5 proven types of stories artisan businesses use to increase their sales conversions
Brand storytelling is a highly effective way of boosting audience engagement, creating better customer connections to ultimately generate sales for your artisan business. An engaging story serves to move your audience from browsers into customers. In fact, effective ‘storytelling can boost conversions by 30%‘ [source. Serach Engine Watch, 2019] Brand stories come in a variety of forms and expressions, in this feature I share 5 proven types of brand stories artisan businesses use to increase their sale conversions.
The 5 story types are:
1. The Emotional Connection Story
This is the story that builds an emotional connection between you and audience. Emotional connections create a bond of trust and loyalty. A 2015 survey by content marketing agency, Headstream revealed that if people really love a brand story 15% will buy the product immediately, 55% are more likely to buy the product in the future, while 44% will share the story. Emotional stories can also tug at the heartstrings. When using this story type, be authentic and don’t over do it by becoming too sentimental as that can have the opposite effect of making your audience feel uncomfortable.
2. The Entertaining Story
People love to be entertained and injecting a bit of humour into your brand stories is one of the best ways to do this. Humour brings joy and makes people feel good. This story type can offer a form of momentary escapism when times are tough. Using humour in your brand stories helps to make them memorable, relatable and shareable. When using humour in your stories ensure your message doesn’t get lost in the laughs, as too much humour can lead to not being taken seriously.
3. The Inspirational Story
The inspirational story motivates audiences to do and be better. This story aligns with their values and helps build community. Inspirational stories can inspire your audience to aspire to improving their lives, the lives of others or the world around them. This could be improving their well-being, learning something new, or becoming part of something bigger than themselves. Inspirational stories foster brand loyalty even creating life-changing movements.
4. The User-Generated Story
Some of the best brand stories are those told by your customers, and the user generated story focuses on sharing them (with your customers permissions off course). User-generated stories provide social proof, which can increase your business’ credibiblity and trustworthiness. Types of user-generated stories include testimonials, case studies, and social comments and captions that you can use in your digital channels and printed marketing materials.
5. The Problem and Solution Story
The problem and solution story is one of the most common story types. As the name suggests you highlight a problem in your audiences lives and position your product or service within your story to provide a solution to overcoming it. To create emotional connections and build trust use personal or real-life user-generated examples in your problem and solution story to illustrate what you are saying.
These are just 5 proven types of brand stories that you can use to increase your sale conversions. Your brand stories can focus on one of these story types or be a combination of a few or all. And, regardless of the type of story you use remember to keep your stories authentic, because ‘66% of people believe the best stories are those about regular people.’ [source. Headstream, 2015]
Which of these brand story types would work for your artisan business? I’d love to know, do share in the comments.
– Tapiwa Matsinde
[Image credits: The image shown belongs to PNW Production sourced from Pexels. If downloaded and used elsewhere, please credit accordingly.]
