What is the goal of any business? The answer is clear – the goal is to generate sales and grow revenue profitably. According to the report, 44% of companies spend most of their time working on customer acquisition because it is much more demanding than retention or any other sales strategy for that matter.
Marketers use all sorts of tricks to attract new clients, but storytelling somehow gets neglected way too often. By definition, storytelling is the art of telling stories. Although it sounds fairly simple, it is actually very difficult to find a great storytelling approach and create an attractive piece of content.
It takes a genuine copywriting master to craft a compelling story, but the task gets easier if you use the right strategy and embrace state of the art writing methods. In this post, we will show you seven ways to use storytelling as a customer acquisition tool. Let’s take a look!
Features That Make a Good Story
Storytelling can take many different directions and talk about all sorts of topics, but almost every story relies on a few major elements. The same logic applies to other formats such as college papers, landing pages, dissertation service assignments, news stories, and so on.
So, what are the most important features of a great story? Here they are:
- Emotions: One of the main purposes of storytelling is to evoke feelings and inspire emotional reactions. If you want to make an effective story, make sure to highlight the targeted emotion.
- Empathy: Once the audience figures out the emotion behind your story, you should display empathy and explain how your company feels about the whole situation.
- Personality: The third feature of a great story is personality. Readers and/or viewers have seen emotions, they have seen your empathy, but now it is time for them to see your personality as well. This means you’ll need to react and show the way you are handling the situation.
Storytelling Tips for Customer Acquisition
Storytelling mostly depends on your skills, copywriting experience, and professional inspiration, but we can give you several hints on how to make the process faster and more productive. Without further ado, let’s check out seven ways to craft a mind-boggling story and attract new customers.
1. Learn how your audience feels and behaves
Every marketer writes for a highly specific audience, so the first tip is to learn how your average customer feels and behaves. Do you know consumers’ qualities, emotions, values, fears, and beliefs?
Jake Gardner, a content creator at the Assignment Help UK, claims this is the cornerstone of storytelling: “You can start writing a story only if you understand the emotions, needs, and expectations of your target users. It is the only way to design a meaningful and actionable story.”
2. Focus on a common pain point
A good story focuses on a common problem and then shows the way to resolve the issue. Stories help us find a mate, become craftsmen, spurn adventure, convince us of a point-of-view, and challenge us to connect through empathy.
They make a customer journey more pleasant and promise a proven method to overcome obstacles. In such circumstances, your job is to identify a common pain point and tell your readers how to deal with it most efficiently.
A story about Warby Parker will help you to understand our point.
Namely, one of the founders of the business lost his eyeglasses on a backpacking trip and couldn’t afford to purchase a new pair. It was a painful experience that resulted in anger and disbelief, but the end result was that the group of friends decided to create and offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price.
3. Don’t try to sell anything
A good story is never about trying to sell something to the audience. On the contrary, it is all about evoking strong feelings and emotional reactions among users, so stick to this principle in storytelling. It will help you to build relationships with the target audience and contribute to the long-term success of the business. But if you push it too hard and send sales messages, rest assured you won’t impress anyone.
4. Emphasize emotions
We already mentioned that emotions represent a core component of storytelling, but we have to emphasize it once again.
Do you remember Felix Baumgartner? The Austrian skydiver broke the sound barrier and two other world records back in 2012 during his jump from the edge of space organized by Red Bull.
Everybody talked about this story for quite some time, and for good reason, as it was one of the most exciting stories in the marketing universe!
5. Show practical cases and examples
Another very important storytelling tip is to show a practical example to prove your points. It’s a simple trick that helps the audience to relate to the story and understand the whole point more clearly. Just take a look at Google’s Year in Search example below and you will see what it means to support the story with amazing examples.
6. Add a CTA
Each story must have a tangible purpose. Although your primary objective is to evoke emotions, it shouldn’t stop you from adding a call to action (CTA) and inspiring readers and viewers to do something based on your recommendation.
Of course, you must be careful enough to design a CTA that matches the point of your storytelling. The idea is to drive action that enables readers to support a higher cause and contribute to the resolution of the problem you’ve just presented.
7. Promote your stories using the right channels
What good is a story if it doesn’t reach the target audience? Promotion is a key segment of storytelling and one of the most powerful customer acquisition drivers, so make sure to utilize the best communication platforms only.
For instance, B2B organizations are targeting serious business professionals and hence need to exploit channels such as email newsletters, websites, and social platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. On the other side, brands targeting younger audiences will likely concentrate on social media such as Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Your job is to identify the most promising communication channels and place the story accordingly.
The Best Storytelling Examples
The theory is one thing, but the practice is something completely different. This is exactly why we want to present you with a few interesting examples of storytelling.
The first example comes from Google and its world-famous Year in Search concept. Here’s how it works – the largest search engine chooses the most relevant keyword of the whole year and creates a story around it. It doesn’t only send a powerful message to the world but also proves how incredibly important Google really is for modern societies.
Airbnb uses a similar strategy to tell the story about belonging and recognition. That way, the company shows that it stands for something much bigger than travel.
Whirlpool also invested a lot of time and resources in storytelling. The company noticed that thousands of kids missed classes because they didn’t have access to clean clothes, so they started installing washers and dryers in schools to help. The so-called Care Counts Laundry Program provoked strong reactions and made Whirlpool a true hero of the story.
Conclusion
A good story can turn passive spectators into active participants and convert inert leads into full-time customers. However, writing an appealing story is everything but simple, particularly if you are not following the latest trends of copywriting.
In this article, we showed you how to use storytelling as a customer acquisition tool. Have you ever used storytelling for sales purposes? Do you think it really helped your business to flourish? Share your ideas about customer acquisition and storytelling in comments – we would love to see what you think about it!
Scott Mathews is the best essay writing author and a blogger at the paper writing service called Assignment Help Online. Scott is an expert in content creation who knows pretty much everything about digital marketing. Besides that, Scott is the father of two kids and a dedicated long-distance runner.