It does not matter how good a story you have or how powerful your idea is. If your audience can sense dishonesty, you don’t have a good story or great idea anymore. They won’t want to transfer their time or funds even to try or listen to it.
Three reasons you should never skip adding personality and honesty to your brand’s story:
To Humanize Your Brand
An Accenture Strategy Study conducted in 2016 found that around 83% of the consumers they poll preferred human interaction when dealing with brands’ customer service departments. An important fact to note to show just how important personality and social interactions are to your customers.
Your customers want to know they are talking to real people and humans. They want to feel heard, valued, and do business with real and genuine people, not business entities. Studies similar to this one show just how detrimental it can be if you avoid humanizing your brand and add too much automation. Further highlighting the importance of adding personality, honesty, and relatability to your brand.
To Have a Competitive Edge
If you keep your story more personal by staying honest and true to your values, you are more likely to stand out against your competition. As the study shows, if your audience sees your competition as more genuine or personal, they are likely to switch instantly.
To Better Tell Your Story
When you are honest and show your real personality, you can better tell your story and communicate your values to new or current customers. A lie is harder to follow through on and, over time, will be obvious to your customers, readers, or viewers. You can’t expect to relate to your customers fully with dishonesty. There is no reason to be dishonest in this world of instant access to information, tools, resources, and competition.
Here are two quick tips to increase your brand’s personality:
Build a Community
Customers are attracted to a sense of community and around people who share similar interests, morals, or ideas. This means one of your top priorities should be to bring your audience closer together. Be sure to interact daily and as much as you can and inspire them to have many different discussions together.
Give Your Consumers a Voice
Involve your consumers as much as possible in your business. Host live question and answers, submit polls in your Facebook groups, send surveys through your e-mail campaigns or allow them to test your products. Make it obvious and easy for your customers to send or submit feedback. Any way your audience can feel heard and valued is a benefit to your company.
Remember, the days are over where companies get to act like robots. The studies don’t lie. To connect and relate with your audience and get them engaged, you must be authentic.
Over the next 60 days, we will be talking exclusively about becoming a better storyteller so you can work on increasing your audience engagement.
It’s a fact that the human brain is wired or attracted to stories. This is because stories are how the human brain learns, grows, and remembers things. Through stories, you can better remember important events and communicate or connect with your peers and audience. And, more importantly, through stories, you gain audience engagement and the action required to run a successful and sustainable business.
Let’s be honest, we know that you’re unlikely to follow us through the entire series, so here’s a little cheat for you – the entire series of articles as an ebook – our gift – no strings attached. If you’re ready to catch up on some summer reading that will actually propel your business forward then this is for you.
DOWNLOAD THE FREE E-BOOK: Become a Good Storyteller to Increase Audience Engagement
