Our modern, developed economy brings us many benefits, like advanced technologies, incredible products, and advanced medicine. However, these all rely on complex value chains that are hard to untangle. Supporting these are an interwoven fabric of overlapping services and products that obscures the value of each thread. If you’re one of those ‘threads’, you want your customers to appreciate your value – but this is hard when the value is abstract.
All companies operate with some degree of inertia – after all, a reliable pattern of behavior is intrinsic to any organization. However, this can make it hard to gain new clients, as they must change habits and swap a reliable supplier for an ‘unknown quantity.’
To succeed in our modern world, you must be able to convince customers of your value and demonstrate it in tangible terms. The answer is storytelling. By using storytelling, your business can gain a powerful way to attract and persuade new customers.
Storytelling has the most value to offer for hard-to-understand concepts and products with complex but intangible benefits. So, if you’re selling something like software or financial products – which can be complex to explain, storytelling is your new friend.
Even simple products gain a lot from storytelling. Imagine you’re selling apples: people want an apple and buy one. Simple, right? Except, apples aren’t the most appealing fruit on the market. So, instead of selling apples, you use storytelling. Now, you’re selling the health benefits, the sustainability credentials, and the lifestyle of eating an apple a day. You’re selling the ‘crunch,’ not the apple itself.
So how do you do this if you’re selling something much more complicated or where different customers gain distinct benefits?
Show the benefits of digital storytelling software
Digital storytelling is an incredible way to wrap complex ideas into digestible packets. With digital storytelling, you can show how people experience the benefits instead of trying to describe them or listing technical specifications.
With professional digital storytelling software, you can create an array of different stories that address specific customer groups and then deploy the most impactful stories at just the right time.
Why brains love stories
When complex ideas are wrapped up in a story, we can ‘get it’ more easily – and the reason is simple. Evolution. Thanks to over a million years of evolution, the human brain is 100% ready to receive and decode stories.
Narrative structures can package useful information in an easy-to-exchange format that we recognize. Every story contains (as a bare minimum) a Situation, Action, and Result, and we’re primed to recognize each element in every story.
Our ancestors exchanged stories as the earliest form of knowledge sharing – we could warn others of dangers or give them tips to succeed. In both cases, the people who could understand and use stories for their own gain profited, survived, and passed on their brain’s love of stories to future generations.
Stories aren’t just how we exchange experiences – we use them to process events internally. We turn our own experiences into stories we tell others (and ourselves). This fundamental property of the human brain is why you must use stories to communicate with your customers.
Using Customer Experience Centers to tell your brand stories
It’s more important than ever to stand out. Using a customer experience center can help you define your brand story and use storytelling to show how your product or service can help your customers. Also known as a briefing center, an experience center is a dedicated space for communicating your value proposition and discussing new solutions.
These spaces are ideal for immersing customers in your brand and using storytelling to link your solutions to their own challenges. By immersing them in your brand, they can see demonstrable proof of your values, methods, and what you stand for – and connect it to their values with storytelling. However, it’s important to use digital storytelling software with maximum customization capability. Without this, you’re stuck with the same old story – on a loop – for every customer.
Storytelling gives you a unique opportunity to tell stories that matter to each target customer group or audience. This ensures your benefits are clear, in terms the customer truly understands.
