The Art of Storytelling in Copywriting

The art of storytelling when it comes to copywriting is powerful.

Storytelling, when used in marketing and advertising, is a technique that is predominantly concerned with a particular narrative you wish to tell about your brand. Its aim is to invoke feelings and create loyalty between a business and its customers. It humanises your brand.

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business found that when people listened to business pitches, they overwhelmingly connected more with those who shared stories. For those who pitched facts and figures, only 5% of listeners recalled the statistics shared but 63% remembered the stories.

Storytelling is everywhere and the big brands use it. When the Covid pandemic shut down air travel, many airlines suffered huge financial losses. Once travel picked up again, it was imperative that airlines found a way to launch back into business. In 2022 Qantas created a very successful campaign that went viral (every marketer’s dream!) because they used storytelling well.

They released a video with beautiful cinematographic scenes of Australia to the soundtrack of Peter Allen’s ‘I Still Call Australia Home.’ There were plenty of Aussie celebs featured throughout but the scene that got most viewers (including my sister and I!) was the Grandma reuniting with her daughter in the airport, meeting her granddaughter for the first time. Oh, my heart! My sister and I were separated over Covid by 9,000 miles (she was in Edinburgh, Scotland and I was in Perth, Australia) and both of us gave birth to babies during this time. We sent each other the Qantas ad on Whatsapp (followed by plenty of crying emojis) and like so many other people around the world, we were longing for that moment to be reunited at an airport terminal somewhere. Had our bank accounts reflected as such, we would have given Qantas all our dollars right then and there.

That, my friends, is the power of great storytelling.

Check out the Qantas ad below.

Storytelling opens up the creative can o’ worms. You can use any creative angle as long as there is structure and purpose to the story you wish to tell. If copywriting is all about persuasion and drawing people in to then convert them into customers, storytelling is a powerful technique to not only capture their attention but connect them to your brand on an emotional level.

I personally believe that every aspect of your business from the messages you share online, the products and services you sell (and why), to every step of the customer journey, tell a story about your brand. Your messaging should be consistent whether they’re reading a post on your socials or unboxing a package sent to them in the mail.

I love using storytelling as a copywriting technique. It’s mah jam.

If you need assistance telling your brand’s story, I’d love to write it for you. Get in touch with me on my contact page.