Imagine two competing businesses taking two different approaches to marketing. The first loads their social media with statistics: how long they’ve been in business in the area, how many employees they have, how many products they offer, where those products are made. The second does something similar but gives context to the statistics. Instead of presenting its 250 employees as something whose importance is self-evident, the second business tells a story about those employees, one that is relevant to its customers: we’re a part of this community. We support it. We understand what you need because we’re your neighbors.
The first business tried to let the facts speak for themselves, but the second took those facts and spun them into a story. It’s a story that addresses a customer pain point: finding a business that understands them and their needs. While both businesses are saying more or less the same thing, the second becomes the more successful business through the power of storytelling.
Stories Are Just What We Do
Stories are so effective because human beings are natural storytellers. Stories are how we make sense of the world around us, our place in the world, and even our relationships and our own psyches. If you’re trying to persuade someone to do something, an honest and relatable story is going to win more allies than an argument that relies on logic alone.
We often separate reason and emotion and claim that reason is more important to our decision-making. We all like to think our decisions are well-reasoned, that we can turn off our emotions and make the logical choice. In reality, our emotions are often in control, while reason justifies our emotional reactions after the fact. Good marketing happens when you can combine the two: a well-reasoned, honest, authentic argument rendered as a story that speaks to the customer’s emotions.
Stories Build Relationships
Logic without context can come off as confrontational or simply feel meaningless to the listener, while stories can be unifying. Stories invite you to experience the world from a different point of view. Characters give you a focal point for that experience. A story can show you the experience of someone vastly different from you, allowing you to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, or it can show you someone just like you and let you know that you’re not alone. It is this second kind of story that makes for powerful marketing, effectively telling the listener, “others have the same problem as you, and here’s how they solved it.”
While honesty is important, the simple fact of a fact being a fact isn’t going to sway anyone’s opinion. When facts, data, evidence, or statistics are presented without context, they’re essentially meaningless. Factual data and rational arguments need a story around them to make sense. People have to understand why a number is important or meaningful. Facts can tell a story, but the story isn’t always obvious.
The best marketing stories are about the customer: the customer has a problem, the customer searches for a solution, the customer finds the solution, the customer is happy. This is true whether in B2B or B2C. There is a belief in B2B that this kind of emotional marketing is less effective because purchasing decisions take so long and have to go through so many people. B2B transactions are just as relationship-based as B2C sales, perhaps even more so, because you’re looking to build close, lasting partnerships with a handful of businesses rather than thousands of retail customers. The kinds of relationships that storytelling can build is even more important in B2B than B2C.
Stories Aren’t Real…But Also Kind Of Are
The story at the top of this blog post didn’t actually happen, obviously, but that doesn’t mean it's not true. It illustrates a truth in a generalized, memorable way: that stories are more effective vehicles for marketing than decontextualized facts. If you want your marketing to grab hold of a customer’s imagination, clearly define their problem and show them the way to solve it. Give them a story that they can put themselves into.
