As your blogging personality is crucial for your blog’s success, the stories you tell are what sets you apart, and makes you personal and memorable. Incorporating digital storytelling into your blog and brand content will help you build community and make your content stand out.
People can get facts in many places. The internet is full of valuable information.
What they cannot get anywhere else are your stories.
But it is a skill and takes a lot of practice to turn everyday events into relatable stories that can teach something via personal experiences and convey the information in an entertaining and relatable way.
Storytelling takes your content creation to the next level!
What is storytelling?
Storytelling is an art that requires creativity, skill, and practice.
Digital storytelling involves creating and sharing a sequence of events or experiences to communicate ideas, entertain, and educate. Storytelling serves multiple purposes and has various forms. It can be used for entertainment, where stories are crafted to captivate and engage an audience. But storytelling in business is also used to educate and effectively relate information and concepts.
You can use storytelling techniques to engage and connect with your target audience, build emotional connections, and explain tactics and ideas in a more visual, catchy, and even more plausible way.
Storytelling is a powerful tool that brings more depth and authenticity to your content. It allows you or your brand to express yourself, share experiences, and convey meaning. It unlocks the human ability to relate to and engage with narratives and turns impersonal facts and tips into powerful community-building tools.
The recipe for good storytelling copywriting
A great story starts with a captivating introduction that hooks your audience.
Keep your audience entertained with a little bit of suspense in the middle.
You also need an end that people will remember – play with surprise and impress with an outcome that people want for themselves. Make your stories the epitome of what your audience is aiming for.
Great storytelling is something you learn with practice – and through consuming stories.
Read blogs (email newsletters or Twitter threads) focusing on the stories they tell. You can learn a lot by analyzing other people’s stories. Once you look closer into the stories you consume, you will figure out that you also have stories to tell.
Benefits of storytelling in business
The value of storytelling is manifold. Unique stories make your content stand out, they turn exchangeable content into personal experiences. But there are more benefits of storytelling than just making your content unique.
There are various aspects of an online business that can profit from storytelling.
Your stories make your content unique – it is your stories and only you can tell these exact stories.
Stories make your content memorable – Experiments have shown that people will remember stories better than they remember facts, numbers or statistics. Plus, facts are something many people can tell, people will not remember who told them. But they will remember you for your stories.
Image Source: Marketing Words
Make your content more believable / relateable – theory sounds often good. But your stories turn theory into something that you experienced. That is why you so often read these stories on sales pages where people tell you how they succeeded. Their story proves their point and builds trust.
Make YOU stand out with your content – a good story told will turn boring advice into awesome content.
Stories engage – facts rarely inspire comments that are more interesting than “Thank you for the tips.” Personal experiences that are presented in stories will earn you more interaction, some shared stories and discussions.
Stories can simplify complex matters – putting theory into practice can be harder than anticipated. Examples and stories can help to explain the practical side of things.
Emotional connections create brand loyalty – stories evoke emotions. Emotions build connections.
Build your brand – you choose the story, you choose the image of your brand in public. Telling stories around this brand image will contribute to your brand.
Build community – stories engage and shared experiences connect.
Don’t underestimate the importance of storytelling for building an online business. Stories have tremendous power.
Depending on what you want to achieve with your digital storytelling, you need to incorporate different emotions and narrative elements into the stories you tell. Marketing stories can be different from sales stories.
Blog storytelling
A blog can be boring even if it is informative. Stories have the ability to add a little spice to the information and make a blog stand out. Your stories are part of and contribute to your blogging personality – and that is what will set you apart from all the other valuable content sources in your niche.
Plus, your personal experiences make you unique and memorable. People will remember you for your stories, the emotions in the stories will establish connections.
Done right, your blog storytelling can build community and inspire interactions.
Digital storytelling in marketing
The best marketing is not about product features or specifications. It is about emotions and transformations that you achieve through using a product.
It is about the change a product can bring to the customer and the brand image and emotions you want to incur in your audience.
And what better format to convey these emotions, changes and feelings than through telling stories?
You can use stories on various stages of your sales funnel. They can get you attention but they are also great to build desire and spark action. Stories can add emotions, they inspire curiosity, build anticipation and build trust.
But you cannot use just any story. Your story has to align with the goal of your marketing campaign – and be consistent.
Make sure your stories contribute to the image you want to present to your audience. Don’t hop from one message to the next just because it seems more hyped.
- Brand narrative: in a one-person business (blogger) this means you want people to get to know you as the ONE person. Make sure you have a clear idea of who you are or who you want to appear for your audience before you start telling stories that don’t align. The more you stick to the person you are the easier it will be to tell stories that contribute to your brand narrative.
- Build emotional connections: the stories you tell are a great starting point to build community. Try to use stories that relate to customers’ experiences, challenges, and desires.
- Problem – Solution driven: You will have seen many of these types of stories. They relate a problem that many people also face and provide a solution. These stories are typical for blog posts, social media posts, and sales pages.
- Authenticity and transparency: Personal stories are the best way to build authenticity. These stories are unique, they set you apart from your competitors and they make you a human being.
