What's your story? The importance of storytelling in communications

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Presenting facts and statistics to your audience is a useful strategy to engage your audience, but storytelling creates unmatched authenticity and improves trust.

The ancient art of storytelling induces human emotional connection, which makes it a powerful marketing tool.

Presenting factual evidence to your target audience will attract leads, but crafting a story that communicates your personality and your ‘why’ will engage people much more effectively.

Crafting your story

You can begin storytelling in your communications by sharing the story of why your business exists.

The key is to keep it simple and use the basic components of a story:

• A beginning where you explain the problem you set out to solve, a middle to detail how you solved it and an end that highlights your success and how you’ll continue to succeed
• Characters, conflict, setting, themes
• A personal story
• Some supporting data but not so much that it becomes cold and impersonal (Click Funnels)

One brand that leverages the power of storytelling well is Nike.

In 1999, the brand released an advert that commemorated the career of Michael Jordan. The brand was not mentioned until the very end, differentiating Nike from the ‘sell, sell, sell’ principle and this continues to be a successful strategy for the brand.

And Netflix, the popular streaming service, has disrupted storytelling with shows that resonate beyond the story of an individual to become universal. It has often been said that we use TV to escape life. But often we are actually watching shows to understand life. We watch for stories we can see ourselves in and Netflix has perfected the curation of these stories to keep users hooked (Forbes).

Why storytelling is important

The human psyche is wired to create and appreciate narratives, so it makes sense to implement them into communications.

Other benefits include:

• Emphasising the human element of a brand and therefore building trust
• Provides order as we are conditioned to expect a resolution after a conflict within a narrative arc
• Educational in an engaging way

If your communications aren’t effectively engaging your audience, it might be time to put down your statistics sheet and start writing stories.