Stories add oomph to your brand

Whether your business is local (like a home remodeler) or global (like an online specialty retailer), you can make a tremendous brand impression by telling stories—real-world stories illustrating how your business has benefited customers.

Customer stories work for you several ways. First, stories are memorable, so they make your business and brand more memorable too. They stick in people’s mind, especially if they strike a particular chord with readers or website visitors. For instance, a story about how your service team went the extra mile for a customer could make a lasting impression with people burned out by frequent lousy service.

Second, stories sidestep the jaded skepticism with which audiences greet empty-sounding promotional claims. (“We go the extra mile for you!” Yeah, right.) Instead of spouting slogans, stories demonstrate the underlying truth, without sounding boastful. A story giving a few details about how you walked the walk for one real, live human being will do more to build your business and brand than a thousand slogans will.

Third, stories make you more credible. Stories are believable. Sometimes they even have emotional impact. Telling about real experiences of real people actually lends credibility to your business and brand—an example of the “rub-off effect”: the story’s credibility rubs off on the wider enterprise.

Fourth, stories can give you a competitive edge. That’s because most businesses don’t make full use of their customer stories to add oomph to their sales and marketing. If you do, you are probably outdoing your competitors.

Fifth, stories are endlessly flexible—a veritable Swiss Army Knife for branding, sales and marketing. They can be long or short. Attributed (to the real person or company) or anonymized. You can pick and choose details that may be important to different audiences. Stories can be told different ways to fit a brochure, a webpage, a web “teaser” ad, print advertising, a video or tv commercial, a billboard, almost anything.

Sixth, stories can be selected and tailored to reflect attributes that most clearly reflect your business and brand. Many smart entrepreneurs create a logo that reflects one key attribute of the brand—reliability, innovation, whatever. You can develop customer stories that demonstrate how this attribute translates into actions that make for a great customer experience.

Seventh, stories are recyclable. You get good mileage out of them. That’s because you don’t get to use them just once, in one format. You can retell a story in a different way, in a variety of lengths, to suit different marketing and branding purposes.

Eighth, stories are readily available. If you have satisfied customers, you have customer stories (even if you don’t realize it). And if you don’t have any satisfied customers, don’t worry about stories, you’ll be out of business any day now.

Bottom line: customer stories are an underutilized business asset. If you are not pinpointing and leveraging your customer stories, then your investors, partners or whoever you may be responsible to, should be holding your feet to the fire. How would they react if you left a rich vein of gold ore lying in the ground beneath your feet without prospecting for it, extracting it or refining it to gain all the value you can? So you owe it to yourself, your business, your stakeholders and brand to take customer stories seriously.

Okay, you’ve become a believer. You want to start using customer stories to enhance your business and brand. If you want to go at this endeavor systematically, here are a few action steps. They pretty much follow the sequence for mining ore: prospect, extract, refine, utilize.

Prospect means finding stories. Create a portfolio of possibilities you may be able to develop into customer stories. Extracting means getting details about their experiences from customers.

Refining means taking the raw material—customer details—and applying these facts to construct real-world stories. Utilizing means taking your well researched and well written stories, and placing them wherever you think they’ll add luster to your sales, marketing and branding initiatives.

Discover the gold mine lying under your feet. Start that list of story candidates right now!