Your brand depends on the stories you tell. All successful companies have them.

When consumers like the narrative you provide, they’re more likely to keep your products and services at top-of-mind awareness. They’re more likely to engage with your business emotionally. They’re more likely to buy from you. And they’re more likely to evangelize on your behalf.

Look at growth in the organic and sustainable food movement, for example. If you walk the aisles of Whole Foods or your town’s specialty market, you’ll see stories about local farmers, happy cows, handpicked produce, or sustainably caught fish. People aren’t just buying dinner. They’re buying a narrative. And it’s marketing’s job to cultivate this connection between producer and consumer.

In his book Omnivore’s Dilemma, food writer Michael Pollan refers to this evocative marketing prose as a literary experience. It makes food choices special, transforming an egg or a piece of chicken or a bag of arugula from nourishment to an intellectual experience with complex aesthetic, emotional, and even political dimensions.

When you develop a producer/consumer relationship with this kind of depth, you bond with your customers. Just by committing to your story, you’ll begin to sow the seeds of brand awareness that will bear fruit for many years to come. Here’s how:

Five Factors for Telling Stories with Your Marketing

1) Make your audience part of the overall story. The more they’re involved, the more they’ll care.

2) Speak to your buyer personas’ pain points. Tug the emotional strings. Make them enthusiastic about your story. If you do, they’ll probably go out and tell someone else.

3) Entertain them. Sometimes readers get caught up in the story, and they forget you’re trying to sell them a product.

4) Create a sense of community. Develop a level of exclusivity with your story, and make it so compelling that your audience needs to be a part of it.

5) Differentiate yourself. Every company has a unique story, so this is your chance to show how you’re different from the competition.

What’s Your Story?

Learn how to develop your company’s narrative by defining your buyer personas and speaking to them with highly focused content. Find out more about cultivating brand awareness through storytelling and a well-defined content strategy in our 30-minute webinar, What Is Inbound Marketing?