the business, what made you want to do what you are doing, and why it is important to you.

Don’t just tell a boring biography make it come to life. Talk about the challenges you faced and the goal you wanted to reach. Most importantly, explain how you will help your target customers and make their lives better.

Tell Customers About what Matters to You

Stories are a great way to present important issues that matter to you. If you support an organization or a charity, a story about how you came to do this can engage your audience more.

Rather than just doing something, explain your reasons behind it, such as why it is important to you, and how you discovered the organization. Perhaps even tell a personal story about why you chose to support it. This will help to draw your reader in and connect with them.

Share Your Struggle

Conflict is a major part of any good story. People like to hear about how you overcame a struggle. So rather than telling people how great you are, share the difficulties you had.

This can be the ideal subject for a blog post. Perhaps a story about how the odds were stacked against you but you persisted and got over them. It also shows how much your business means to you.

Don’t Bore Your Reader

When you use stories in any part of your marketing, don’t bore your reader. Read your stories through once they are done and get rid of the boring bits, and focus on the interesting stuff. Remember that you only have a few seconds to capture the reader’s attention, so don’t waste them.

Get Personal

Stories are way better when they are personal, so tell them in a personal voice. Speak to your audience directly and don’t try and add more “professional” sounding language.

When you tell stories on your blog, make sure they are not told in boring jargon. Use simple language that people can relate with, otherwise you will just turn people away.

Use Emotion

The secret of a successful story is to engage the emotions. This is essential in any kind of content you produce, whether you are writing a blog, a social media update, a newsletter, or anything else.

Add a human element to all of your stories and connect with your reader on a human level. This is far more persuasive, and it is likely to drive more people to your business.

Stories are memorable because they engage the emotions far more than facts and figures. This is why sales copy so often focuses on real people and real stories.

Work Your Marketing Magic with Stories

Stories play a big part in our lives, and you can take advantage of this fact when marketing your business. The simple fact is that people are hard-wired to listen to stories. And if you tell a good story, people will listen.

You can get them to engage emotionally with your brand through a good story, and this is the ideal scenario for any marketing plan. So use stories. Take advantage of them in your marketing, and get better at them. Then enjoy the increased amount of engagement they bring.

Lucy Stevenson is a marketing consultant who encourages her clients to help her to think out of the box to create a success campaign. Her articles for business owners appear around the web.