Originally published February 18, 2023 , updated on July 10, 2024

Business storytelling can be a powerful tool for building customer relationships. A powerful business narrative can connect with your audience emotionally. It’s also a great way to earn consumer trust, and long-lasting business relationships require trust. 

Nowadays, many business relationships are formed online. This means your brand story must work to humanise your business. A business with character and depth fosters feelings of empathy and connection. At the crux of it, the goal of business storytelling is to elicit these feelings of empathy within your target audience. That said, creating business storytelling that connects to your audience isn’t always easy.

Here’s how you can use the power of storytelling to build great business relationships.

1. Identify and Segment Your Audience

It’s important to understand your audience before starting the business storytelling process. If you know your audience, you can target the right audience. Clarifying your ideal profile buyer’s traits can also help your marketing team. It helps them create content that taps into their interests, too.

Knowing your prospects’ pain points can help your team create effective storytelling for content marketing that’s well-targeted, searchable, and discoverable. A great way to do this is to perform in-depth market research, which helps you understand what content to share. The content you share should solve a pain point and your audience will see it as valuable. Offering valuable information to your audience is a great way to earn their trust. 

Performing in-depth market research can seem intimidating at first, but breaking it down into smaller steps can help smooth out the process. First, identify what you need to know about your audience. For example, you could gather information about their demographics, psychographics, and behaviours. Demographics include your prospects’ age, gender, income, and level of education. Psychographic traits can be your prospects’ lifestyle, values, and personality traits. Behaviours include purchasing patterns, media trends, and brand loyalty.

Once you’ve collected the information you need, you can begin segmenting it. Segmenting your audience means placing them into groups based on their shared traits. You’ll then tailor your marketing efforts to each group. Identifying and segmenting your audience will help you create what resonates with them. This resonance is key when using storytelling in your content marketing strategy. Resonance fosters long-lasting business relationships.

2. Focus on Your Unique Value Proposition

The online world is saturated. So use storytelling for businesses to highlight what sets your brand apart. Your business has its own story, services, and strengths; leverage these to develop your unique brand personality. 

Your business should have its own unique value proposition (UVP) as well. But how does your UVP elicit an emotional reaction to foster trust, connection, and loyalty?  

Prospects need more than a good product to ‘buy in’ these days. They must resonate with your business’s values, too. In a recent study, up to 82 percent of shoppers said they want to support a business that aligns with their values. In the same study, 39 percent of shoppers said they’d cut ties with a brand if they found out that their values weren’t aligned. So, it’s this UVP that’ll do the selling for your brand and how you communicate your UVP is key.

A business UVP must be subtly woven into its business storytelling strategy. The UVP can give your brand personality and will inform your business’s voice, stance, and perspective. On top of connecting with your audience’s values, your UVP adds depth to your brand personality. The more well-rounded your brand personality is, the deeper it will connect with your audience.

Remember that your UVP is what drives your business story forward while setting your brand apart. Getting clear on your UVP, carrying out, and expressing it can create an emotional connection online. An emotional connection builds trust, which is essential to building customer relationships that last.

3. Be Authentic

Did you know that stories cause the brain to light up differently? Human beings are literally hardwired to connect to stories. Storytelling turns on the logical and emotional side of the brain and connecting different information also encourages long-term memory retention. So, business storytelling isn’t just a way of adding meaning to your content strategy. It also makes your brand more memorable.

Remember that people can tell if you’re being authentic or not. We live in the era of authenticity. People want to be valued as individuals. They expect your brand to bask in its individuality, too. When telling your brand story, be authentic, open, and transparent. These traits can humanise your brand, which fosters empathy with your audience and creates that highly sought-after connection. 

Authentic stories are engaging, and the success of social media influencers is proof of this. Powerful brands are honest; they share what’s really going on behind the scenes, including their challenges, pitfalls, learning curves, and more. Their secret is that they’re vulnerable. Their story is also coherent – since it’s a narrative of real events.

In an increasingly digital world, it can be difficult to connect. If your brand is transparent, open, and vulnerable, its stories will be more emotive. Authentic stories are powerful, and powerful stories elicit emotion, which makes them highly memorable. Ultimately, an authentic brand story can deepen the overall customer-company connection.

4. Engage With Your Audience

When storytelling for your business, it’s important to interact with your audience online. In this way, you nurture and build relationships with your client base. Encourage your audience to engage with your content by asking questions. You can also ask for feedback, and respond to comments and messages in a timely fashion.

Interacting with people also gives your audience a greater sense of well-being. On the other hand, passive scrolling makes people feel even worse. Customers expect you to engage with them. In fact, online social media engagement is the number one choice for customer care. A complaint resolved on social media is said to increase brand advocacy by up to 70 percent. What’s more, everyone expects brands to reply within one hour of receiving a message. Responsiveness shows that your business values its customers.

Of course, engagement is a two-way street. It requires a back-and-forth conversation between your company and its audience. So, engaging with your audience requires actually being social. Be social online by posting regularly. Ensure that your marketing team responds promptly to comments and inquiries, too. Since engaging with your audience is another way to humanise your brand, keep your tone of voice authentic, consistent, and warm. 

Great Loyalty

Here’s another great benefit of online engagement when storytelling for your business. Your brand has the power to create a community. Building a community around a brand through content engagement can create a sense of belonging for customers. Creating a community through business storytelling can also foster deeper relationships. It connects customers to other people with similar traits and interests. Joining a large and loyal following that’s excited about what your business offers makes your clients feel like they’re a part of something meaningful. In turn, clients may feel more connected to your brand. If your clients feel connected, they are more likely to stay loyal to your business.

5. Create High-Quality Content Consistently

If you want to build a strong business relationship with your audience, create high-quality content that offers value. Consistently sharing valuable content is a great way to establish trust. Again, business storytelling centres around fostering trust. Trust can win over your prospects and maintain a loyal client base.

Content that offers value to its audience can invoke positive emotions. These positive emotions can become associated with your brand. Eventually, whenever someone online sees your posts, they may automatically feel excited. They may also feel more connected to your brand and may be more likely to support it in the long run.

Here’s another way consistent, quality content fosters customer trust. Consistently distributed content can boost a brand’s presence, making them highly memorable. A brand with a strong presence can attract a larger following. It can also be seen as more credible, since it already has so much support. But this can depend on what’s known as the ‘surround sound strategy.’ This strategy involves having your content appear everywhere, at once. In other words, on multiple platforms – consistently. 

The surround sound strategy can also improve brand saliency, which is the meaning associated with your brand. Brand saliency also refers to how well others recognise your brand. It’s a quick mental map that tracks how a person feels about your brand before they make a purchase. Unsurprisingly, it can heavily influence your prospect’s final buying decision. 

So, consistent content that offers value and that’s seen repeatedly keeps clients coming back for more. It’s also proof that they’re connected to your business and that they trust your brand.

Conclusion

You can use business storytelling to build positive, long-term relationships with your clients. Storytelling is ‘human,’ so it has the power to successfully personify your brand. Since emotive stories are noticed, understood, and better retained, invoking emotion in your storytelling and content marketing strategy can really set your brand apart online.

Most importantly, empathy drives connection. A well-thought-out brand narrative can then nurture that connection – increasing your client’s lifetime value and overall customer loyalty.  If you’d like to put together an emotive story that really connects with your audience, Goodman Lantern offers business storytelling services to get you started. We can help you identify and communicate your brand’s unique voice and personality.

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