What is Storytelling and How You Can Use It
The ultimate guide to storytelling.
When I was in school, I used to hate the History subject. I used to find it incredibly dull. I had a hard time memorizing all the dates and years. Luckily in my ninth year, I met a teacher who used to teach me by telling stories about our Indian History. How everything started, the Mughals, Rajput, and British Invasion. His stories were so intriguing that I fell in love with our Indian History without realizing it.
And guess what? The girl who had a tough time remembering the names of wars and treaties took a Bachelor's Course in History. Why am I telling you this story? Well, because this story made me realize the impacts of storytelling in our lives.
Why is storytelling important? It is important because it helps the audience connect and engage emotionally. Storytelling is a brilliant strategy that can increase your business conversions rate effectively. You can use stories everywhere, from blog posts to product pages. In this article, I will tell you why you should consider storytelling a vital marketing tool to use on your blogs, articles, and web copy.
Why You Should Use Storytelling
Since the prehistoric ages, stories have always made a special place in everyone's heart. It's human nature to connect with emotional stories. Storytelling helps to communicate, engage, and influence people easily and entertainingly.
Your audience won't remember all the facts and numbers. Most people care about emotions more than logic. Your audience is looking for something that resonates with their own lives, something relevant to their lifestyle. And stories are the perfect way to make your audience provide what they are looking for. If you can marinate data and stories together, trust me, you'll cook the best marketing strategy!
Your audience's needs are changing each passing day. Gone are those days when you can serve them anything. They are becoming more and more emotion-driven. If they can't relate to your content, they don't even care to stick to your website or blog posts.
How to Use Stories in a Blog
Use them as an Example
You can always use stories as an example of your blogs or articles. You can use different anecdotes, your personal stories to give examples. This will make your examples more compelling and understandable. But you don't have to use stories everywhere, make sure to use it where it's needed.
Make Your Stories Relevant with Your Post
Make sure the story you are using in your post is relevant to the message you want to convey. If you use a story that fails to deliver what your posts want to mean, storytelling will lose its charm.
The story I used at the beginning of this post is about my own experience with stories and how they can leave an impact. I've used this story to tell you how stories can make dull and tough things easy to understand. The story portrays what I want to convey in this post; it perfectly aligns with my writing.
Keep in Mind the 4 Elements of storytelling
Some of you might already know that a good story consists of 4 essential elements. These are a character, a conflict or problem, an action, and a solution. When you write a story, use these elements in it.
For instance, in my story, I have introduced myself as a character. The character needs a problem or conflict. My problem was remembering dates and years of History. To resolve this, I need action. In my story, my teacher helped me fix my remembering issue by using exciting stories to teach History. The message I wanted to draw from this personal experience is the value of storytelling.
Try to Use Personal Stories
People relate to personal stories. Compelling personal stories help your audience to connect to the main character of the story. Try to add honest, real stories into your blog posts, it will create an impression in your audience's minds.
How Can You Use Storytelling Into Marketing?
Storytelling can make your marketing strategy more creative and productive. As stories help to build a better connection with the customer, you can expect better ROI. Stories come in different shapes and sizes; the trick is on knowing which storytelling method will suit your brand personality.
You can use educational stories as a marketing strategy. It will help you to educate your customer about your services, products, what your business offer. You can use simple stories in illustrations, blogs, and articles to teach and demonstrate your service.
Storytelling is useful for marketing as it enables an opportunity to brag about your service in a sophisticated way. You can use client stories to explore the show, don't tell technique. A story about your satisfied customer, how your service helped them, can have a significant impact on convincing your potential customer.
Wrapping Up
Stories can convince, engage, attract, and connect people. Compelling stories can transform extended boring writing into something more vivid and lively. If you use stories properly, your audience will remember you, your post, and even your brand. However, not every content needs stories, so make sure to use stories only where it suits.
