Stories that build your online brand

Telling memorable stories about your customers’ real-world experiences can build your credibility, add moxie to your sales/marketing and luster to your brand. Stories are readily available to any business that has satisfied customers—and that means every viable business on the planet. You can adapt customer stories to a variety of business needs, for instance by tailoring their length and details to fit different venues and audiences.

Customer stories are particularly important when you have a web-based business. Online businesses like yours have a global presence but, unlike a local pizzeria or landscaper, there’s none of the direct, face-to-face interaction that local businesses use to forge strong customer relationships and word-of-mouth. Instead, everything’s done at a distance. So you really have to “work smart” to build a strong, consistent, memorable brand that will initially attract people online and then keep them coming back.

If yours is a service business, then you should be able to find customer stories at every turn. If you deliver products—say, as an online retailer or wholesaler—then stories focus on customers’ delightful experiences with your products, or (as good or better) on their experiences with your customer service.

A word about telling online customer service stories. Many stories may involve correcting a mistake your company made: the wrong order shipped, a wrong shipping address, the wrong size shirt, whatever. Don’t be afraid to show your warts, if necessary, to tell a memorable and positive story. Customers know mistakes happen. What they really, really care about is how swiftly and gracefully you take care of anything that may go wrong. Even if it was the customer’s fault, you take care of it. Give customers that level of service and they will give you their undying loyalty because top-notch service is so hard to find—and is so crucial to an outstanding customer experience.

Think about what else makes your business uniquely valuable to customers. Is it offering hard-to-find items? Then tell stories about how customers searched high and low for that special something, and found it on your site.

When choosing your own stories, look for opportunities to add emotional impact (if it’s there; don’t make it up). It’s not just that your customer found the unusual item she was looking for. Dig a little deeper: perhaps it was a gift for her dying father, or perhaps for her daughter who was getting married within days and desperately needed this particular item. Stories like this stick with you, and demonstrate better than any slogan the reason people come shop your site in particular. Look for drama in your stories because it burns these stories into people’s minds—along with your brand value.

Here’s a customer story straight from the pages of your favorite business magaine, Entrepreneur. A franchisor’s full page ad in a recent issue talks about an average guy in the Midwest—mentioning his name, age and hometown—who was afraid of losing his job in an economic downturn. But he was discouraged by how much it cost to start the kind of business he really wanted. The answer, of course, was the franchise, which made it simple and affordable for him, with a process that got his new business up and running fast. Real person, real life.

If you have stories that demonstrate “go the extra mile” service or other great customer-experience attributes, especially when leavened with emotional impact, then these stories are worth gold and will help you build an unassailable brand.

If your business has been operating any length of time, you already “own” customer stories. Now is the time to put them to work in your sales and marketing to support your business and brand.