If you’re looking to grow your SME, make a powerful impression and create meaningful connections with your customers, look no further! This article will provide you with the tools to do so through the power of storytelling. 

What Is Storytelling? 

Its definition lies in its name: communicating a story to an audience. As simple as it sounds, storytelling is actually an extremely powerful tool when it comes to marketing by:

• Giving brands the opportunity to share their stories and values to their customers
• Resonating emotionally to them
• Creating meaningful connections

Storytelling is therefore a far more valuable tool than advertising: it goes beyond communicating a message. Rather, it connects customers to your values, culture, and history. 

Why Use Storytelling?  

As humans, stories have always been an important part of our lives. In the past stories were used to pass on the cultural values and history of a certain group of people. Their purpose was then to share knowledge and emotions, making sure their own cultural baggage was not forgotten. People identified in such stories and looked at them to make decisions.

The same goes with businesses. The human brain prefers emotional information to just rational facts. This confirms the fact that most decision-making is in fact emotional rather than logical. When looking at a brand, the majority of people looks for reasons why they should interact with that business. Therefore they mostly look at the story they’re being told. 

An engaging story can be a powerful tool in retaining customers’ attention. Think about it: whenever you’re watching a great movie or reading a very well-constructed narrative in a book, you simply forget about time and get completely absorbed into what you’re doing. Same goes for storytelling. An engaging narrative will grasp your audience’s attention and will make your message stick to their minds. Most importantly, you will also keep your audience engaged in the long run, thus successfully retaining your customers. 

How Do You Become a Successful Storyteller?

you finally understand why storytelling is such a powerful tool and would like to learn how to successfully implement it? Well, fear not! Here are some practical tips on how to use storytelling to grow your SME. 

1.     What message would you like to convey through storytelling?

It is important you think about what message you would like to convey to your customers. What is important to you? What are the core values of your business? Instead of stating facts about yourself and your company, customers will be more interested to know what’s meaningful about your history and values. Therefore you need to be able to make your content relatable and emotionally relevant.  

2.     Show your message. 

If you want to create meaningful connections and capture your customer’s attention, you might want to consider using different forms of content to communicate your message. Videos can be an extremely powerful tool in doing so. They are an easy and effective way to emotionally connect with your audience by providing visual and compelling stories. You can also use your social media channels to keep them engaged and blog posts that will allow your customers to interact with each other and with your business. In this way you will be creating a real community around your brand. It is really important you use more than just one platform simultaneously. 

3.     Focus on the journey, not the destination.

Grabbing your customers’ attention is only the first step in storytelling. It’s what comes next that truly matters. Offer your audience a compelling story that will entice them to come back to your brand to discover more about what you are and what you do. Retaining your existing customers is far more effective and cost efficient than finding new ones. Hence the importance of constantly keeping them engaged. Content marketing is essential in this, especially through your business’ social media channels. Regularly posting relevant and engaging content and directly addressing your audience is key to successful storytelling and brand awareness. 

The Importance of Digital.

In this article we explored the power of storytelling in creating meaningful connections with your audience and how you can leverage this tool to boost your SME. However nowadays digital marketing dominates the advertising landscape. Specifically, content marketing and storytelling are closely related to social media marketing. If you’re interested in digital marketing and would like to explore more tips on how to expand your small business digitally, click here. 

To wrap up, do not underestimate the power of storytelling! If you follow this article’s tips you will quickly discover its benefits yourself and it will become an integral part of your marking strategy.