Mastering Storytelling: Strategies to Engage Your Small Business Audience

Small business owners face a myriad of challenges. How do they stand out in a crowded marketplace? How do they draw in loyal customers? And how do they achieve all this with a limited budget? Thankfully, there is a solution to this dilemma.

It’s about leveraging the power of storytelling to connect with your audience on a personal level. This is as much about communicating your values as it is about showcasing your unique perspective, while you build valuable relationships that can help take your business to the next level.

So, how can you as a small business owner achieve these aims at the same time through storytelling? Keep reading below for more insights.

Preparation Phase

Narratives are powerful tools to help your audience forge a stronger connection with your brand. But creating them takes time, effort, and prior preparation. Here’s what you should consider doing before you get started.

Know your brand

Business owners know their product or service offering like the back of their hand. But how well do they know their brand? Do they even have a brand to speak of? If you don’t yet, you should. Branding goes beyond logo design, corporate colours, and a catchy tagline. It’s about the tone of voice you use in all your communication with the public.

It needs to be identified clearly so that your brand can grow and become easily identifiable by everyone who gets to know about it. And one more thing: you need to use your brand tone of voice consistently in all your marketing messages, be they on social media, on your blog, website, email communication, or anything else.

Know your audience

The next step is equally important. Despite its appearance of simplicity, it can get complicated and take a lot of time and effort to get right. Yes, we are talking about knowing exactly who your target audience is. For this purpose, you’ll want to study the market you operate in and determine what sort of customers you typically get. Your potential customers in New York might be vastly different from your potential customers in Japan.  

Then, gather information about them such as socio-economic status, demographics, psychographics, and more. When you have this information, you’ll probably realise that you have several different segments of customers. Ideally, you want to choose the broadest segment of these and tailor your message consistently to their needs.

Think about how they speak and how they’d like to be spoken to. Think about what drives them and what challenges they’re facing. By deeply understanding your ideal customer in the broadest segment you serve, you can create much more targeted marketing messaging and narratives.

Have a clear goal

Ultimately, your story or narrative should have a clear goal. Do you want to raise brand awareness? Do you want to reach more followers on social media? Do you want to directly impact your sales figures? Writing and preparing story content is a difficult and engrossing effort.

The last thing you want is to aimlessly produce materials that have no goal. Make sure that you identify measurable outcomes that you can keep an eye on. This will help you see if your storytelling is working, how and when to tweak it, whether you need to develop it further, or change it altogether.

Creation Phase

Now that you have a clear purpose and vision of who you want your story to target and what message you’d like to communicate, it’s time to consider the next phase: narrative creation. Below are a few key pointers that will help guide you in the right direction.

Draw up a clear story plan and structure

Creating your story plan and structure is easier said than done. That’s because you want it to be short and punchy, emotive, captivating, powerful, and attention-grabbing all at the same time. For this purpose, you want to have clarity about the shape that your story structure will take.

Remember that unlike fairy tales, you want your story to have a deeper meaning and purpose. And again unlike fairy tales, it shouldn’t be long-winded and have too many layers.

Most stories follow the dramatic arc in their structure. They contain an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. However, you don’t have to follow this structure to the letter.

You can choose from several story structures that align with your vision and goals. Here are several examples you can choose from:

• An origin story can share how your business was founded
• Vision and mission stories can inspire and motivate customers
• Leadership or team stories can put a human face behind the words you express
• Introducing a new product or how it came to be
• Showcasing different ways your product can be used
• Select existing customers to tell a story about how they use your product
• Customer hero stories feature customers that used your product successfully
• Creating a single differentiator story can show what sets you apart from your competitors
• You can also emphasise your business’ commitment to corporate social responsibility initiatives

Use visuals

Remember that a story doesn’t have to be large chunks of uninterrupted text. Instead, it can be supplemented with powerful visuals that resonate with your audience.

Whether it’s a photograph of you on your first day of business, an infographic, or a picture of a happy customer, it’s about breaking up the text with a visual break that can immerse your audience even deeper into your story, making it come alive and keeping them captivated for longer.

Create your story

Now it’s time to create your narrative. You’ve decided on the structure and you know what type of visuals you will use. But how do you proceed? A couple of tips worth bearing in mind include:

• Keep it simple: Avoid using overly-complicated words. Write short sentences or sentences of varying length and use the active voice where possible.
• Make it relatable: Identify a hero for your story. This can be your product or even your customer. Also, to make the narrative relatable, speak in the first person. Saying “we” can sound more corporate and distant, while using “I” creates an instant connection.
• Tap into emotions: The best way to make your story come alive is to make it emotional. Don’t be afraid to pull on your audience’s emotional strings. But be wary of being exploitative. You do not want to rely too heavily on evoking emotions like fear, sadness, or anger. Instead, you want to create joy, delight, and surprise. As such, you should choose powerful nouns and accurate verbs, colour and fonts to evoke positive emotions and bring your story to life.

• Make it insightful: Another important tip to consider is to make your story insightful. You want your audience to learn something or walk away knowing something new. This is why it’s okay to feature facts in your narrative, although you probably want to stay away from too many dry numbers and figures. Remember: few people remember pie charts but they do remember how you made them feel. That’s what you want to tap into.
• Create audience involvement: Also, don’t be afraid to get your audience involved in your story. Ask them to help you reach a conclusion after you’ve presented half your narrative to them. Alternatively, ask them to share their thoughts and opinions with you. Furthermore, you can street them toward taking an action. Ultimately, engage them so that they are compelled to engage back with your business.

Bonus Tips

Getting the basics right in marketing storytelling is one thing. But you also need to consider a few additional factors that play a pivotal role in your narrative’s success. Let’s start with authenticity.

We can all smell when we’re being sold to and most people don’t like that feeling and end up associating your business with trying to make a quick sale. Avoid being that brand. And when you create your story, make sure you add value to your audience. You don’t want to waste their time. 

Another key element is consistency. Your story should pervade every aspect of your written marketing communication. You also need to consistently maintain the story, develop or evolve it so that you retain interest and continue to build your brand.

Finally, make sure to engage in social sharing. This means spreading the word about your story on social media platforms where your business has a presence. The more visibility your story has and the more you set yourself apart from your competitors, the better business performance you are likely to enjoy.

Managing your social media presence is vital in a digitally driven world and it’s worth keeping a pulse on your involvement on such platforms.

Measuring Impact

As a final word, there’s something important to be said about measuring the impact of your efforts. Above, we mentioned the importance of having a clear goal in place. Once you have a measurable indicator that you can check your narrative’s performance against, you can tell if it’s working or not and make the necessary adjustments, where needed.

A few key metrics that could help you measure performance, whether it’s growing your blog or social media profile, include but are not limited to the following:

• Reach 
• Engagement
• Return on investment (ROI)
• Time on page
• Number of views
• Traffic to your website
• Conversion rates
• Customer retention
• Search engine rankings
• The number of backlinks acquired

Closing remarks

Storytelling in marketing is both an art and a science. When done correctly, it can be a powerful tool that helps your business grow. As you work on creating your business’ narrative, make sure to align the story with your brand persona and be consistent with your messaging.

And don’t forget to constantly measure the results of your efforts so that you know what’s working and where you need to make some tweaks. While it’s an ongoing process, it’s a way to differentiate yourself from the crowd and enjoy greater business success and customer loyalty.