In this Expert Insight Interview, Gabrielle Dolan discusses how you can use brand storytelling to connect and engage with customers or prospective customers and how you can get your employees to be brand ambassadors. Gabrielle Dolan has written many books, with the latest one, Magnetic Stories, dealing with connecting customers and engaging employees with brand storytelling.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- Reasons to get involved in brand storytelling
- What businesses don’t understand about storytelling
- What a good story consists of
Magnetic Stories
This is Gabrielle’s sixth book, and for the last sixteen years, she has been working with businesses to help their leaders share stories and communicate better. So far, most of her work has had a more internal focus, dealing with things like connecting and engaging employees with company values, sharing personal stories, etc.
However, more recently, she realized that there’s a lot of work to be done with regards to connecting with customers, so she decided to deal with brand storytelling more closely.
Telling Real Stories
A good story is like a magnet that creates an instant connection that is incredibly difficult to pull away from. However, when most people hear about storytelling and telling stories about their brand, they probably get a rough idea of it. Still, on the practical level, many people don’t know what the characteristics of a story are or how they would even use it.
If you look at the websites of many up-and-coming companies, you’ll see that the About Us page is often replaced with an Our Story page, but it is most often not a real story. Instead, it is just a timeline or a paragraph full of acronyms or jargon.
Stories and Emotions
To Gabrielle Dolan, a story has to have an element of human connection. It has to be about someone. That is why case studies or timelines of companies’ development are not stories. In business, a story also has to be succinct, so people can get the message quickly and get on with their day.
Storytelling in business should also try to deliver one message per story instead of covering a wide range of themes. Crucially, the human element must be there to help people connect with it on a personal level.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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