The Advantage of Telling Stories

The purpose of the content on your website is to sell your company’s products or services to your website visitors, sounds easy right? Well with the enormous amount of copy and content on the internet today, it’s actually very difficult to write content that catches readers’ attention and engages them, however, there are some things you can do to help your website’s copy stand out and one of them is to tell stories.

Storytelling is one of the most well-recognized and compelling methods for engaging audiences. Storytellers have been around since the beginning of humanity and remain important because humans love being told stories. Most stories are filled with traditional techniques for influencing readers to help to convince them that your product or services are the best.

Stories are a natural part of daily life for most people. Audiences today are inundated with thousands of different stories on a daily basis through print ads, television, human interaction, novels and more. The powerful stories are the ones that grab people’s attention, that they enjoy participating with and are rich enough that users’ have an emotional reaction.  If you can use these methods when developing copy for your website, you can help persuade your audience, build credibility and trust, and create brand fans.

How can you use storytelling techniques in your copy?

1. Write a story that is relevant to your products and services. It’s great to write an interesting story on your website, but if it doesn’t support your marketing strategy then it’s not doing what you need it to do. Your story can’t just be interesting; it also needs to be convincing enough to encourage your readers to move to the next step in the buying cycle.
2. Speak to your key audience. A story is useless if it doesn’t make an emotional connection with your audience. Make sure that the story you’re creating speaks to your audience’s pain points. 
3. Don’t lose sight of the purpose of the story. Remember, your story is still meant to sell. Just because you’re writing a story doesn’t mean you need to write a novel. Keeping your copy concise is still important.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at December 20, 2010 8:00 AM

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