How can you stand out from the noise in an ever increasingly crowded market place?

How can you double or even triple your monthly revenue?

How can you instantly turn strangers into buyers who are happy to pay twice the market rate for your product or service?
How can you attract 100% of your ideal prospects and turn them into subscribers and buyers?

It’s easier than you think.

The way to get there fast is through the awesome POWER of STORY.

I first discovered the power of story for helping me sell horses at double the prices of my competitors.

Later, story helped me take my struggling bath & beauty products business and turn it into a luxury brand carried in fancy spas and boutiques. In fact, I even used photos from my great-grandmother’s photo albums to tell the story of beauty recipes passed down through the generations.

Are you tapping into the power of story in your business?

Story is how humans pass down wisdom, inspiration and learning. Story is older than writing.

The art of story came into form spoken around the fire and painted onto the walls of caves. Through the centuries, it later developed into a more complex written form.

Think about it…

Stories stick.

When you go to a talk or a class, you remember story a lot more than you do facts and figures.

In fact, after a presentation, 63% of attendees remember stories. Only 5% remember statistics. (Source: Made to Stick by Dan & Chip Heath)

There’s an old marketing adage that says “Facts tell, stories sell.”

How do you know which stories to include in your marketing and sales processes?

Do you want to share a story about what happened to you at the grocery store the other day..?

Well, no.

You do not want to just start telling random stories. You want to ensure that the stories you tell are engaging and purposeful.

How to make your marketing stories engaging.

Joseph Campbell, a famous anthropologist, developed the mono-myth. You’ve probably heard of it commonly referred to as The Hero’s Journey. He found certain stages and steps that ALL of the most enduring, powerful, engaging and loved stories have in common.

I am obsessed with Joseph Campbell and The Hero’s Journey – as it pertains to marketing and selling.

You see these elements repeated over and over in stories like:

• Star Wars
• Buddha
• The Hunger Games
• Lord of the Rings
• Biblical Stories
• Rocky

3 Stages of the Hero’s Journey.

The main pieces of the Hero’s Journey are Separation, Initiation and Rebirth.

The journey takes the Her from the world they already know well, the Ordinary World to a journey into the Special World.

Within these 3 stages, there are a total of 12 steps in a great Hero’s Journey.

Adding story into your marketing and sales processes makes everything more memorable. This helps your email list building, your “know, like and trust” factor and of course, your sales and profits!

There are 3 main ways to use story in your marketing efforts:

1. Your business origin story.

In this types of story, you’re sharing how and why you began your business. These types of stories help your ideal prospects connect with you.

Many times, when you are a content expert, you are your ideal prospect so this really allows your ideal prospect to identify with your story. They feel like they bond with you. Your origin story makes you more relatable.

You may not think your story matters or is very interesting. That’s because you’re so close to it! Your story does matter. Start testing using your stories in your marketing and see what happens.

2. Your client stories.

These stories are powerful because they show what your products and services can do for people. They are social proof stories.

The best client stories happen when you tell what life was like for them “Before Your Product or Service” and “After Your Product or Service”. If you can circle back around to

3. Teaching stories.

These types of stories aren’t yours, they include things like ancient parables, modern stories, fables and other people’s stories (not you or your customers and clients).

You’ve heard me use story in several episodes of the Easy Online Marketing podcast. I use an ancient parable from the East in the opening episode to inspire listenership. I’ve used my origin story in several episodes, talking about how I made money with my horse DVDs and how that made me obsessed with list building, product creation and online marketing.

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Dig into your own #stories to differentiate yourself in your #marketing and attract your perfect customers and clients.

So how will you start using story in your marketing?