My husband and I were wandering around New York City for ThrillerFest—and we were starving.
We’d been meandering through the streets for hours, as we tend to do in cities, and we hadn’t brought any snacks. We were in luck, though—because if you throw a rock from literally any street corner in NYC, you can hit a place selling pizza by the slice.
Pizza? In a convenient delivery method? Cheap?
Talk about a no-brainer sale.
When you’re selling something tangible—like pizza—you don’t need to work so hard to convince people they need your product. If someone’s hungry and they walk past your counter of delicious-looking pies, they’ll probably grab a slice. You don’t need to write a sweeping narrative about mozzarella’s journey from farm to oven.
But if you’re a mindset coach? A burnout recovery specialist? A financial advisor for creatives? A team lead trying to get buy-in for a new project? Or, honestly, anyone selling something kinda intangible?
Storytelling can be one of your most powerful assets.
Your potential customer isn’t walking around with a hunger for your exact offer. They’re walking around with a problem, a frustration, or maybe even just a vague sense that something could be better. Your offer is the path to the promised land.
Whenever I am hungry, pizza is the promised land. I know I’m hungry, and I know pizza is a delicious and quick way to fix that problem.
But your customer might not know the promised land exists, so they’re certainly not looking for it.
They might not even realize their problem exists.
This is where stories come in.
Stories are how you paint a picture of the promised land for your customer. How you build that bridge between what’s possible, and where your potential customer is right now. And how you let them know that you’r solution is the best way to get there.
Stories aren’t just for novelists. They’re for you:
- The business owner trying to connect.
- The coach whose biggest asset is a transformation that’s hard to photograph.
- The nonprofit leader or activist who’s trying to make change.
Because yes. You can tell me your system will help me be more productive and free up time in my business. You can tell me that your average student saves X number of hours per week.
But that doesn’t stick.
(And, honestly, I’m probably not going to believe you.)
What sticks—and what I will believe—is the story of the single mom-slash-entrepreneur who took your course and built a system that finally allowed her to put her phone on Do Not Disturb while watching her kids play at the playground, so she didn’t have to miss another moment of her kids growing up.
That’s real. That’s sticky.
So—who needs to tell stories? You do.
If you’re selling a service, offering a transformation, building a movement, or trying to make a change story is your most powerful tool. And not just any story. Specific stories. Grounded in real people, real moments, real transformation.
Your audience needs more than bullet points. They need to feel something, and story is how we get there.
Stories are for websites, emails, reels—anywhere and everywhere
I come from the B2B (business-to-business) content marketing world, where stories are mainly for about pages and case studies.
But since I’m also a fiction writer, I’ve always tried to shoehorn a story or two in any piece of content that I write for clients.
It’s a compulsion. :)
Because here’s the thing: story isn’t just a decorative garnish you sprinkle on your website and in the occasional newsletter. The stories you tell about your business form the connective tissue that holds your brand together.
That’s why we’re going to spend some time this week talking not just about why story matters, but about where and how to actually use stories in your business.
Let’s start with the “where.” Here’s just a short list of places you can use storytelling:
- On your website (yes, including your About page, but also on sales pages and service descriptions)
- In your email newsletter
- On social media (especially platforms like Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, or X)
- In case studies and client success stories
- In sales calls or presentations
- At networking events
- In your book
- During webinars and speeches
- On your podcast or as a guest on someone else’s
Basically: anywhere you need to connect with a human being, you can use a story.
The mistake I see most people make is thinking storytelling is only for “big” moments. But the stories that connect most aren’t grandiose hero’s journeys. They’re everyday moments. The small sparks of transformation. The funny client mix-up. The time you learned something the hard way.
Here’s the good news: if you have a daily story-finding practice, you’ll be sitting on a goldmine of material in no time. It’s all raw story data.
That story of the frustrating client call? Use it in a future email. That time you nearly burned out from saying yes to too many projects? Turn it into a reel or a LinkedIn post about boundaries. That time a customer tracked you down at a conference to tell you their rave review? Put it on a sales page.
Not every story you collect during the challenge is going to be a good one. Not all the good stories are going to be good selling stories—and we will talk about what makes a good selling story later this week.
But you’re gonna find some gems.
And the cool thing is that you don’t need that many of them to really transform how you use storytelling in your business.
A good story is like a Swiss Army knife.
It’s adaptable. You can tell the same core story in a bunch of different ways, for different platforms.
- Break it up into an Instagram carousel
- Expand it into a case study on your site
- Use the “before” moment in a sales email
- Share the “after” moment in a webinar
- Pull a quote and turn it into a testimonial
One good story can carry you through multiple pieces of content if you get strategic about how you tell it.
What if every time you sat down to write an email, or a social post, or a website update, you asked yourself: “What story would help bring this to life?”
You might find that marketing gets a whole lot easier.
Let’s be real
Okay, so maybe you’re thinking by now: “Yeah, Jessie. I get that stories are powerful. But… what if I don’t have any good ones? Can I just make something up?”
I get the temptation. You want to sound impactful and impressive. Maybe even a little magical.
Wouldn’t it be easier to craft the perfect little fictional story that lands just right?
After all, allegories are great teaching tools. There’s a reason we still quote Aesop’s fables and Jesus’ parables. There’s a whole genre of business books that work entirely on metaphor, like The Go-Giver and Who Moved My Cheese.
But here’s the thing: you don’t need to make anything up.
Your real life is already full of stories that connect, inspire, and convert.
We just need to find them, and learn how to craft them into delightfully powerful little magic sparks of energy.
Let me clarify. I’m not saying fictional storytelling doesn’t have its place. I’m literally a fiction author—I know the power of a good story! But fully made-up stories feel…off.
If they’re clearly allegorical, they can come off as old-fashioned. They’ve got that whiff of old-timey white guy self help Old Spice cologne.
If they’re fiction being passed off as real (“This totally happened to me at the coffee shop last Thursday!”), they can come off as overly polished. Everyone’s looking out for that eau de Axe body spray that comes from relying on ChatGPT to write your stories.
Whether you’re using parables or making up anecdotes out of whole cloth, buyers these days can catch those whiffs of inauthenticity a mile away.
Definitely not what you want perfuming your content marketing.
Even if no one’s going to fact check your anecdote, your audience will sense the “off” notes in your tone. And once that trust is cracked, it’s awfully hard to rebuild.
Authenticity just feels different. It’s raw. It’s real. And that’s what people connect with.
So let’s talk about telling real, true stories.
Here’s my challenge to you today:
- What if the stories you’re already living were the most powerful ones you could tell?
- What if you stopped worrying about “being a good writer” and just focused on being honest?
- What if you trusted that the story of your messy, beautiful, behind-the-scenes work was the exact thing your audience needed to hear?
Don’t worry if your stories aren’t perfect, and definitely don’t write them off in favor of fiction. People love seeing behind the curtain. They love real. They trust it. They feel it.
The feel you.
And that’s what gets them to stick around.