Storytelling for Marketers (Virtual Classroom)

The course explores and explains the key components, characters and narratives that create persuasive and memorable communications.

During this course you will learn:

• Why storytelling is such a powerful and persuasive method of communication
• When and where storytelling should be used to promote your brand, organisation, products or services
• How and why storytelling wins, hearts as well as minds of your customers
• The key components of an engaging, compelling and persuasive brand or business story
• What is the best possible ending and outcome for you and your customer

This course will show you how to apply audience-centricity, emotional drivers, internal representation and revelation to make your brand or business story highly engaging, enticing and inspiring for your target audience.

Understanding the concept of Storytelling

• Why marketing needs more great storytellers
• How stories have been used historically to engage, educate and persuade
• What makes storytelling such a powerful and persuasive method of communication?
• What’s the difference between a sales pitch and a selling story?
• Why does storytelling work where conventional sales-step structures fail?
• How and why storytelling wins the hearts as well as the minds of customers

The role of Storytelling in modern marketing

• When is storytelling the best way to promote your brand, products, services and solutions
• Horses for courses: the difference between brand, marketing and selling stories
• Why failure stories can sometimes be more effective than success stories
• What is a ‘Brand Story’ and how do you create a really good one?
• How big and small brands have used Storytelling to build customers loyalty and value
• How to build brand awareness and affiliation by creating shared beliefs
• The devil is in the detail – or is it?

How to create a story your people want to tell and customers want to hear

• How to plan and plot your story so it is engaging, persuasive and memorable
• The five narrative stages that form the most persuasive selling stories
• The three fundamentals that no sales story, client presentation or marketing copy can succeed without
• Understanding the narrative arc and good structure
• The role of the central character and how to choose the right one for your purposes
• Which other character types can play an important role in your story?
• What are the best possible story endings and outcomes for you and your customer?

Expert Storytelling tips that boost outcomes and avoid mistakes

• How to involve your audience, prospects and customers in your story
• The value of emotional drivers in marketing and storytelling, and how to apply them
• How to use internal representation as an engaging storytelling device
• Learning to talk in pictures not just words
• Using fear, uncertainty and doubt to your advantage
• What is the secret of making your story both memorable and sharable?

What’s your story?

• Your chance to practice planning and creating your own brand or marketing story
• Comparing approaches and choosing the strongest story examples
• Group presentation of your story plan: event, characters, journey and outcome

During this time when it’s essential to keep our physical distance, it’s just as important to maintain connections, education and ambition.

The IDM Virtual Classroom is face-to-face, peer-to-peer learning – in the digital world. It lets you keep learning, wherever you are, and to connect with others, no matter the distance.

The IDM’s Virtual Classroom offers:

• An interactive classroom environment
• Peer-to-peer collaboration
• An engaging platform experience
• Practical learning through hands-on exercises
• Online access anywhere you can get an internet connection

Courses are structured in a time friendly format consisting of three to four sessions per day, broken up into 60 to 90 minutes of learning, instead of the conventional approach of listening to lectures and notetaking.

Before starting your course, you’ll receive joining instructions outlining any technical requirements, plus a unique login link via Zoom.

The course will be ideal for any marketing or sales professional who is responsible for product, service or brand promotion. It would also be highly beneficial to copywriters.

The course would be relevant and applicable to B2B, B2C and Not-For-profit organisations.

Marketers should attend because they will learn about the origins of storytelling and how it has been applied within virtually every culture throughout history to engage, inform, inspire and persuade an audience. They will understand how and why storytelling achieves results where conventional selling structures fail.
They will discover how to apply storytelling techniques, structures and methodologies to win the hearts, as well as minds, of their prospects and customers. And they will learn how to apply audience-centricity, emotional drivers, internal representation and revelation to make their selling stories highly engaging, personal and inspiring for their target audience.