I was invited to speak with the amazing Small Business Saturday live on their Facebook Page at the beginning of the week, and I wanted to speak about how you can weave your story into your marketing.

If you want to watch the interview you can here:

I believe that storytelling is a massive part of running a business. There are so many benefits to sharing your story, to engaging with your audience and to standing out from the crowd.

Here are my top 9 benefits to telling your story:

1. Your story will stick on your audiences mind – they will remember you

2. It’s grabs attention

3. Makes you and your brand real

4. It evokes emotion – and we know we all buy based on our emotions

5. It helps people emotionally connect with you, your story will resonate with them

6. It helps to build loyalty

7. It engages better than just pure sales messaging

8. It makes you stand out in a crowded market place

9. It helps to make your USP concrete

We’re hard-wired for stories. We spend our childhood hearing them, the newspapers and magazines we read are full of them. We connect with them, we’re nosey and love getting ‘under the bonnet’.

So I hope I’ve convinced you that is you start telling stories in your business you’re onto a winner.

Recently I did a post on Instagram that if you’re a company of one you are the brand.

You get to decide what your brand looks like.

You get to decide to say no to corporate stuffiness, you get to create a business that suits you, you get to shine and show off your gifts and talents and you get to be 100% you.

Telling your story is all part of that.

So what stories can you tell?

Well, how about starting with the story behind why you started your business? Why you’re passionate enough about what you do to decide to do it every day? What is the story behind your products and how you do what you do?

People love a conflict, the triumph over adversity story. Any bumps in the road you got over. How you got to where you are now.

Think about the major story arch. Person is at point A and has a problem or conflict of some kind. Something happens along the way where they learn something new, meet a mentor get over the conflict. And then there they are at point B with the problem solved. Have you got a story like that?

Can you write down 3 story ideas now that you could share with your audience?

After the live interview, I realised there was a part two to this idea of storytelling in your marketing.

And that is the story of your customers.

I did a live about it on Facebook and you can watch it here.

The more we dig into and understand our customers, the more we’re able to support them and create products and marketing messages that let them know that we’re the best option for helping them solves whatever problem they have.

Have a think about the story your customers are telling themselves?

Who are they? Who do they want to become? What’s the problem they have? What does success look like for them? Why do they need your product? Why would they be interested in your brand?

The more we can stand out from the competition with our story and the more we understand the story of our customers the stronger our business becomes.