What You’re Missing When You Try and Use Story in Your Content and Sales Copy

What story will your customers tell about why they buy from you?

Image by Jason McBride

Marketing gurus love to blab about the importance of story. You can pay a lot of money to learn how to use story in sales emails that will make you truckloads of cash.

The marketing gurus aren’t wrong — story does help you sell — but the gurus are missing something.

Emotional Stories

The only way humans communicate anything of importance is through story. We are wired for stories because we are emotional beings. A story helps us remember important stuff because, unlike a grocery list or a spreadsheet, a story triggers an emotional response. We remember things that make us feel better than we do cold hard facts.

Gurus want you to use story to provoke emotion and to increase your chances of being remembered. That is a highly effective strategy. But it isn’t enough. There is more you need to be doing with story.

Why?

Because humans are not only emotional beings, we are also the world’s greatest self-rationalizers. We want to be reasonable. Even though virtually all our decisions are emotion-based, we want to pretend that we make fact-based…