“The stories we tell literally make the world. If you want to change the world, you need to change your story. This truth applies both to individuals and institutions.” – Michael Margolis
If you’re like many people, you might believe that marketing comes down to selling. That may have been true in the past, but in today’s digital world, it’s a little more complicated than that.
Instead, storytelling in marketing has become much more effective. Most people don’t like to be sold a product, but they do like to be told a good story. This story is precisely what makes your law firm unique and what differentiates it from the competition. In marketing, the best stories are often the simplest — but that doesn’t mean they are easy to craft.
How to Include Storytelling in Marketing
Create an emotional connection
Your top priority with storytelling should be on forging a connection with the reader or viewer. To do that, you need to show the human side of your business. You might want to speak to why your firm started in the first place. For example, if you provide immigration legal services, you could focus on immigrant relatives who fought for a better life in the United States.
Demonstrating your law firm’s experience and knowledge is critical. However, so too is showing how and why you, as an attorney, help people. There’s a reason that People was the most popular magazine in America for years. Telling stories about people, it turns out, never gets old.
Formatting your story
One of the main challenges in legal content marketing is that you have to convey your brand story as concisely as possible. Your potential clients are busy people. You need to get to the point quickly.
There are a few critical components every story needs, including:
- A goal: What the character wants.
- A conflict: Obstacles the character encounters in pursuit of the goal.
- A hero: The character who removes obstacles. In marketing, this is often the service or product, but mediated through another character.
- A moral: What the reader or viewer should take away from the story.
Consider Nationwide Insurance’s marketing as an example. When someone has a problem, like a car accident, Nationwide representatives show up to protect the consumer and help navigate a difficult time. They get to the conflict right away, bring in the hero and the moral is clear — “Nationwide is on your side.” This brand has effectively used storytelling in marketing to communicate the value of its services.
Once you’ve crafted your story, reinforce it throughout your marketing efforts. Make sure your potential clients know where you’re coming from and what drives you to do what you do each and every day.
