Is Storytelling the 'Spark' You Need to Amplify Your Marketing Impact?

If you know anything about cars, you know that its spark plugs are the key to making it run. These tiny devices inside your car's cylinders cause the reactions that ultimately start your vehicle. You can have all the other parts in place –the engine, the fuel, the drive chain – but without that spark from the spark plug, you won't get anywhere.

Business marketing is very much the same. An incredible product and top-notch customer service don't bring people in the door unless there's a "spark" that inspires them to reach out to your business in the first place.

In both car engines and marketing, movement is not just about that initial spark. It's about timing – it's about setting off little explosion after little explosion, each at exactly the right moment, to maintain the momentum needed to arrive at your desired destination.

Those tiny, perfectly-timed explosions are the secret ingredient to your marketing success. And you can make them happen with stories – the spark plugs of marketing campaigns.

How storytelling optimizes marketing campaign performance

You may not have given much thought to storytelling for business up until this point. What do you need stories for, anyway? Doesn't your product's quality speak for itself?

Well, it might – once your customer gets their hands on it and experiences that quality firsthand. But impressive specs and product features aren't going to convince someone to buy from you. You need to hook them with a narrative they can relate to. 

Or, perhaps you've been telling stories in your marketing campaigns already, but you're just not seeing the results you expected. Like spark plugs, marketing stories can get worn out. They can corrode, collect dirt, or malfunction, and you need to clean them up (or replace them entirely) to optimize their performance.

Jose, the director of marketing at a payroll software startup, faced this challenge himself when he met with the executive leadership team to discuss declining results in the last quarter. Their latest marketing campaign focused on how small business owners could streamline the employee payroll process at a fraction of the cost of a bookkeeping service. The ads received a lukewarm reaction (sales were slightly down from the previous quarter), and Jose was under a lot of pressure to rethink their campaign to boost numbers by year-end.

What marketers like Jose need is a fresh approach to storytelling. We've discussed many times on the Go Narrative blog that the human brain is wired for story. We seek out stories to make sense of the world and better understand complex situations. As Jonathan Gottschall writes in The Storytelling Animal,

"Fiction is an ancient vitual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems."

What does this mean? To fully appreciate the value of someone or something, we need to be able to positively visualize that person and thing in our lives. This is especially true in product marketing campaigns. It's one thing to hear about a product's capabilities. It's another to view a future state of your business in which a particular product has benefited you.

That's why storytelling enables you to increase the impact of your marketing investments and make them more effective. With the right stories, your customers can visualize themselves working through their problems, using your business as the solution.

A few key outcomes of applying stories to your marketing campaigns:

• Increase sales pipe velocity and conversions: You'll have a more predictable-performing sales pipeline.
• Greater revenue per unit: When customers see more value in your products, you can charge more. Storytelling helps them understand the value by clearly showing them a future where they're getting that value. Don't make them work hard for it.
• Increased customer life-time-value: A customer who believes in you and sees you in their lives will keep you around.
• Boosted Net Promoter Scores: Great stories are easy to share, which makes it easier for your customers to evangelize your company and products.
• Being heard in the noisy marketplace: You want to be the one who cuts through the noise – and when they hear you, you want them to clearly see and believe why you're a better option.
• Cut through the competition. The company that can rapidly and effectively show why a customer should care about their product will win over the competition.

The bottom line? Storytelling increases the value that your customers perceive from your brand and increases the likelihood of earning (and keeping) their business. When you're thoughtful and intentional about the use of stories in your marketing efforts, you are boosting the performance of the entire campaign engine.

'Sell me this pen.'

If you want to understand how a story can exponentially increase the perceived value of a product, consider the closing scene from the 2013 film, The Wolf of Wall Street. Penny stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) goes down a line of salesmen at a seminar, asking each one to try to sell him an ordinary pen. All of them begin describing the pen's features or try to position it as an extraordinary pen. These were not the answers Belfort was looking for, and he takes the pen away from each would-be salesperson.

This question is a callback to an earlier scene in the film when Belfort asks a group of his sales proteges to sell him a pen. One takes the pen from him and tells him to write his name down on a piece of paper. When Belfort says he doesn't have a pen, the future salesman replies, "Exactly."

While this cheeky answer illustrates the "supply and demand" concept that is fundamental to sales, the real-life Jordan Belfort later explained the correct answer to this challenge in a Globe and Mail interview:

"Before I'm even going to sell a pen to anybody, I need to know about the person. I want to know what their needs are, what kind of pens do they use, do they use a pen? How often do they use a pen? Do they like to use a pen formally, to sign things, or use it in their everyday life? I want to hear [the salesman] ask me a question: 'So tell me, how long have you been in the market for a pen?'

Belfort goes on to explain that asking this simple question can help you identify someone's needs and what value they see in the pen. From there, you can tell them a story to speak their language and transmit the product's value in a way they can understand.

For example, is your prospect an aspiring author who uses the pen to write down notes for her next novel? Tell her a story about how your pen will last through the late-night brainstorming and editing sessions that will land her on the bestseller list. Is your prospect a high-powered CEO who uses the pen to sign six-figure business contracts? Tell him a story about how having a pen means being prepared to close a high-revenue deal on the spot in his next meeting. Your pitch is no longer about the pen itself, but about the potential value that pen holds for the individual user.

This, incidentally, is the crux of account-based marketing, which you can learn more about in our blog on the topic.

