Storytelling is a powerful technique for convincing reluctant customers and overcoming their objections. In this article, you’ll learn how to create compelling stories that highlight the benefits, features, and emotions your product provides.
Identify customer pain points
Before telling a story, you must understand your customers’ problems, needs, and desires. What are they struggling with? What are they looking for? What are they afraid of? You can use surveys, interviews, reviews, or testimonials to gather this information. Next, you can create customer personas that summarize their characteristics, goals, and challenges.
Choose the right story type
Stories can be a powerful tool to connect with customers and persuade them to make a purchase. From success stories that demonstrate how the product or service helped someone, to origin stories that explain why and how it was created, to similar stories that compare it with something familiar or unexpected, to metaphorical stories that use figurative language to evoke emotions. There are many different types of stories that can be used to attract customers.
Structure your story with a clear plot
A good story has a beginning, middle, and end and follows a basic flow. First, a catchy sentence is an opening sentence or paragraph that attracts the reader’s attention and piques their curiosity. Then you present the problem with empathy, emotion, or data to demonstrate that you understand your customer’s pain points. You then present the solution along with benefits, features, or testimonials to demonstrate the product’s value. Finally, use a call to action to invite customers to take the next step, with a level of urgency or incentive to encourage them to act quickly and confidently.
Improve your story
To make your story more engaging, you can use certain storytelling techniques, such as the hero’s journey, the power of three, and show, don’t tell. The hero’s journey is a classic narrative structure that illustrates how your customers go from ordinary to extraordinary thanks to your product or service. It involves calls to action, mentors, challenges, transformation and rewards. The power of three is a technique that uses three elements, words or phrases to create rhythm or contrast. This can help you emphasize a point, create suspense, or give a story closure. Show, don’t tell is a technique that uses sensory, dialogue, or action details to demonstrate to your customers what is happening, rather than telling them. This can help you create vivid scenes, evoke emotions, or show off results.
Test and refine your story
The final step to ensure your story is successful is to test and refine it. Collect feedback from colleagues, friends, and customers to learn how to improve your story. Use analytics, metrics, and conversions to measure your stories’ performance and use data to optimize it. Experiment with variations like title, length, tone, or format, and use A/B testing, split testing, or multivariate testing to compare results. With these steps, you can create a story that is sure to be a success.
