Relationships are built on trust and emotional connection. That’s just as true for brand relationships as it is for interpersonal ones.
While the concept of relationship marketing has been around for decades, it’s taking on new significance in the digital age. Technology has enabled brands to collect huge quantities of data that help them better understand customer behavior, needs and preferences. As a result, companies can offer more personalized, real-time experiences than we could have imagined in the analog era of relationship marketing. At the same time, there’s now massive competition for our attention, and the bar for customer experiences is constantly being raised.
How can any organization stand out in such a challenging context? Although there’s no simple answer to that question, good storytelling remains a fundamental element of creating engaging customer interactions. It’s the pathway to emotional connection with audiences. Through storytelling, companies demonstrate their understanding of customer needs and desires, while inspiring customers to see themselves reflected in those brand stories.
Brand storytelling isn’t tangential to relationship marketing. Rather, it’s a vital element of how we build trust and loyalty throughout the customer relationship—from someone’s earliest awareness of your brand until they become a loyal brand advocate.
Connecting through story across the customer relationship
Stories are where a brand’s purpose and values intersect with an audience’s needs and desires. As in interpersonal relationships, emotional connection builds over time, and it takes work and creativity. Once you’ve listened and learned about your audience’s challenges and hopes, you can begin building narratives that align with their story of struggle, discovery, transformation and innovation.
Storytelling can factor into each stage of the customer relationship—but the kinds of stories you focus on should be tailored to audience needs at that stage. Let’s look at four stages in a customer journey and see what story strategy might foster the best relationship at each one:
1. Getting to know each other
Brand awareness is the earliest phase in a customer relationship and the first opportunity for brands to make an impression. How do you reach new customers and make a name for yourself in a crowded market? Storytelling at the earliest stages of a relationship should be creative and gentle. Think about a first date: You want to make a good impression. It’s important to show curiosity and listen carefully, but also to exhibit some personality. You probably don’t want to present a formal list of all your best attributes to your date. Likewise, storytelling at the awareness level shouldn’t be a direct pitch, but rather an open door to a continued relationship.
Story strategy for increasing brand awareness:
Be bold and creative
Touch on an unmet need
Don’t go for the hard sell
2. Building trust
As a new relationship begins to grow, honesty, consistency and active listening help build trust between parties. When customers are considering whether your brand is the right fit for them, your storytelling should allow them to see who you really are and show that you’re committed to understanding how to help them. Just like people who want to build lasting connections, brands need to show up authentically and express their values, all while listening and caring genuinely about customers’ needs and priorities.
To build trust, your storytelling should express your mission, purpose and values. Why do you exist? What do you have to offer the world? What matters to you? At the same time, how does your mission align to the unmet needs of your audience? Customer data makes it easier than ever before to understand your audience, and you can use it to tell stories that connect to what they care about.
Story strategy for building customer trust:
Demonstrate your mission and purpose
Connect to customers’ real needs, challenges, worries
Share true stories of your work
3. Learning and growing together
For many brands, education and thought leadership content are important differentiators that deepen customer relationships. Offering educational content shows customers that you’re willing to give something without getting anything in return, and research shows that it increases the likelihood that prospects will make a purchase.* Through thought leadership, brands can demonstrate expertise in a field while inspiring and engaging audiences. Storytelling at this stage of a customer relationship fosters deeper trust and creates stronger connections.
Story strategy to educate and inform:
Share your expertise, in a welcoming way
Break down complex subjects so they’re easier to understand
Engage with trends and conversations happening in your sector
4. Pledging devotion
In a time of fleeting digital experiences, every brand is concerned with customer retention. While customer loyalty has a lot to do with the quality of a brand’s offerings and its customer service, storytelling continues to play an important role in nurturing customer relationships as they mature.
In the later stages of a customer journey, brands should offer customer success stories and behind-the-scenes content. Brand storytelling needs to show how the company is evolving to meet the changing needs of their customers and working to make a positive impact on the world. Like any long-term relationship, lasting customer relationships take work.
Story strategy that supports customer loyalty:
Craft personalized stories or content tailored to particular audiences (e.g., specific industries or demographics)
Share success stories featuring real customers
Talk about your story of ongoing transformation
Build deeper bonds through storytelling
Whether you’re trying to grow your audience, develop more personalized connections, educate customers or reshape the market in your category, it’s essential to connect with your audience on a human level, through story.
Stories are an ancient part of the human experience, and the best ones offer much more than a quick solution to a problem. The most compelling stories connect with the human struggle, the complexity of the world we live in, the roads that are winding and unpredictable, the choices that aren’t straightforward. To move people, brands need to dig deep, get creative and tell evocative stories that resonate with customers’ everyday difficulties while inspiring them to explore the art of the possible.
If you’re looking for help deepening customer relationships through storytelling, reach out to us at info@cxocommunication.com.
* “When comparing four brands, prospects were 83.6 percent more likely to make a purchase from the company that provided educational content.” From What is Educational Content Marketing?, New York Times Licensing.
