Win your customers' trust and confidence with these two types of stories.
Every business or organization should have two types of stories: an origin story and a conversion story.
Note: Origin and Conversion Stories are two of the many frameworks featured in Growth Marketing SuperBoost.
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An “origin story” gives your business or organization a soul and emotionally connects with its customers. It is also a good way to differentiate yourself from competitors.
Thus, it is recommended to write your business or organization’s origin story as the narrative of your business or organization’s journey from where it started, to where it is today.
Then there is your business or organization’s “conversion story” — which really sells prospective and existing customers. It wins the trust and confidence of your ideal customers, by highlighting the transformation that customers undergo when they buy, use, and/or engage with your product or service.
You want to write your business or organization’s conversion story as a narrative of your customers’ journey to where they desire to go or who they aspire to become with the help of your category.
What’s more, here is another way to think about your conversion story, from marketing and brand storytelling expert, Bernadette Jiwa:
“Buying is no longer about getting things we need. It’s about reinforcing a set of beliefs we hold and share. Marketing is not about finding new ways to sell more of something. It’s about affinity more than it’s about price, feelings more than facts. Marketing is about giving people frames of reference and context. And above all, marketing is about becoming part of peoples’ stories.”1
Thus, you also want to write your business or organization’s conversion story as though it is part of your ideal customers’ stories.
Here are some other thought starters that you can consider when writing your business or organization’s conversion story:
What will make my ideal customers remember my business or organization’s conversion story?
How can my business or organization’s conversion story deeply appeal to both emotions and rationalizations?
How can my business or organization’s conversion story get noticed, stand out, and build salience?
Where can I embed my business or organization’s conversion story into various marketing channels and methods so that it achieves reach?
How can my business or organization’s conversion story inspires relevant, meaningful, and memorable associations with my brand category?
How can I weave my ideal customers’ “jobs to be done” into my business or organization’s conversion story?
How can I weave my business or organization’s “elements of value” into my business or organization’s conversion story?
It is also important to remember that marketing works best when you “make the story bigger” — in this case, “make the conversion story bigger” — than your business or organization and its product or service. (For reference, see our marketing messaging frameworks.)
Think about the overarching story you are telling your customers today. Then think about how you can make this story “bigger” so it can better relate to and connect with customers.
For example, Elementor is a website building software. Their overarching story is: “Build, manage and host stunning websites.” To make this story bigger, Elementor could say: "Grow your business online."
Since origin and conversion stories are ultimately about your ideal customers, or at least perceived through their prism, relatability is paramount. Just like the ability to identify with a character in a book, show, or movie brings readers and viewers great pleasure, and actively engages them with the work in question, the same must be true about your business or organization’s origin and conversion stories.
In other words, the ability for people to identify with a business or organization (and its category) will bring them great pleasure, keep them actively engaged, be perceived as valuable.
"Relatability has become widely and unthinkingly accepted as a criterion of value," wrote Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker.2
However, against the backdrop of social media — where much of today's marketing is published and shared, and where people are constantly interacting with other people to whom they can relate on a variety of levels — businesses and organizations face an unprecedented challenge:
They are not just competing against others in their category anymore; they are up against every single person in their ideal customers’ social media networks.
As such, businesses and organizations need to articulate their origin and conversion stories such that they generate interest with their ideal customers, in a way that makes them say: “I can see myself in this.”
There’s more where this came from at the Growth Marketing Institute.
Jiwa, Bernadette. “Marketing: A Love Story: How to Matter to Your Customers.” CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.
Mead, Rebecca. “The Scourge of ‘Relatability.’” The New Yorker. August 1, 2014.