How to Use Stories to Win the Hearts of Your Audience

Stories: as humans we love them.

People naturally relate to stories – it’s a primitive thing and it’s the way we’ve been passing on information for countless years.

We used to sit around campfires regaling each other with tales of our adventures. But what we didn’t do back then was tell people about how they too could ‘earn $100 a day by clicking a few ads’.

If you want to appeal to someone on a basic level, then use the form of communication that has survived since the dawn of all of us.

Think about your own experience of stories and you’ll know this to be true.

Do you remember what it feels like to finish reading a book and to feel like you’ve been jolted out of a dream? Or to walk out of the cinema and have no idea what time of day it is? To be surprised to see it’s got dark?

Stories can move us to tears, they can make us angry and they can make us laugh.

A cold sales pitch or ‘Top 10 Ways to Lose Weight’ just can’t do this.  It’s something that a surprisingly small number of bloggers have caught onto but their loss is your gain!

This is just as important when it comes to selling as well.

Start a sales pitch with:

“I was in the same position as you…”

And your readers will wake up, take notice and read on.

This is FAR superior to starting the same sales letter with:

“Introducing the best ebook on fitness” 

Do you see the difference?

Building a Personal Brand With Stories

If you want to take this story idea and go with it, then something you can do is to build a ‘personal brand’.

That means that the main brand for your website or for your business is going to be you. This in turn then frees you to write about your own experiences, to recount tales from your life and to speak directly to your audience.

Everything you write will seem more relevant, more engaging and more fascinating and your audience will feel as though they know you. – This definitely helps a great deal when it comes to winning their trust and making more sales/orders!

Personal brands also allow you to do a number of things on social media that you otherwise could not. For instance, you can now Tweet about your day, or upload pictures of Instagram of yourself in coffee shops/at the beach.

You can let your fans get to know your dog, your friends, your partner. All of this will help you to build a stronger connection with them. That’s how you create true fans.

The Value You Share – Value Proposition

What all this also allows you to do is to focus on what’s known as the ‘value proposition’.

Your value proposition is the thing that you are ultimately trying to sell and that means you’re thinking about what your product, service or blog does for someone.

Let’s put it another way: you don’t sell hats, you sell warm heads.

And likewise, you don’t sell fitness books: you sell abs.

And you sell confidence.

It’s the feeling that you’re giving that really matters and very often this can relate to a lifestyle.

Once again this relates back to the target demographic and the person you want to reach.

What lifestyle are you promoting?
Is this the lifestyle they want to?
What are the things that they enjoy and respect?

If you have a fitness blog then you’re selling the fitness lifestyle and that means healthy eating, energy, time outdoors, muscles and confidence.

If you have a gardening blog, the lifestyle is probably more related to having a great home, to relaxing in the evening and to nurturing things to feel proud of. Maybe ‘going green’ is closely related and maybe you could even call this a ‘natural lifestyle’.

Either way, once you identify the lifestyle you’re promoting, you can then ‘sell’ that lifestyle through social media and through your personal brand.

Be consistent, but try to make your Facebook pages and your Instagram inspiring and encouraging for those people.

The photos you upload might be of you in the gym, or wearing clothes that look great because you go to the gym.

Maybe you share photos of you playing with your dogs on the beach. Thats because you’re probably fit and healthy enough to do that. Maybe you share inspirational quotes on Twitter.

Likewise, for the gardening blog, you might want to share pictures of your plants. Maybe of healthy home-cooked dinners. Maybe of cosy nights in with the family. Or perhaps nice walks through areas of natural beauty.

In all these ways, you are selling your lifestyle and helping more people to buy into that promise. They will then want to get closer to you. They may believe that in doing so, they can develop a similar lifestyle for themselves.

If you got value from todays post, How To Use Stories To Win The Hearts of Your Audience, please leave me a comment below.

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