storytelling…your secret weapon
Think about a time when you had a really enjoyable shopping experience. It could be either online or in a brick-and-mortar store.
What stood out to you?
Why was it an enjoyable experience?
What did you like about the brand and the products?
How did you feel while you were shopping at this store?
How did the products fit into your life? Made it better or enhanced it somehow?
The answer to these questions make up the secret ingredient to transitioning a visitor into a BUYER! This is a critical step that, if not done correctly, can be the difference between you having a successful retail business with real longevity or a business that folds and crumbles and disappears into the wind.
Attracting your customers and engaging them are just the beginning. Now, you can’t move forward until you master these two, but you can’t just leave it up to chance after you get them to your store. You have to keep them interested and connected with you and your brand. You have to show them in a creative and CAPTIVATING way the answer to the basic question ALL customers have, “What’s in it for me?”
This is where Step 3 of the D.E.C.I. Method comes in, Captivate. This step is another commonly missed step by many small retailers. Many believe that once the visitor is attracted to the store and is engaged enough to start browsing, they have done their job and their products or brand will speak for themselves.
WRONG!!
Ever wonder why you get a lot of traffic to your online store, but your sales are still lacking? Or why your store is so busy at times, but at the end of the day you didn’t make your sales? This is a contributing factor why. Your store experience did not Captivate your visitor enough for them to make a purchase with you.
How do you correct this crucial mistake? Easy…through STORYTELLING!
Storytelling has been around for ages and has been talked about in a lot of marketing and advertising materials. But how does Storytelling look for a RETAIL business? What elements are key to telling successful, and profitable stories?
Well, you have to paint a picture through your DISPLAYS and DISPLAY TECHNIQUES within your store. How your products, signage, and color stories are all arranged to make a huge impact on the stories that you are telling your customers. This is how you humanize your brand and make that all-important emotional connection with your customers that makes them want to buy from you.
These are examples of the Stories you should tell to Captivate them and move them along in the customer journey:
How they will FEEL using your products
How they will LOOK in your products
What is a possible END USE for your products
How this product will IMPROVE their life or experience
How your brand is DIFFERENT than all others that sell what you sell
There are many more, but you get the idea of what type of stories to tell in your store through your displays to help your customers connect with your brand and your products. Notice that most of these stories are customer centric. They focus mainly on what the CUSTOMER gets out of buying from you. Now your competitive advantage is something that benefits the customer, however, this story is still more focused on you and your brand. This is an important story to tell because this story may be the deciding factor in a customer buying from you or the other company they saw last week that sells what you sell.
The key to this step comes from understanding who your customer is and what they really want. So you have to master the Draw Step and have a clear picture of your Target Customer in order to tell them truly compelling stories that entices them enough to move forward and shop with you.
Now the biggest part of this step is HOW you create these stories. This will look very different depending on what type of store ( online vs brick-and-mortar) that you have. This is the step where the implementation varies a lot. The Stories being told are the same but for obvious reasons, the way you create these stories are vastly different. Knowing and understanding these differences is the key to being successful here and not having a store with a ton of traffic and no sales.
To learn the many ways both Online stores and Brick-and-Mortar stores can create captivating stories and go deeper in this Step, go here!
Nichole
