The Power of Storytelling

Since humans started gathering around the warmth and protection of the first campfires, there have been stories. They passed down knowledge and vital information for survival and helped us bond. From the spoken word to written text, TV, movies, and digital media, stories give us entertainment and transport us to amazing places. It’s important for businesses to tell captivating stories instead of just presenting dry facts and uninteresting data. Facts and data are key pieces to the story, but they’re nothing without context to give them meaning and depth.

Be Relatable

Your achievements are something to be proud of, but it’s hard for an audience to relate. Instead, focus the challenges you faced and how you were able to overcome them. Everyone can identify with trials and hardships and will be interested in how to rise above. Make your audience the hero of the story by focusing on how your product or service can help them reach a personal goal.

Emotion

In an age of analytics and logic, emotions still carry weight. When people look for something to solve a problem, they can be logical to a point, but the final decision is often based on emotion. The same people that make buying decisions based on emotion will try to sell something based on logic. Even if you’re selling to another business, there’s a person on the other end of that transaction who has the same set of emotions as the rest of us.

Clear Message

Knowing what point you want to get across is a key part of storytelling. You can ramble on for hours, but people will tune out. Having a few key points will keep you on track and to the point, reinforcing a clear outcome that you want to communicate.

Sensory Engagement

Social media makes it easy to visually engage with your audience through pictures and video, but that’s only one of the senses. Your videos can have audio, but most people leave them muted, so use expressive language to engage more of the senses. You don’t need to hit all five senses in a short post, but adding more than just visuals will help the audience’s attention.

In the end, a good story will let customers understand you better and create a strong and lasting connection.

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