What you should know about storytelling and ecommerce

Storytelling is the art of turning traditional marketing into content driven by a message that includes depth and breadth of why something is important. When it comes to e-commerce, making sure that your content is engaging and valuable will help increase conversion rates and lead to higher customer loyalty. Building a brand’s story has become an important aspect of business in recent years. However, pulling it off well can lead to high customer lifetime values and loyalty.

Steps To Build a Brand Story

It takes time to build a brand story, but it can help drive multiple aspects of your business when done correctly. To start, it will require trust and loyalty. These two things should be built into your company, to begin with, but using the words to build trust is also important. 

Before creating a brand story, you will need to know who your audience is. If the industry you serve is apparel, you will want to ensure that your story is related to that industry. Remember why you entered your niche; perhaps it was “to craft clothes from sustainable bamboo.”

Here is an example from Tesla:

“Tesla was founded in 2003 by a group of engineers who wanted to prove that people didn’t need to compromise to drive electric – that electric vehicles can be better, quicker, and more fun to drive than gasoline cars.”

The above example gives trust to the consumer, showing that Tesla started as a small team with a big dream.

Next is differentiating your brand. Creating a convincing story about how your company differs from similar businesses is important to get customers to buy what you sell!

Tesla knows this, and in a time when owning a car is becoming a challenge due to soaring prices, the company differentiates itself from other car makers by following up its story with a not-so-subtle flex. They claim: “Model S has reset the world’s expectations for the car of the 21st century with the longest range of any electric vehicle, over-the-air software updates that make it better over time, and a record 0-60 mph acceleration time of 2.28 seconds as measured by Motor Trend.” They use their product to differentiate themselves from competitors. 

Steps To Building Your Storytelling and Why it Matters

With so much of today’s world turning to SAAS or full e-commerce, it is becoming harder to differentiate your business due to the lack of in-person customer experiences. Making sure your ad and brand share a common overarching theme, as well as a mission, will help build brand loyalty depth. 

There are three main parts of business storytelling:

Core Messaging

• Core Messaging: define the main message that you want to communicate. Is it more about your values, your product, or the quality of service? These are purely ideas, as ultimately the core message of your product is up to you. 
• A good way to figure out your core messaging is to figure out a ‘pain point’ of your audience and how your business (whether that’s your values, product, service, or something else) can help remedy that pain point. As in, how can your product or service help solve a customer’s problem in your target audience? 

Creating Motivation

• Now that you’ve established what the pain point of your customer is, you need to create motivation for them to want to buy your product. The best way you do this is to get them is for your story to establish what the problem in your customer’s daily life is, and how your product or service is going to remedy that problem when they purchase it. 
• During this phase, you need to provide your customers with facts about the product so they can begin to get an idea of how it’s actually going to happen. 
• Remember, the most loyal customers are the ones who believe their lives have been elevated by buying and using the product at hand, and that applies to virtually any business regardless of industry. 

Call To Action

• Now that the customer has the above information in mind, as in your story has established what their pain point is and motivated them to buy your product, you need to use a Call to Action to close the deal. 
• You can get creative with your CTAs, but some common ones include “Subscribe Now,” “I’m In,” “Book Your Free Assessment,” “Sign Up and Save,” “Join Us,” “Try It For Free,” or “Get Started.” 

Balancing each is essential to conversion. Too much core messaging results in information that is too high-level. Not enough motivation causes a lack of inspiration for using the product. Expansive selling feels like a hard sell and lacks humanity. 

The world of finance and expense tracking can get pretty boring sometimes, but this ad from Barclay is a good example of an advertisement that hits all the bills. 

It’s fast, and its core message is direct: “We offer corporate clients a dedicated relationship director.” The motivation is offered: “with in-depth sector-specific knowledge,” and the call to action is clear: “learn more.” 

Making sure that these items are thought out before launching an advertising campaign or starting a new Shopify business could make or break your new e-commerce company. Storytelling does truly lead to results. A study by The London School of Business found that people remember a whopping 65-70 percent of the information they hear via a story vs. only 5-10 percent conveyed through statistics. So learn to harness imagination over information!