Storytelling

This is the second post in our series, Marketing is Storytelling.

In the first part of this series, I introduced you to the idea of marketing as storytelling. If you can discover the authentic story of your business, and tell it with empathy and truth, your marketing efforts will be highly successful.

I also highlighted the three elements in every marketing story:

1. The person telling the story.
2. The person to whom the story is told.
3. The story itself.

In order to have a successful marketing campaign, be very clear about what each of these elements means for your business. If you do not define these elements, someone else will define them for you, and not always to your advantage. Stay in charge of your own story.

In this post, I will show you how to refine each of these elements so that they do the best marketing work for you.

1) The person telling the story. 

This is, of course, you. When you bring your product or service into the marketplace, you should have a very clear identity, so that your customers know exactly what your business stands for, and what is on offer.

Here are a few pointers to help you.

Recognize the need for a ‘business identity’, a mark of distinction. 

A mark of distinction is something that a customer can highlight when talking about your business. This is not about you creating logos or slogans or anything like that, at least not yet. It’s more about your assuming a mindset that recognizes the need to be different from others. You don’t achieve business success by running a business that is just like the hundreds out there. Recognize the need for distinction.

Clarify your business identity.

This needs some quiet time contemplating your business, and asking some very important questions.

If you want to define your business identity, don’t look at your products or services. Look instead at your potential target market.

So, don’t ask, ‘what do I sell?’

Instead ask, ‘what problem am I trying to solve?’.

Then work backwards from there.

The customer is vital. Without customers, you have no business. So your business identity must be defined around what problem you wish to solve for your customer.

Let’s assume your business is the sale of luxury watches. Our question is: what problem are you trying to solve for your customer?

A person who wants to buy a luxury watch might want to do so because he wants to look good, successful, and stylish. So that’s the ‘problem’ you want to solve for a potential customer. You want to help him look good, successful, and stylish. How? By selling him a Harry Winston Opus 14, for example.

So then you’re not just a seller of luxury watches. You are something else. Something more personal. A trusted guide for the man of taste, something like that.

This sort of description has more meaning, more relationship potential. And ultimately, it tells a better story.

Position yourself by looking at your customer and what you are doing for him. Don’t look at your products or services. Focus on the problem you are solving for your customer.

2) The person to whom the story is told.

This is, of course, your potential customer.

In defining yourself (under point 1) above), you will invariably end up defining your customer as well. This is because, in order to define what problem you are actually solving for a customer, you have to do a pretty good job of defining the customer.

As I mentioned in the first post of this series, don’t cast your net too wide here. Not everyone out there will be interested in your product or service. Don’t be tempted to go for a wide-ranging, catch-all marketing approach. It won’t work.

What works is a focused marketing approach, targeting those customers that are a proper fit for you. There are customers out there who are looking for a business exactly like yours. Your goal is to find those people, and focus your time on them. Be as precise as you can be in trying to identify and target these people.

So how do you know which customers to target?

Take a look at your business. Your main quirks and characteristics will make you attractive to a particular type of customer. These characteristics include things such as the size of the business, and any particular specialisms. For example, dealing in Rolex watches only, as opposed to watches and jewellery in general. Or dealing in antique furniture, as opposed to running a furniture store.

Such quirks and characteristics should help to give you a general picture of the customer you should be targeting. Once you have that general picture, you can begin to fill in more details.

Getting more detailed – what does your ideal customer look like? 

Create a ‘customer avatar’, basically, a picture of your typical customer, with all the details filled in. Who is he? Where does he work? What is his income level? What are his hopes, dreams, fears, and insecurities? Go as detailed as you can, to draw this picture. The more precise you get, the sharper your targeting. And the better your results!

Staying with our example of the seller of luxury watches. He would need to create a customer avatar for the sort of person he would target. It might look like this, in part:

Howard, a 42 year old stockbroker. Howard is not married. He earns between $500,000 and $800,000 per year. He takes two holidays a year, subscribes to racing magazines, and wears only bespoke suits …

A clearly defined customer profile will help you successfully target your market.

3) The story itself. 

If you know the problem you wish to solve for your customers, then you will have a fairly good idea exactly who your potential customers must be.

If you take it a step further with a very sharp customer avatar, you will have a very good picture of your target customer.

So how can you tell a story that will create a powerful connection between you and your target customer?

Your story should connect with your customer at the point of his deep need, desire or longing.

In the earlier example of the seller of luxury watches, we identified the need of the customer to look good, successful, and stylish. This is a deep human need, and, by tapping into that need, the seller can create a direct connection with the prospective customer. If the seller can get across that he empathises with the customer’s particular need, he will create the necessary connection.

Your story must create an emotional connection, first and foremost. Connect with your customer’s emotions – his need for love, respect, affirmation; his hopes or fears; his insecurities and doubts. Meet your customer at the place of his deep feeling, and connect with him there. Only from this place can the story emerge.

But the story cannot emerge without empathy. And it must be true empathy. You cannot fake that. Nor should you try.

Using Howard the stockbroker, your story will be one that taps into Howard’s love of fine things, and his desire to look the part of a successful stockbroker. The story should identify with these feelings in an authentic way. The story should speak Howard’s language; it should also communicate to Howard that the storyteller understands him deeply.

