Everyone loves a good story. For most of human history, all we had were verbal stories (oral histories) to pass information about past events (close-call survival adventures among them) from one generation to the next.
Storytelling has never lost its allure. A well-told story entraps and holds spellbound its audience until it gets resolved. Stand up comedians like Bill Cosby, great writers like Mark Twain, and competent copywriters use stories to delight, inform and “sell” their goods.
If you can wrap a relevant story around whatever it is you’re offering, do it. It may be as simple as telling how your product or service impacted someone’s life. The challenge, here, is to make sure it’s relevant and memorable in some way, if not to what you offer, then to an experience that your prospect has just shared with you. Storytelling is a super way to build “fond bonds” with your audience and prospects.
Although the features of your product or service can cause a prospect’s eyes to glaze over, benefits-as-stories are hard to forget. If you can tie a story to a particular benefit of your product or service, the story will become attached to your brand–so choose wisely! Make sure the connection is positive. It goes without saying that you don’t want to share a negative story. No matter how funny a negative story may be, you don’t want it attached to your brand. (I would love to tell you a funny story about why I associate fig newtons with having the flu, but both my brand and the fig newtons brand would be tarnished forever, and I don’t want that to happen to either of us!)
Examples of good storytelling:
How you used your product (kitty litter) to get your vehicle unstuck or out of your snowed-in driveway.
How you used your product (vinegar) to clean your dishwasher/clothes washer.
(Result: Additional positive uses for the products.)
Example of bad storytelling:
A soda pop manufacturer or salesperson tells how he used soda pop to clean his corroded battery terminals.
(Result: “If his soda pop can do that to battery acid, what’s it doing to my innards?”)
