The Art of Story Selling

We all have our own individual stories we tell ourselves about reality, others, and ourselves.

The fundamental structure of the brain seems to be predisposed to connecting meaningful sequences of events into story form. Think of how most people are more likely to recall and use details found in stories better than they do with other forms of information. This is why some companies hire the services of a creative agency to determine, package and present their product or service detail in compelling and memorable story formate.

While the story helps with attracting attention, the stats, information, or insights supporting the compelling narrative has to be equally appealing to the analytical part of the consumer’s brain.

But it is not enough to have a good story for your brand, you have to be able to sell that story to the right market, at the right time, in the right emotional context. As a business, you also have to find a balance between information marketing and story selling to grow your brand awareness. Setting most optimal emotional context when communicating a brand story it is key to inspiring a high level of responsiveness in your audience. However this alone is not enough to guarantee that your message will influence your consumer’s decision-making process. A good story can get you engagement, but it doesn’t promise you conversion.

To lead a prospect to actually making the decision to buy your product or service, its important to communicate to both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. While the story helps with attracting attention, the stats, information, or insights supporting the compelling narrative has to be equally appealing to the analytical part of the consumer’s brain. Only then do you have the fundamental components for what we call Story-Selling. The quality of your emotive story can get your prospect to engaged and consider your offer, but you will also need to have a strategic proposition to further convince your prospects as to the logical reasons on why they should choose your offer over any of your competitors.

Craft a marketing message that speaks to both the logical and emotional parts of the brain, so both are working in unison toward marking the purchase decision.

To effectively communicate with your market, you will need both (a creative story and strategic reasons) and you can not have one without the other. The art of Story Selling is in using your unique and personable attributes that you or your business already have, and then using those to craft a marketing message that speaks to both the logical and emotional parts of the brain, so that they both are working in unison toward marking the purchase decision. When Story Selling is optimised, you will have the best emotional anchor that resonates with your targeted audience, as well as a data-driven strategic process that produces the desired audience behaviours on a consistent basis.