How to Tell Irresistible Stories that Sell
By Andaline Oketola
A brand needs to build and earn the trust of its customers. A good product with bad stories won’t make sales.
Storytelling has always been in existence. It was how your grandmother’s friend went to the same shop to buy the exact woven fabric as your grandmother. And this was because your grandmother told her a story of how the seller made her laugh, how everyone complimented the fabric, and how good she felt in it.
A brand needs to build and earn the trust of its customers. No better way to do so than by telling them stories. Not just any story but great stories because a good product with a bad story won’t make sales.
This article looks into the essence of storytelling, and how understanding your target customers is important to crafting stories that sell. It also gives extensive details on how to know your potential customers and outlines five characteristics of the kind of stories that sell. Let’s get right into it!
Why Tell Stories?
Go-Globe reveals that only 5% of people remember statistics, but 63% remember stories. This shows that people hardly make decisions based on facts but on good stories that would cause them to believe strongly in your brand.
Coca-Cola is a top brand that has been in existence for 136 years, and not going into extinction anytime soon. In 2020, Forbes ranked Coca-Cola as one of the top ten most valuable brands in the world. A greater part of this accomplishment comes from its marketing campaigns, reaching over 200 countries around the globe. This brand is an example of what intentionally telling great stories can do for your brand.
Understanding Your Target Customers
Everyone has a problem, a desire, and a worldview. But the truth is, you cannot serve everyone or anyone.
The stories you want your brand to tell has to attract your prospective customers. For example, creating a story around how renting a room in your house is the best thing after getting free money would not appeal to house owners, no matter how great the story is.
Telling the right stories to the wrong market would yield nothing. Your target customer is the main character that drives the plot—The story you want to tell should be centered around the main character and not the other way around.
Focus on serving the people whose problem needs the solution you are offering. This works better and faster than trying to convince people with different worldviews.
Imagine you scream, qui veut de la nourriture gratuite? to a mixed audience. While some will be genuinely confused, you will get a response from those who understand French. This means one thing: You would get the reaction you want from only those who understand your language.
How to Know Your Target Customers
Having a better understanding of your target customers ahead will help you:
- Get to the heart of their spending motivations and serve their unique needs well.
- Create products that will solve their pain points.
- Drive significant growth, increase customer retention, and generate more revenue.
The following are the major four steps to knowing your target customers:
1. Target Customers Segmentation
According to Salesmanago, non-targeted campaigns show a 50% lower click-through rate than segmented campaigns. This proves that using storytelling that resonates with a well-researched market segment will likely drive the highest engagement. Market segmentation can be done in many ways but the major pillars are:
- Demographic Segmentation
- Psychographic Segmentation
- Geographic Segmentation
- Behavioral Segmentation
Demographic Segmentation
This is centered on knowing “who”. It involves collecting the data of your target customers. Data such as gender, age, income, education, social class, religion, and nationality.
Psychographic Segmentation
This involves grouping people based on similar personal values, opinions, lifestyles, attitudes, aspirations, and personality variables. Similar demographics do not always mean related desires, values, or motivations. This is why psychographic segmentation drives more results because it probes into the “why” of your customer.
Behavioral Segmentation
This looks into the “how”. Researching the way consumers interact with products and brands goes a long way to help position you as a brand. It can include finding out the kind of content they engage in, the website and social media applications they binge on, or their broader consumer journey.
Geographic Segmentation
This talks about the “where”. This segmentation groups customers based on where they live and where they shop. People who live in the same geographical zones typically have similar problems, cultural preferences, viewpoints, and hence, similar solutions.
The data of your target customers using these segmentations can be collected by:
- Looking at those who already buy your products.
- Conducting market research and identifying industry trends.
- Recognising your competitors and zooming in on those they commonly sell to.
- Listening to stakeholder insights.
2. Create Personas
Now that you know who your target customers are, what they want, why they want it, how they want it, and where they want it, you need to define your buyer personas.
Persona is simply an expression of your most common target customers i.e a theme common to your target customers. It will help you establish needs and get solutions quicker.
Here are easy steps to getting this done:
- Take a closer look at your data gotten from the segmentations.
- Identify patterns.
- Create fictional characters based on your research to represent the different customer types that might use your service, product, site or brand similarly.
Xtensio is also a great website that can help you do this.
3. Define Who Your Target Customer Isn’t
Being specific in determining who your customers are and aren’t is important because there will certainly be customers who are close to your target segmentation, but will not act on your stories. Understanding this will keep you from investing time and marketing budget that will yield no profit.
4. Modify from Time to Time
You will get an increasingly precise understanding of your target customers the more you gather data, and interact with them. This is why you must continuously improve personas to attain the best results. You would need to revise the existing persona descriptions, put in new personas, or remove obsolete personas.
Characteristics of Sellable Stories
There are different kinds of stories your brand can tell but here are five things every story should have to drive sales and customers engagement:
Relatable
Relatable stories create a connection between your customers and your brand. A relatable story is memorable, won’t require over-flogged convincing, and is way more likely to keep people talking about your brand.
What is challenging in this is that; in a continually changing world, your customers’ tastes change over time, you are appealing to multiple audiences, and your products or services are evolving. Despite these, focusing on your brand’s uniqueness will create a route that will help you to constantly relate with your customers.
Compelling
You have a limited time to grab people’s attention, so your story has to keep your target customers engrossed. You need to create a fast positive impression to hook them and keep them glued.
However, the main essence is not just to keep them entertained. You have to show them how the transformation they are seeking can only be possible by patronising your brand. The more compelling your story is, the more it will likely not just spread, but convert to increased sales and a loyal community.
Authentic
Authenticity, openness, and transparency are key to building a long-lasting partnership with your customers, showing that you care for them and that their opinions matter.
Many brands tend to make promises in the stories they tell but lose customers when the promises aren’t kept. Making promises is a great addition to the stories you tell. It keeps customers curious but their trust is earned when the promises are true.
Consistent
The power to make or break a story lies in your hands as a brand. Your brand personality and imagery should speak the same language. It must add up to build trustworthiness.
Coca-Cola has been consistent in projecting optimism, and happiness over the years. However, Coca-Cola changed its formula in 1985 when rival company Pepsi-Cola began to gain the market, and their shares instantly dropped. The company realized it was an awful mistake after 77 days, returned to the classic formula, and overtook its competitors again.
Emotion-evoking
The reason marketers get people to buy is that they get them to imagine. They paint vivid pictures for their prospective customers which they buy into. Your story should make your customers imagine how better they would feel, finer they would look, and how much ease your product will bring into their lives.
If the goal is to get your customers to notice, remember, share, and buy, your story should engage their imagination and appeal to their senses. Indeed, first impressions matter but the kind of emotions behind your customer’s first impression should matter greatly to you.
Bottom Line
You can capture attention, entertain, enlighten, and make people respond to your call for action by creating great stories. Beyond these, you can also build a strong community through storytelling.
I hope this article was insightful. Do well to leave a comment and share it with others.
