According to a study by Stanford University, facts are 22 times more memorable when they are wrapped in a story. Therefore, storytelling is also of high importance in marketing and should be used to address the clientele and potential clientele emotionally, to address their goals, wishes and problems and to show the personality of one's own brand. If you want to learn more about storytelling, click here to go to our newsroom article on this topic.
But how do you better involve (potential) customers in order to reach them as well as possible, to address them and, in the best case, to generate positive word-of-mouth? You should try to make the customers themselves the "storytellers" of your brand! Here are three reasons why this is even more effective than the company's own storytelling:
- People trust individuals more than companies
As you can see from the all-knowing influencer:ins, people are more likely to trust individuals. According to a Nielsen study, 92% of consumers trust a recommendation from friends and family more than from companies or their advertising. Influencers also reveal a great deal about their lives, creating the feeling that they know them very well, which also builds trust. This in turn means that advertising by individual influencers often works better than that of companies or brands.
- Word-of-mouth and electronic word-of-mouth continue to spread like wildfire.
Especially in social media, the so-called eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) spreads extremely quickly. Word-of-mouth has always spread quickly among friends, colleagues, family members, etc., but through social media there is the possibility that one's opinion or recommendation for a product or brand can be seen by hundreds or even thousands of people within a very short time. If you want to read more about word-of-mouth, feel free to click here and visit our article on this topic. And always keep in mind: spontaneous stories that come from customer enthusiasm are always best. If you pay for customer stories, you lose that spontaneity and other customers can see the insincerity. Therefore, you should encourage dialogue between customers and share the stories they experience with your products or services, etc., to promote sincere communication. This way, when storytelling your clientele on social media and the like, you have the opportunity to gain a much higher reach.
- Improve your SEO through reviews and stories from your clientele.
By storytelling your clientele in relation to your products in the form of blog posts, case studies or customer reviews on your website, you automatically improve your SEO. So you should always offer your clientele the possibility to rate on your website and share their own stories there. The best way to do this is to talk to specific customers and write blog posts or case studies about their personal experience with your products or services. But make sure that not every review or testimonial from your clientele sounds similar, which is often the case with common reviews. Since your clientele's experience with your product or service is the best marketing you can do, it makes sense to give your clientele every opportunity to share their experience in a way that stands out from the norm. And that's where storytelling comes in.
So customers are more likely to respond to recommendations and personal stories from individuals, the stories spread like wildfire especially on social media, and by including customer stories on your own website you can improve your SEO ranking. From this it is easy to see that just the storytelling of your clientele on the one hand generates and deepens trust and on the other hand reaches a very large mass. So you should try to make your customers the storytellers of your brand.
