How to Use Storytelling to Sell Your Brand & Connect with Customers

While you may have a quality product or service that perfectly meets your target audiences’ needs, that usually isn’t what converts them into paying customers and brand advocates. In most cases, it’s your brand’s story and ability to form an emotional connection with your audience that converts viewers into loyal customers.

Every successful marketer understands that each step of the customer journey is intertwined with great storytelling. Stories captivate the audience. They connect with the customers, transform their decisions, and bond the relationships between the customer and the brand, creating fundamental relationships for years to come.

When it comes to connecting with customers, having a great product or service is king, marketing is queen, yet the STORYTELLING that makes them purchase is the ultimate kingdom! At yorCMO, we’ve mastered the art of storytelling. Whatever your industry, telling your brand’s story will undoubtedly drive sales and help your business grow.

Keep reading to learn:

The various phases of telling your brand’s story
How storytelling helps buyers perceive your offer’s reward
How to overcome your customer’s objections and resistance
How compelling storytelling converts customers into brand evangelists

Understanding Your “Why” Is the First Phase of Storytelling

Compelling storytelling can help your business stand out from your competitors, but only when it is combined with strategy and correct execution can that be achieved. To effectively use storytelling as a marketing tool, the first step is understanding your brand’s “why.”

Simon Sinek and his idea of “Start with WHY” explains this first phase of storytelling—the foundational communication. He explains that people won’t fully buy into your idea, product, or service until they understand the WHY behind it.

If you’re struggling with understanding your brand’s “why,” some questions to consider answering include:

What’s your brand’s purpose, cause, or belief?
What does your brand stand for?
Why does it matter to your potential customers?

Using stories in this phase aims to show a fundamental understanding of what challenges customers are dealing with and explain the organization’s values that can alleviate them.

This stage initiates the emotional phase, causing shifts in understanding toward your product or service, persuading them to act. To inspire specific behavior, marketers need to change how the customer feels and thinks by evoking imagery describing the positive outcome, or, simply put— “a better WHY.”

Paint a Picture to Help Potential Customers Envision the Reward

Following the emotional phase, the transformation phase helps customers understand the shift in how they perceive your product or service. Whether you want potential buyers to make a purchase, sign up for your email list, or book a consultation—you need to inspire them.

To inspire, brands must clearly define a win-win vs. lose-lose situation and persuade them to aspire to be a winner. To define the reward, you need to understand your potential buyers’ core problems, hurdles, and frustrations. With that knowledge, you can demonstrate how your company solves those pain points. Paint a picture and use compelling imagery to inspire your audience to imagine the reward that comes with buying your offer.

Define Your Brand’s Value, Mission, & Vision to Overcome Resistance

Brands need to overcome customers’ resistance towards obstacles and hardships and instead show them the path to the top. No matter what area of your business you operate in, your brand story must communicate a clear and easy-to-understand:

Value proposition: What benefits do customers enjoy by choosing your product or service over your competitors?
Mission statement: Why does your organization exist? What are your company’s overall goals and approach to reaching those goals?
Vision statement: What is the desired future position for your company? That should describe your company’s inspiration to where you want your company to go.

When you insert your value proposition, mission, and vision statements into your brand story, it alleviates your customers’ fears and proves how your brand can make their dreams become a reality.

Effective Storytelling Creates a Sense of Community Between Customers

It’s important to note that storytelling is not just about making customers believe in the reward that your company offers. And telling your brand’s story is much more than selling the implications of being the best in a class by consuming or purchasing your company’s products.

It boils down to a relational phase that communicates the sense of belonging to a group of like-minded consumers who share that belief. When done expertly, telling your brand’s story stimulates your buyers’ imaginations and passions and builds a sense of community.

In this phase, customers become brand evangelists who bond with living the brand’s story, sharing their experiences, and boosting others’ motivation by re-telling the story to family and friends. They use a shared experience or situation others could relate to, both online and in real life, and share how your brand has solved that particular problem or pain point.

We all crave connection. Using storytelling as a marketing tool to create emotional ties that provide a sense of community will sell your brand and foster a community and turn customers into evangelists loyal to your brand.

Define Your Brand’s Story with Seasoned Marketing Experts at yorCMO

Storytelling is vital in connecting customers with your brand. It challenges a transactional marketing approach and alleviates the hard-sell techniques. To build a great story for your brand, you need to know where you are going, understand your buyer, and exactly how your product or service meets your customer’s needs. These points make up yorCMO’s 6 fundamentals of marketing, and our marketing experts are here to show you the way.

If you need guidance building your brand’s strategy and converting online viewers into loyal customers, I am happy to help you discover your next steps! Contact me directly at aneta@yorCMO.com or complete a contact form to book your discovery call today.

About the author:

Aneta Zawila-Jordan is a proven brand builder and business accelerator who lives on the mission to grow her clients’ enterprises. She parlays her extensive experience in the fast-paced, consumer-facing verticals to make them WIN by mastering marketing strategy, go-to-market solutions, and performance lead generation.

Aneta is based in the Great Washington D.C. metro area.

Contact us today to book a free consultation to see if fractional marketing is right for you.

info@yorCMO.com | 402.807.5414

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin for practical bite-sized business advice, marketing tips, and more.