Gateway Blogging

Storytelling: Tapping into the Desire for Success

Storytelling is powerful blogging. It’s also powerful marketing and sells without selling — in other words, storytelling isn’t a “hard” pressure tactic form of selling. It isn’t selling at all! The whole point of storytelling is to make it easy for potential customers to envision their own success by talking about your successful customers. You are helping your potential customers to stoke the fires of desire to achieve an outcome in their business. Put simply: you are helping them envision their own dreams of success. This is vital because it speaks to the all-important emotional aspects of the buy decision that no amount of facts or objectives-busting can overcome.

In Gateway Blogging, there are 2 main types of stories:

1. Process/progress stories
2. Customer success stories

Process/progress stories

Process/progress stories are blogging about what you do and how you do it. To elaborate a little further: when you blog about what you do, you mostly want to be blogging about what you do for your clients in a way that shows the benefits of being your client. One way to do this is to write about your process: how clients benefit from undergoing the process of receiving your services or purchasing your products, and the steps to get them those benefits.

Focus on the benefits your clients get from following your process. Process is a differentiator. Our process is part of our business identity, our unique value proposition (UVP). The importance of clients buying into your process can be seen in the anti-sweatshop sentiments and in the tremendous rise of organic farming. People want to know the story behind what they buy so they can feel good about buying it. This kind of marketing is nothing but story!

Customer success stories

When your client has acquired the benefit your process delivers, you then have a customer success story you can tell in the form of a blog post or other content, such as an interview with the client in the form of audio or video. Many freelancers have online portfolios or client lists, but fewer have client testimonials. Customer success stories combine qualities of both: your blog’s readers (prospective and current customers) can gain crucial information on:

1. How your clients benefit
2. Your character and personality
3. Your skills and experience

It’s important that we really focus on the benefits our customer received than what we did or how we did it. Essentially, we use storytelling in business blogging to brag about our clients’ success. When we do this, our client is the “sun” and we are only the “moon” in the sense that we’re only reflecting the light of our client. They are the sun. They are the focus of attention.

Envision success

When you use storytelling in a business blog, you are, in fact, writing about yourself and selling yourself, but you’re doing it in a way people enjoy and that connects with them. This is because you’re helping them envision their own success! You are enabling your audience to tap into their own strong desires for success. When they see how your clients benefit from you, they will begin to consider acquiring those benefits for themselves. Just remember to always frame everything in terms of customer benefit rather than how skilled or great you are.

Good Stories have drama

Do not be afraid to blog about problems if there was a successful outcome in the end. In fact, how potential clients perceive your character, behavior, and results during a problem may be one of the most important factors that gets you hired. Problems are the best opportunity available to really impress and create life-long customers who will do your marketing for you for free by word of mouth (and, hopefully, “word of blog” as well). When you can recount how a challenge was encountered and overcome with a happy ending, you are telling a good story–complete with a little excitement and action–that will have an impact on your audience.

photo by Akuppa under CC License