Persuasive storytelling is a useful writing technique that is designed to compel and better connect with your audience—in turn, creating positive engagement and increased success overall. It uses relatable and real experiences, concepts, characters in a language your audience can understand to motivate or inspire you to act a certain way.
Persuasion Vs. Manipulation
To fully harness the power of persuasion, you must first understand the difference between persuasion and manipulation; they are not the same. Manipulation starts with and leads to a negative objective. It’s about withholding or going around the truth by over-exaggerating or misleading certain facts and gaining your control. The main purpose is to fool the person into doing something or buying something without fully understanding what they are doing.
While persuasion, on the other hand, is directly the opposite. It’s about providing more education or guidance to those already interested. Persuasion leads and guides with positively. It’s about influencing and enhancing current behaviors or ideas, not controlling them. It’s about showing your audience a good reason why they should act or do something. In terms of business, it’s about providing the facts and other details to influence them to purchase.
Below are some tips regarding harnessing the power of persuasive storytelling to increase audience engagement:
Point Out the Problem
Make it obvious to your audience that you know their daily struggles and have a solution for them. Relatability is key to connecting with your audience and to creating a story that your audience can understand.
Empathize Possibilities and Potential
Show your audience what their life could be like or would look like with your help. Use your characters and hero in the stories to feature your audience or customers. The more your viewers or readers can envision themselves as someone in your story, the more likely they will become loyal customers and fans.
Be Inspirational and Motivational
Remember, you don’t want to manipulate or control your audience. Use inspiration and motivational terms with a language they can understand to connect better and encourage your audience to believe in themselves and their current values.
Be Ethical, Emotional, and Logical
Keep your story logical, and don’t fabricate material to lead your audience down the wrong idea. Remember, even if it makes a cool or unique story, you don’t want to end up misleading them. There are ways to be creative without using manipulation.
In the end, to harness the power of persuasion is to be influential, to guide or inspire someone to continue with their current believes and ideas. It’s the opposite of deceit. It’s about ensuring you share a story with your real target audience that strengthens your brand and ensures that your present and future are equally successful.
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