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How Using Stories as IT Marketing Tools Attracts Your Target Audience

Bill Hogan , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

IT marketingAs IT marketing strategies have evolved through time, many businesses realize that consumers relate to products and services that appeal to their emotions. They want to experience how the services will help them meet their goals and dreams.

This is where storytelling comes into the picture. Listening to stories is ingrained into people from the time they are infants through adulthood. Who doesn’t like a good story that caters to the emotions, whether it’s love, fear, tension, excitement or happiness? Using stories that play to these emotions builds the value and trustworthiness of your business and strengthens your brand.   

How Stories Communicate with Your Audience

When telling a story about your business, you communicate your company’s values in a way that emotionally relates to your readers. It speaks to their emotions, making them empathize with your business. Through storytelling, you not only build your brand but also communicate with your audience, which is the basis for IT marketing success.

Once you develop a core story that defines your business and your brand, you can use it as the basis for all your audience engagement. By creating other stories from your core story, your audience becomes more confident in your business, strengthening the emotional bond that results in a long-term relationship. Effective storytelling opens the minds of your audience to new ideas and inspires them to learn more about your business.

The Basics of Storytelling

You probably learned in English composition class that all stories have a structure that consists of a beginning, middle, and end. Stories also have a setting, action, a struggle and a resolution. When writing your business-marketing story, you’ll use the same type of story structure.

When writing your story, keep these storytelling tips in mind:

Grab the Reader’s Attention

Make your audience care about what’s happening in your story. You need to grab their attention right away or they’ll find some other story to read. Your audience wants to relate to your story, seeing the human side of your business.

After you write the beginning, you want to provide some drama to your story with some type of conflict or tension that keeps your audience involved. They want to know the how’s and why’s of the story and how it relates to their own situation. As in real life, they want to see something that throws events out of balance and how the hero deals with the conflict and eventually resolves the problem.

Make a Connection to Your Audience

Storytelling is all about connecting with your audience. All through the beginning, middle and end of your story, reveal your vulnerabilities, so the reader can relate them to their own vulnerabilities. Above all else, be personal and honest in your storytelling, gaining the trust of your readers. Consumers want to know the nitty-gritty of your business, the difficulties and struggles that you had to overcome to provide them with a trustworthy, transparent business they can rely on.

If you only tell a positive picture of your company, people won’t believe it. Life isn’t all rosy and your audience knows it’s never easy. Instead, write about the hardships your business faced. Tell them about the lessons you learned along the way to building a successful business. Also, don’t talk about yourself as the hero but about how the people you know helped with your business success. Your vulnerability connects you to your audience with an emotional impact that builds trust.

Conclusion

Make storytelling part of your IT marketing strategy, creating meaningful stories that focus on your business message. Telling your story is not a one-time project but an effective, ongoing strategy to help your business grow and thrive.

Bill Hogan

Bill Hogan is President of Partners Plus. A fast growing IT Support firm based in the Philadelphia area. Bill has been helping make life with business computers easier since 1981. His education as an Electrical Engineer at Penn State started a dual approach toward gaining expertise in both programming and computer networks. In 1991 he formed Partners Plus, Inc., to provide managed IT services to companies in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, based on being a business operations ally and understanding the need to speak to company leaders in plain English rather than ‘techno-babble’. And while others tend to focus their attention on the mechanical components of a computer system, Bill and his staff take a more global approach - how a network can be best used as an integral, reliable asset to the business owner’s goals. In 2007, after years of frustration with the sub-standard services he saw during network audits, Bill published “Hassle Free Computer Support” to educate business owners with the information they need to get superior technical support for their businesses A firm believer in keeping current with advances in technology and processes, Bill lead Partners Plus to become a Microsoft Certified Partner in 1998 and a Gold Certified Partner in 2008. And, Partners Plus Inc. has been selected by Microsoft as being in the top 1% of Partners serving the Small and Medium Business Market on the East Coast. Bill is internationally certified in Network Operations and is certified by Microsoft in project management and multiple Microsoft technologies. He also held the position of representative for the Mid-Atlantic region on Microsoft’s Advisory Board which manages all Microsoft Small Business certified partners. Partners Plus provides managed it services to clients in Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley and helps them choose, implement, and manage IT and cloud solutions that are cost effective and reliable. Partners Plus’ pro-active approach to IT support is ideally suited for companies in Wilmington, Delaware or Philadelphia who depend on reliable IT infrastructure, but don’t want to spend a lot of money to keep your IT services in Delaware that way. Partners Plus clients have come to appreciate the Partners Plus team focus on operations and the ability to get the core of problems quickly, and the knowledge of how to resolve issues as quickly as possible. With the institution of the Partners Plus Protection Program, the company can now monitor, identify and resolve many network issues in minutes without coming onsite.