If you try to recall a good banner ad, direct mail, or magazine advertisement that you’ve seen in the past week, you might struggle. That’s because, even though you’re exposed to hundreds of these, your brain is learning to ignore them. That means your customers may be ignoring your traditional marketing methods too. So what’s the solution?
And how can you capture your customers’ imaginations and sales?
Stories make the world go round – they’re at the heart of communication. And that’s why many marketers are turning to storytelling (also known as brand journalism) to generate new leads and increase their brand awareness.
How Does Storytelling Work in Marketing?
Before you get carried away thinking about what elaborate stories you’re going to tell your customers – stop. Brand storytelling isn’t a case of writing fairy tale stories in a journalistic style in the hope potential readers will find them.
Telling your franchise’s story needs to encompass many different things, including website content, social media, traditional search engine optimization, email campaigns, paid search ads, and even the portal listings on your franchisor’s website.
And most importantly of all, the story you’re telling needs to be truthful.
What Stories Should You Tell?
One of the biggest parts of storytelling is making sure your potential customers can relate to what you’re saying. You want to capture their attention with a story that makes them stop and think, and one of the best ways to do this is to use other customers’ stories. Allow your target audience to see who your customers are, what services or products they’ve used, and why they enjoy using them. Seeing these realistic stories from customers like themselves will reach out to them in a much more humanistic way than any paid ad can.
Don’t forget to share your story, too – being honest and humble throughout. If you start talking about yourself and gloating about your business’s success, your readers are going to switch off straight away. Reach out to them by sharing your emotions, your challenges, and your ambitions as a business owner. Inject some of the franchise’s personality into the story so customers can learn more about the franchise group as a whole and what its origins were. Your franchisor will probably be able to provide you with their own brand journalism marketing material, so use this to create a powerful story around your franchise.
Using storytelling in your marketing efforts as a franchisee not only helps you to put your own
stamp on the franchise, but it also helps to create a rounded picture of the business. Customers are becoming increasingly resistant to the hard sell and are much more interested in investing in people. And by creating a compelling story (without fabrications!), you’ll strike an emotional chord with them – and this will keep them coming back for more!
Discover the story behind the Dwyer Group and how we began – and who knows, maybe one day your story will be appearing alongside ours!
