Your Product Has a Story – Tell It!

Product marketing material often fails to connect with its audience in a meaningful or memorable way. One way to keep your product marketing fresh and relevant is to go back to one of the oldest forms of communication – storytelling.

Humans are hardwired to both tell and listen to stories; it‘s how we passed on important information for tens of thousands of years before written communication was invented. Good storytellers are ones who always keep their audiences top of mind as they spin their tales. And the best and most memorable stories are children‘s stories – who doesn‘t remember the basics of Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood?

Here are a few storytelling tips to keep in mind the next time you‘re thinking about putting together a PowerPoint presentation, datasheet or similar product marketing yarn.

1. What‘s the “once upon a time?” What conditions have combined to create a market for this product or service? What is the perfect storm? What does it look like? Is it moving fast or slow, are you behind it or ahead of it?
2. Who are the central characters? Remember your customer is always the main character, not your product. Imagine the central character on a stage giving a soliloquy to the audience. Who are they? What is their motivation? What are they trying to accomplish? What‘s stopping them from accomplishing their goals?
3. In any good corporate tale, the product is equivalent to the woodsman in Little Red Riding Hood – he solves her pain point by cutting the grandmother out of the wolf. How is your solution like the woodsman? How do you save the day?
4. What‘s the “happily ever after?” What happens when Cinderella (your customer) and the Prince (your offering) get together? How much money is saved? How much effort is reduced? How are resources freed for other tasks?

Keep these simple storytelling ideas in mind and your product marketing materials can leap off the page and ride off into the sunset of your target audience‘s imagination. Or, if words fail you, let Quexor help turn your marketing frogs into princes!