What about scale? When you do the due diligence with research, asking the “pen” question at scale you can gain understanding of an entire market, not just an individual.

This is the approach Jose took to help him figure out how to retool his company's campaigns. He spoke with multiple customers – some new, some longer-term – to find out exactly what they were looking for in a business tech solution, and what the impact has been on their business and team since they began using his company's software. He gained insights that he never would have gotten if he'd stuck to their simplified customer intake form, which only explored basic questions like company size, industry, and budget.

Inspired by his customer interviews, Jose spent the next several days drafting different ways to tell the stories he'd just collected. He was eager to produce a brand-new campaign that truly communicated the broader emotional value of the product to their average customer.

Respecting the customer's journey

As a leader, it's important to consider the role of storytelling in your organizational operations and your approach to your customers. Stories can help you better connect with customers and show them that you respect their journey as a buyer. You and your team must know how to say the right things, at the right time, to the right people, at the right place on that journey to drive the sales you need.

When you truly understand a customer's story, you understand their priorities. You can get an idea of the other decisions they must make in their lives and how you fit in. You come to understand how your product can help shape that person's story for the betterment of their life or business.

Again, all of this is about hitching your caboose to the customer's value "train." When somebody sees value in a product, they'll gladly part with their money to obtain that perceived value and achieve an improved state of being. If you can help them see your value quicker than your competition, you will position yourself to win.

How do you that? Put every business metric you have through the lens of storytelling and think about how you can map it to perceived customer value, and tell a story to increase that value and improve that metric. Then, use those stories to thoughtfully and strategically shape your campaigns.

As you plan your individual pieces of marketing content, consider the customer's journey over time and how they'll respond to each one, whether it's a blog post they read, a keynote speech they experience at your big annual customer event, or an advertising campaign that pops up in their Facebook feed. By intentionally inserting a relevant and relatable story into each of these assets, you can forge a connection between your brand and the customer. You can effectively show customers a future where they get value from your product.

Jose really took this lesson to heart in his revamped campaign. Instead of focusing on the product's price point and ease of use, he incorporated real customer feedback about how using his company's software allows business owners to pay their employees faster, thus helping them support their families. He incorporated stories of impact for the business owner – all the things they were able to accomplish with the time and resources they got back by using the software. Because he went deeper into the emotional value, rather than the monetary value, of the product, customers who viewed this ad converted at a rate of 5 times more than those who viewed the previous campaign.

What can we learn from Jose? When you present customers with the right story at the right time and place, you're doing the legwork for them in understanding your business's value. You're making it easier for your customers to view themselves in a story that includes your business. Less work for the customer means a smoother, more optimized customer experience with your brand.

The Go Narrative approach: How to light the story spark in your campaigns

At Go Narrative, storytelling is at the core of everything we do. It's part of our fundamental philosophy to help businesses get attention, be heard, and sell more. Many of our clients are marketers and founders like Jose, who need a new perspective on the stories they tell in their marketing campaigns. We empower them to discover and implement their "story spark" in the following areas:

• Go-to-market strategies: Customer stories – both real and fictional – bring clarity and focus to marketing campaigns.
• Presentations and content creation: We weave a strong, inspiring narrative theme throughout ghostwritten articles and keynote presentations for executive leaders.
• Coaching and training: We teach business leaders about critical story frameworks that enable them to apply storytelling to all their internal and external communications.
• Campaign foundation: Stories serve as the basis for launching marketing campaigns and thought leadership platforms.

First, we conduct diligent research to establish a rock-stable foundation, rooted in data, for all of your future campaigns. This allows us to bring your brand story to life and win more customers. We work closely with you and your team to empower everyone to excite the market.

With this groundwork in place, we teach you to say things that inspire customers to act. We offer you the tools and processes for the repeatable application of your narrative and stories.

Storytelling in action: Our work with Microsoft

We've worked with many clients to help them tell amazing stories that drive results. One such client is Microsoft, with whom we have a longstanding, mutually beneficial business relationship (it was my work as Microsoft Dynamics Chief Storyteller that first planted the seeds of Go Narrative in my mind).

As one general manager said of our work on a Microsoft marketing revamp,

"Go Narrative's work has provided us with solid insights grounded on research that will provide direction for our marketing plans."

One of the campaigns we worked on was a "Trojan horse" content marketing effort to drive engagement and alleviate pre-sales friction through a focus on storytelling. There was zero paid promotion or advertising budget; this was a 100% guerilla marketing campaign designed to bring in organic results on channels like YouTube, social media sites, owned web properties, and community forums.

In a single quarter, our story-based campaign increased unique monthly page views by 3.78 times, and monthly page actions by 7.35 times.

This is just one of many examples of the power of storytelling for business. It proves that when you start paying attention to your customer's needs – and telling the right stories to align to those needs at the right point in time – a chain reaction of sparks occurs that propels your business forward.

We'd love to have you be our next success story.

Are you ready to optimize the impact of your marketing performance? Book a complimentary 30-minute consultation with Go Narrative to discover how storytelling can ignite the spark that takes your campaigns to the next level.

Go Narrative is a marketing consultancy that assists business leaders in technology firms to build and implement advanced marketing strategies. Our secret sauce is storytelling for business growth and transformation. We can help you cut through the noise and improve your reputation. We love helping business leaders understand, use and apply storytelling in business via writing, presentations, video, strategy and actionable plans. Get attention. Be heard. Sell more.

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