Conclusion

So these are the three elements you need for a successful marketing story. Define these properly, and your business will stand out clearly in the marketplace.

Next up in this series, we will discuss why small business shy away from marketing.

Many business owners shy away from marketing. There are various reasons for this. A common reason is that many feel overwhelmed by all the things they feel they must learn, for example, about different marketing techniques. As a result, many stay away altogether from marketing.

This is a mistake you cannot afford to make. Marketing is the lifeblood of any business. A great product or service, on its own, cannot make sales. There has to be an intelligent and concerted marketing effort behind it.

In this post, I would like to share with you the big idea behind marketing. I will also give you some key insights to keep in mind as you shape your marketing plans.

Here is the big idea.

Marketing is storytelling.

This is the beginning, middle, and end, of marketing.

After all is said and done, when all the fancy technical words are broken down into simple, easy to grasp concepts, this is the one thing that shines through.

This is the first post in a series on marketing as storytelling. This series will help you refine your core marketing message, so that you target precisely those prospects that are right for your business, leading to significant increase in customers, and solid business growth.

…

So, marketing is storytelling.

Marketing is the story you tell about yourself to the world.

But not to the whole world – not really. Only to those whom you have carefully selected. Marketing is not about adopting a scattergun approach, blaring out a message to all and sundry. Sure, it might look like that when we  see the adverts etc all around us, but that really isn’t how it works. A good marketer will have carefully defined the intended recipient of her message, and is actually targeting that person with her marketing efforts.

There are three elements in every marketing story. Every time you market your business, these elements are there, whether you realise it or not. Therefore if you do not deliberately define what you want them to mean for you, they will define themselves, or someone else (heaven forbid, the competition) will define them for you. So it is important to know that these elements exist, and then set about defining them clearly.

Here are the three elements in every marketing story:

(1) The person telling the story;

(2) The person to whom the story is told; and

(3) The story itself.

1. The person telling the story

This is, of course, you. You are bringing your product or service out into the marketplace, and you are telling a story about what it is that you are offering.

You (as the storyteller) have an important role to play here. It is not just about your product or service. Crucially, it is about you.

So, who are you?

Or, to be more exact, who do your customers think you are?

The truth is, no matter how a business may define itself, what truly matters is how it is defined by its customers. If, for example, you see yourself as a dealer in antique furniture, while everyone sees you instead as a general furniture shop owner, it doesn’t then matter how much money you throw at your marketing. Unless and until you correct that misalignment, nothing will work.

But of course, we should not rely on our customers to tell us who we are. We should be intentional about creating our business identity, and in communicating this identity very clearly to the world. This way, we define ourselves in the way we want our customers to see us, and then they take the lead from us.

So, in putting together your marketing story, be very clear about who you are.

2. The person to whom the story is told

This is, of course, your potential customer. We have to be very clear about the identity of this person. If we are not clear about who we are targeting, we will end up targeting everyone and no-one.

So who is your potential customer?

Many business owners fall into the temptation of casting their nets very wide. They want to target as many potential customers as possible, in order to increase the chances of sales and business growth. While this might seem to make sense, it actually does not work. If you are not precise in targeting your message to a clearly defined recipient, you will achieve very little.

Here is a truth. There are people out there right now, looking to buy from a business exactly like yours. They are primed and ready to spend their money on what you have to offer.

However, if you are not able to identify them, you will walk past them. If you are not focused on finding them, you will saunter past, looking into the distance, while ignoring the ideal customer walking right next to you.

The message here is this: don’t pitch very wide. Instead, look for your ideal customer, and then pitch to him.

If you pitch too wide, you will have to cater also for people who don’t know about your business, don’t care about your business, and will never buy from you, no matter what. Instead, you need to turn your gaze away from them, and instead zero in on those people (wherever they may be) who are ready to spend money on what you have to offer.

So how do you find these people?

First, you have to know who they are.

To do this, take a look at yourself as the story teller (see point 1 above). Who are you? What makes you different from your competition? What sort of prospect is likely to be attracted to you? Those are unique signals that should point you towards the customers with whom you would have the most empathy.

The next step is to begin to narrow down your range of potential customers. This depends on the particular business you are in, but the general principle applies across all fields. The more focused you are in defining your target market, the more successful your marketing efforts will be.

3. The story itself. 

When you are clear about your business identity (point 1), and you have pinpointed your target market (point 2), the story you need to tell will start to become clear.

So you know exactly what your business is about, and you know exactly the type of customers you are targeting.

The next step is to build your story.

The story you tell should connect to your customer’s need or desire. It is not about pointing to your product and service, and singing its praises. In fact, it is not at all about your product or service. It is, first and foremost, about your customer. What is his deep need, desire, or longing? Can you fulfill it? If you can connect fully with that place, your story will be both amazing and effective.

Conclusion

The vital point once again – marketing is storytelling.

Marketing is the story you tell about yourself to the world. There are always three elements to this story, and you must define them, or risk having someone else (unhelpfully) define them for you.

Define who you are, as the storyteller.

Define the person to whom you are telling your story.

Define the story you are telling.

Next in this series, we will discuss how to define and create these elements. That is, how to tell your story.