Learning how to use storytelling in marketing can revolutionize the way you connect with your target audience. Once you’ve mastered it, you’ll be able to expertly weave a narrative that draws in potential customers, educates them about your brand, and persuades them to do business with you.
If it’s a skill you’re looking to master, you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to take a look at the different ways storytelling is used in marketing, and teach you everything you need to know to use it effectively for your brand.
What is storytelling in marketing?
Storytelling in marketing is the practice of using a narrative to convey messages about your brand, product, or service. It’s a great way to engage and connect with your target audience on an emotional level.
Rather than simply listing features or benefits, storytelling involves crafting a compelling, relatable story that resonates with the values, aspirations, and experiences of your audience.
This can be incredibly effective when used in SaaS (Software as a Service) marketing plans in particular. It allows SaaS companies to demonstrate the value of their service in a relatable way, which can often be difficult when consumers can’t get much hands-on experience with a product pre-purchase.
Benefits of storytelling in marketing
There are many reasons that brands opt to use storytelling in their marketing.
Builds trust and emotional connection
Using facts and figures in your marketing is a great way to highlight your achievements, but it’s not likely to create an emotional connection between you and your audience. Stories, on the other hand, do have the ability to create emotional connections.
Consumers are more likely to develop a deep connection when they see themselves reflected in the narrative. This inspires them to act and become part of your brand’s story. Once they feel included in the narrative, the trust they feel in your brand grows, leading to greater customer loyalty and brand advocacy.
Image sourced from pwc.com
Sets your brand apart from competitors
Crafting a unique and compelling narrative helps to build brand awareness and differentiate your brand from your competitors. A well-told story can highlight what makes your brand special, including its history, values, and mission, which creates a distinct identity in the minds of consumers.
This is especially important in the highly competitive SaaS industry, where there are undoubtedly multiple other companies offering competing services to your prospective customers.
Makes information memorable
Information that’s delivered as part of a compelling narrative tends to remain embedded in consumers’ minds for longer. This is partly because a product or service takes on a more meaningful association when it’s tied to a narrative.
A strong narrative makes your brand more recognizable among consumers, improving brand recall. This leads to better customer engagement, which encourages customers to return to your brand to make further purchases in the future.
Types of storytelling in marketing
There are lots of ways to use storytelling in marketing, but three examples in particular are used as effective B2B inbound marketing tactics by many brands.
Customer success stories
Many brands will share real-life stories and testimonials from their most satisfied customers. Not only does this demonstrate the value and benefits of a product or service, but it also adds further credibility and authenticity to the brand’s messaging.
If potential customers can hear from an impartial party how effective a product or service has been, they’re much more likely to trust the brand offering it and give it a go themselves.
Image sourced from vocalvideo.com
SaaS companies such as Dialpad use this technique to great effect.
Company origin stories
Showing the faces responsible for founding a brand helps to humanize the company, overcoming that harmful ‘faceless corporation’ stereotype. It’s also a great way to provide insight into a brand’s culture and values.
Talking about why a company started in the first place and how it grew from humble beginnings into a success story demonstrates the passion, expertise, and dedication of the people behind the brand, making them more relatable to audiences.
Problem/solution stories
Another fantastic way to show off a product or service without sounding too ‘salesy’ is by demonstrating how other customers have used that product or service to solve a specific problem. Highlighting the benefits of a product through a narrative can help audiences to appreciate its true value.
They can insert themselves into the story as the ‘protagonist’, helping them to realize how the brand can benefit them as it did the customer in the story.
Tips for effective storytelling in SaaS marketing
Utilizing storytelling can revolutionize your marketing, but it’s not always as simple to pull off as it may seem at first. Here are some top tips to help you nail it.
Start with a captivating hook
Using storytelling in your marketing is a great way to pull your audience in, but it only works if you can grab their attention quickly and make them care about the story you’re trying to tell. That’s why a unique, captivating hook is essential.
It creates interest in your story, pulls your audience into the narrative, and helps to differentiate the story you’re telling from the ones being put forward by your competitors.
Don’t focus solely on features
Highlighting what your product or service can do will show your audience why they should be using it, but it’s important that your story doesn’t simply become a list of features. Otherwise, your audience may as well just be reading a brochure.
Weave the features of your product throughout the narrative, and use it to highlight how they can be harnessed in specific use cases to solve real, tangible problems and address pain points. When using storytelling in marketing, it should always be a case of ‘show, don’t tell’.
For example, perhaps you’re a SaaS company that provides CRM software. Your narrative could cover the entire sales process for one customer in an organization, explaining along the way how the CRM software helps sales teams to qualify and score leads, how it enables marketing teams to send them personalized materials, and finally how it allows support teams to offer more effective post-sales support.
Position your audience as the central character
Stories are more engaging when the reader can insert themselves into the narrative. If your audience can position themselves as the central character in your tale, they’re much more likely to empathize with and relate to the story you’re telling.