- Long-Term engagement and community building: Storytelling in marketing is rarely a one-time event. It is a strategy that keeps on building. You don’t need one story to tell – you need to incorporate storytelling into your content creation and find ways to tell the same or similar stories over and over again.
Storytelling for sales
Surprise: There are stories that sell. And sales storytelling can be the key to growing your revenues.
Great sales stories inspire change. The best sales storytelling inspires your audience to take action.
But not every story has what it takes to multiply your sales. The most successful sales stories often follow this storyline:
I was in your shoes and faced the same challenge but I found the ultimate solution and you can get it from me.
A good sales story has to have similar elements that other blog stories or marketing stories need. Sales storytelling is:
- entertaining
- believable
- educational
- relatable
- memorable
- and sales storytelling inspires action – these stories often use mental triggers like fear of missing out or scarcity to increase conversions.
But there is more to digital storytelling for sales.
Your story has to answer the questions “Why?” “How?” and “What?”
Why: Identify the problem. Present it in a way that makes it crystal clear not only what the problem is but that your audience also has this problem and needs a solution very badly.
How: Present the solution. This is where your story comes in “I had that problem, but I found a solution that is easy and quick.
What: Describe the transformation: Show how finding the solution changed your life and made everything so much easier and better.
Now you are ready to transition to your offer and sell.
Storytelling on social media
I cannot say it often enough: people like to connect with people. And stories have the power to turn your social media account from a nameless tip channel into a human being that your audience can talk to.
Stories are conversation starters and make you stand out from endless anonymous social media posts.
There are numerous creators and entrepreneurs that tell their growth stories live on social media. Their successes and their failures help them build a brand and community as they grow. The stories they share make them human and relatable.
You can find some of these stories via the hashtag #buildinpublic:
Emotional storytelling
Emotions inspire action.
Using emotions in content marketing have the power to multiply engagement and conversions.
Stories have a unique power to evoke emotions. It is really about chemistry.
Image Source Marketing Words
Stories can align out emotions with the emotions of the storyteller. Which in turn will lead to more people taking action in the direction the storytelling leads us.
In addition, a repetitive “Buy my stuff” gets very boring while you can tell endless stories that can all lead to your audience buying your stuff.
How to turn everyday stories into artful storytelling
Let’s be honest, not all of us are natural-born storytellers.
But we can learn.
There are basically two types of stories that can tremendously contribute to trust and community building for your business:
- Your own experiences
- Your customers’ stories
That is why you can read so many stories about how someone solved a problem or grew their online business on sales pages and social media. These stories make their success relatable and their offers more believable.
When you are trying to create your own stories, keep in mind that you a story is more than a list of events that happened. Your stories need to entertain and keep the readers’ attention. The following story qualities help a lot:
- narrative
- attention-grabbing
- interactive
- imaginative
- purposeful
Digital storytelling tactics
There are some storytelling tricks that can help you bring more variety to your stories. These tactics may also help to tell one story in many different ways.
Here are some storytelling tactics you should know:
Sneak Peek
Start your story with a little teaser. Give a short preview of what they can expect – but don’t give it all away too soon.
Teasing the story in a sneak peek can build tension and inspire curiosity for the full story.
Surprise
Unexpected plot twists help you keep the attention of your audience.
If your story is already clear from the start, why should they read it to the end? Keep some surprise elements for the end.
Humor
A good laugh or just a simple smile while reading your story will keep people reading.
We love a story that makes us smile.
Personal
No matter how impressive the data is, people will connect more to personal stories and remember more from them.
Your personal stories are probably the best stories you can tell to build community and your personal brand.
Drama
Drama can make a boring story interesting. Drama adds excitement.
You ended in dept but your solution made you rich instead? Foreclosure was imminent but you found a way out?
You have probably read one or two of these entrepreneurial stories that added a ton of drama to their plot.
Bright future
I am sitting on a beach and only have to work for an hour a week and can still see the money growing on my bank account?
Or have you seen the big red sports car I am driving?
Do you want the same? Then buy my product and I show you how to get there.
These and similar stories are flooding the online business market. They are painting pictures of a bright future people are dreaming of – and many fall for these stories!
Cliff hangers
Have you ever read a story and then the last chapter was missing?
As a child, I raided my parents’ bookshelves for reading material. I found the book “The Count of Monte Christo” – unfortunately I did not realize this was only part one and the second book was somehow missing.
Do I need to tell you that I pestered my parents until they bought me a complete set of books?
Cliff hangers are a great storytelling tactic to build up tension and they can also serve as sales stories if the solution to the hanger can only be found after buying a product.
Villain
Your audience cannot only identify with the hero. Sometimes being the villain will also work in a story.
In business storytelling, you can play the villain card by debunking common knowledge or calling out best practices as being wrong.
The power of digital storytelling
The most successful bloggers, social media influencers, and online creators excel at one thing: telling stories.
Not telling stories in your marketing content may still yield results. However, digital storytelling has the power to evoke emotions and inspire actions.
Stories will help you grow in many ways.
And if you are not (yet) the best storyteller, don’t worry, we all have to start somewhere. And storytelling is something you can learn. The more stories you tell, the easier it will come.
