What you’re missing when you try and use story in content and sales copy

8 Feb

Marketing gurus love to blab about the importance of ‘story’. You can pay a lot of money to learn how to use story in sales emails that will make you truckloads of cash.

The marketing gurus aren’t wrong — story does help you sell — but the gurus are missing something.

Emotional stories

The only way humans communicate anything of importance is through story. We are wired for stories because we are emotional beings. A story helps us remember important stuff because, unlike a grocery list or a spreadsheet, a story triggers an emotional response. We remember things that make us feel better than we do cold hard facts.

Gurus want you to use story to provoke emotion and to increase your chances of being remembered. That is a highly effective strategy. But it isn’t enough. There is more you need to be doing with story.

Why?

Because humans are not only emotional beings, we are also the world’s greatest self-rationalizers. We want to be reasonable. Even though virtually all our decisions are emotion-based, we want to pretend that we make fact-based decisions.

You should use the power of story to lead your customers to make the emotion-fueled choice to buy from you. But, if you want long-term success, you also need to take the next step.

You need to give your customers a story they can tell others about why they buy from you.

Customer stories

There are two parts to every purchase decision. The trigger is the emotional response to your marketing. The second part is subtle but equally important. Your customer needs a set of facts they can use to justify their choice to themselves and to others.

These facts need to be more than just a list of features. These facts need to be wrapped in a convincing story.

Think about buying a car. Nobody tells their friends or family they purchased a car because it made them feel awesome. That might be why they bought the car, but they need a story to tell that makes them sound reasonable.

That’s why car commercials talk about gas mileage, safety features, towing capacity, and horsepower. These facts are the seeds of the story car buyers will tell to justify their purchase.

When your customer has a great story to tell, they are less likely to regret their purchase, and they are more likely to tell everyone they know about your incredible product or service.

The more expensive the purchase, the better the story needs to be

The more money your customer spends, the better the story they will tell needs to be. This isn’t true just for consumer goods. It’s also true in the world of business-to-business transactions.

If you are selling a SaaS to an IT firm, your buyer will make the purchase because of emotion. She trusts you. However, she needs to be able to tell her boss or the board or the investors something more than buying from you made her feel good. She needs a killer story about ROI, lower costs, and things that stakeholders want to hear.

Nobody needs a great story for buying a candy bar. But you had better have a damn good story when you spend six figures on a new software platform.

Crafting your customer’s story

When creating content and sales copy for your business, you need to think about what story you want your customers telling about why they buy from you.

You want to make it easy for them to feel good about sharing their purchase story. This means you need to not only provide a powerful emotional hook, but you need compelling facts that fit neatly into your customer’s worldview. Emotion and logic are an unbeatable one-two punch in marketing anything.

Make it easy for your customers to recount their story by using linking the facts with specific emotions and using the tried-and-true marketing technique of repetition. You want your customers to know the facts cold.

When crafting the story you want your customers to tell others, you can enhance your chances of making a sale and earning repeat business by making the purchase process easy and by following up after the sale to make sure everything was delivered according to plan.

Your incredible customer service becomes a part of the narrative your customers share about why they buy from you. As your customer repeats their story and others react positively, they feel even better about their purchase.

This leads to a powerful cycle of word-of-mouth marketing as your customers become evangelists for your brand because it makes them feel good to help other people feel good.

The next time you plan your marketing strategy, spend a lot of time thinking about the kind of story you want your customers telling themselves and others about why they buy from you.

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