If you want customers to understand how your brand can help them personally, allow them the room to put themselves in the story and personalize it to their own unique circumstances. Make sure that whatever their challenges are, your SaaS platform can ultimately provide the solution at the conclusion of the story.
Connect with emotions, not just facts
Facts and figures make compelling evidence when you’re speaking to your shareholders, but they don’t create a very compelling narrative for your potential customers.
Your audience will be more drawn into your story if they have an emotional response to it. This makes them more engaged, meaning they’re much more likely to stick with the story to its end.
Not only that, but encouraging your audience to feel something as they engage with your story will link them to it and your brand empathetically, forging a deeper connection and inspiring brand recognition and customer loyalty.
Experiment with various storytelling formats
There are many different ways to tell stories. Different mediums allow you to connect with different audiences, so it’s important to choose a storytelling format that allows you to connect with your key buyer personas.
Image sourced from hubspot.com
Different storytelling formats you could use include:
- Written storytelling – e.g. blog posts, articles, long-form social media posts.
Written storytelling allows you to paint a picture with words, crafting persuasive narratives that tackle your audience on a journey through the beginning, middle, and end of a story.
It’s a useful format for including links to landing pages and backlinks to other content, too. Services such as a SaaS digital marketing agency can help with this aspect of a content marketing strategy.
- Visual storytelling – e.g. videos, images, infographics or data visualizations
An image lets you tell a story quickly, useful for grabbing your audience’s attention in a fast paced environment.
- Digital storytelling – e.g. interactive web pages, data widgets, AR/VR.
Digital storytelling is a more interactive way to spin a yarn, allowing your audience to immerse themselves in the experience.
Choose the right channels to share your stories
How you distribute your stories is almost as important as their content. For example, posting long-form written content on Instagram isn’t going to capture the audience’s attention there in the same way an image would.
Image sourced from hubspot.com
It’s important to tailor your stories to the channel they’ll appear on and the audience that hangs out there. Social media engagement is higher when you use short, snappy content.
Many SaaS companies will opt for blog posts and articles that appear on other companies’ websites. These can often be more in-depth, providing extra space for the explanation of technical features that will appeal more to the specific target audience of the website.
Utilize multimedia and interactive elements
Utilizing multimedia is a surefire way to get your audience to notice your stories. Many people are visual learners and absorb information better from seeing it displayed as an image than reading it in text.
Break up lengthy blog posts or articles with images and infographics to keep the reader’s attention and really hammer home your points. Similarly, you could include closed captions in your video content to allow the audience to still understand what’s going on even if they can’t watch your video with audio.
Interactive elements that an audience can control themselves boost engagement and retention, creating a truly unique experience they’re unlikely to forget.
Image sourced from hubspot.com
Avoid jargon or overly technical language
The aim of your stories is to engage and entertain as large an audience as possible. If you start using overly technical language, you might lose a large portion of your viewers before you’ve had a chance to properly hook them on your narrative.
While it’s true that a large portion of the audience for your SaaS platform will have some familiarity with the subject material, it’s worth remembering that multiple stakeholders from a potential client may need to interact with your story, all of whom will likely have differing levels of expertise.
Try to keep your content as accessible as possible, so that readers of all experience levels can engage with it. You can even use storytelling to educate your audience, so when they do go on to engage with your more technical content, they’re better placed to understand it.
A great example of this is to break down and explain the multiple acronyms that crop up in SaaS. This will help your audience to differentiate a CRM platform from a UC (Unified Communications) service.
Be careful not to exaggerate your product’s capabilities
Stories are much more fun when the stakes are high, but they still need to be believable. If the audience thinks you’re exaggerating what your product can do, there’s a chance they’ll distrust your brand, which is the exact opposite of what you want.
Create a compelling narrative, but make sure it’s true to life. Testimonials come in very handy in this regard, as they provide a first-hand account of exactly how your product has helped in a particular scenario without any embellishment or exaggeration.
Find a happy ending when you use storytelling in your marketing
Once you’ve mastered how to use storytelling in marketing, the sky’s the limit! By allowing your audience to see themselves within your narrative you can forge a deeper emotional connection, enhancing engagement and fostering brand loyalty.
You can use stories to build trust in your brand and differentiate yourself from your competitors. It’s important to remember that effective storytelling isn’t just about conveying information; it’s about evoking emotions, sparking connections, and inspiring action.
So, as you embark on your storytelling journey, keep your audience at the heart of your narrative, and watch your brand’s story unfold with unparalleled resonance and impact.
Author’s Bio
Nick Brown is the founder & CEO of accelerate agency, the SaaS SEO agency. Nick has launched several successful online businesses, writes for Forbes, published a book. He has also grown accelerate from a UK-based agency to a company that now operates across US, APAC and EMEA.
