Successful Product Marketing Starts with Storytelling

In a global cluttered marketplace, how do you get your products to stand out? It's the biggest questions brands need to answer today. It's a consumer driven world, and if you want them to pay a premium for your product, you need to give them a good reason. To succeed in this environment, brands need to utilize the power of storytelling in your product marketing.

Let's dig into how you can tell powerful product stories.

When you boil down powerful product storytelling, it really comes down to four key ingredients: Resonance, Anticipation, Outcomes, and Emotion. This is your recipe for telling engaging stories about your products.

Success is out there waiting for all brands.

The question is, will you capture it?

How to Make Stories Resonate?

By definition, to resonate is to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions.

In order to resonate, you must create empathy. Empathy is that feeling of "like me". Your audience needs to be able to picture themselves in your story.

The best way to create that feeling of "like me" and resonate with your audience is to connect with your audience around a shared value, experience, or challenge.

If your audience holds the same core beliefs as your brand, and you bring those beliefs to like if your product marketing story, you'll create resonance.

If there are certain experiences or challenges that market research has shown that most of your audience has, set up your product story so that the story's main character (protagonist) has a similar experience or faces a similar challenge.

If your audience sees your protagonist going through a similar challenge that they have faced in their lives, you'll create resonance.

Everything that follows in your story hangs off of your ability to resonate, and create empathy with your audience.

Make sure you don't miss.

How to Capture Audience Attention?

Attention is a marketers' biggest asset in a global cluttered marketplace. Consumers are opting out of emails in droves, and the number of consumers using ad blockers is skyrocketing.

How can you break through the clutter to capture AND HOLD your audiences' attention?

Anticipation and suspense.

Create product marketing stories that take consumers on a rollicking adventure filled with obstacles and challenges that resonate with them.

As your story twists and turns, and your protagonist overcomes, fails, and overcomes again, your audience will feel what she feels.

The audience will anticipate the outcome of your story, and wait for that outcome to reveal itself, which will ultimately hold their attention in suspense.

Ordinary product marketing stories are dismissed.

Powerful stories are remembered.

Extraordinary stories are shared.

Be extraordinary.

Successful Product Marketing Shows Positive Outcomes

If you did a good job setting up your story by creating resonance with the audience through a shared challenge, this is where that hard work pays off.

As your protagnoist faces her challenge, your audience feels for her because they have faced the same challenge in their own lives.

Offer your product or service as the solution to the protagonists' problem and you have planted the seed within the minds of your audience that they too can solve their challenge by using your product or service.

You might be thinking, ok, that's easy. Does it really work?

Well, it doesn't stop there. It's not enough to simply pay off the challenge with your product and hope consumers will buy.

You need to take your story one step further by showing your audience the life that's possible when using your product or service.

Show the audience how much better the protagonists' life is after using your product or service.

Let them imagine the possibilities your product or service can have on their lives.

Consumers Buy Based on Emotion

Target consumers' feelings with your product marketing and your return will be exponentially higher than simply giving them the facts and specs.

How amazing your product or service will make them feel is what needs to come across in your product story.

Just like in the Outcomes section we talked about showing the audience how their life will be better after using your product or service, great stories evoke an emotional reaction within the audience. Those emotions are what drives their behavior.

Emotion drives the purchasing behavior, especially for premium products and services.

To succeed in today's cluttered marketplace, brands need to stand out, and create emotional connections with consumers. Those emotional connections build bonds of loyalty, and that loyalty translates into a higher LTV for each customer.

Succeeding in a Consumer-Driven Marketplace

In this new consumer-driven marketplace, storytelling is what will separate highly successful brands from the mediocre ones.

Consumers pay premiums for authentic brands they feel like they "know". And not just know the WHATs (what your brand sells, what features your product offers), but the HOWs and the WHYs.

How your products were sourced. How your service makes them feel when using it.

Why you built your company. Why you care about your customers.

You Control the Future of Your Brand

Premium niche brands beat big box brands with powerful storytelling.

Big box brands hold or grow share by recognizing this and begin making an effort to connect with consumers through stories.

Get on board. Or fail. The choose is yours.

The marketplace decides now, not spend, reach, & frequency.

Read our Ultimate Guide to Better Brand Storytelling to learn how to infuse brand storytelling into your marketing strategy. It will show you how to make your brand stand out, take sales to the next level, and leave your competition scrambling to figure out what the heck just happened.