When do you feel connected to someone? How does it happen? My guess is that you feel connected through the stories you share with them and they share with you! Same goes for building connections with your ideal customers in business! Storytelling is the tool to use in order to establish “like” with your customers and tug at their heart strings! Literally nothing converts better than a story. Storytelling is an art and it takes practice! What stories exactly should you be telling?? I have 3 for you to start working on, so let’s get into it!
3 Stories to Tell in Business
- Your Origin Story
As you develop stories to connect the heart of your business to the hearts of your customers, it is best to first establish your origin story. Your origin story is the moment that your business was born, or that an idea was sparked, or the first step to starting what is your now business. It should tell the story of what made you and your business a perfect fit! Your origin story is SO powerful and gives your customers a big look inside the why of your business. It simultaneously makes you relatable AND establishes your expertise! This will grow your customers LIKE of you and TRUST in you! Win, win!
Your origin story is one that you will tell hundreds and hundreds of times. You will also tell it in hundreds of different ways! This story is meant to be woven into every aspect of your business. This story lives on your website’s about page, your instagram, your emails, literally every single channel you have! So, pro tip: the more specific the story, the better you will tell the story. So make it simple! Make it easy to weave into everything. It doesn’t need to be long, but it needs to get the point across and deepen connections. Make sure it relates and is engageable!
- Small Relatable Stories
Stories to tell your customers can also just be small things that give a peek into who you are while making you relatable! Make these stories repeatable and easy for you to tell and for your customers to remember AND repeat! These can be stories that are directly about your business or YOU – the heart, the human behind the business! These are small things, like the fact that you carry one of those insanely large jugs of water around with you everywhere you go, or that you love Chucky Cheese pizza, or you have an inability to ever find a hair tie when you need one. For me, McDonald’s Diet Coke.
These small stories that give people a peak into who you are will make your customers think of you! Every time they can’t find a hair tie – they think of you. Whenever they drive by a Chucky Cheese – they laugh and think of you. Etc! This keeps you and your business on the forefront of their minds. A great place for these stories to live is on Instagram stories!
- Current Journey Story
Write a story about a current struggle, a journey that you’re on right now in your business. OBVIOUSLY don’t share anything that will make your customers lose trust in you. But, when you share the bad with the good it makes you human. Because you are! Let your community see that you relate to them and that they can relate to you. Share a scary risk you’re taking, share the behind the scenes of testing a new product, go deeper with your heart behind your business. Tug at those heart strings!
What stories can you tell in your business? The goal of storytelling in business is for our ideal customers to have a deeper connection with our brand and to make them want to let us help them with their problem. Will everyone like you? Of course not, and that is OK! That’s not the goal. But the RIGHT people will like you. If you are not yet sharing stories about your brand and business, you are missing a magical puzzle piece when it comes to connecting with your audience!
Love, Suzy
Love this. Do you have recommendations for a GREAT storytelling “school”?
[…] My #1 tip for writing a killer caption? Read it OUT LOUD in your voice before you post it. Make sure you sound like yourself and like an actual human. Tweak it from there! You want your voice to come through in your writing! Not your writing voice, your literal voice. The voice that you use when you’re talking to your friends! This builds know and like with your customers. It drives the personal connection that they feel with you through the power of written storytelling. […]