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What gets your interest? Great stories. How do you find them? By having conversations with your clients and customers.

Think about it. What stands out for you when you read or view – or even hear – a story? It doesn’t matter if it’s online or on paper, on a website or TV or even on a podcast or broadcast. The good story gets your attention and inspires an action. When you bring that inspiration to your content, you have set the table for doing business with an existing client or customer or having a meaningful conversation with a prospect.

Getting the really good story goes beyond all the technology tools that come to mind. Sure, you can get data from a host of web analytics applications and online surveys. A few good quotes from happy customers and clients, based on a series of standardized questions, can raise the volume of your data by a notch or two. But they’re guides for developing the continuing dialogue you need to have with your star clients and customers.

Your ongoing dialogues will help you understand the pain points that each client or customer had. You likely learned about those pain points as you moved through the sales process. When you talked on the phone, you could hear the intensity of the pain and feel the frustration of not having the remedy for it. When you visited their place of business or sat across the table for coffee or lunch, you could see the frustration in their faces. When you worked through your solution and made it part of their business, you could see the hope you inspired. Finally, after they evaluated your solution and quantified the benefits, you could share their sense of accomplishment and what your solution meant to them for being able to take the next step on their journey.

You can only capture the emotions that make up the good stories by talking to people. Pick up the phone on a regular basis and pay a visit whenever you can. It’s through those conversations that you’ll strike the emotions and learn about those little things that make a good story compelling. When you do that, you’ll mine the stories that will matter most to your core fans – the prospects and customers you need to find and retain. When you share them, you’ll share the emotions that drive those stories – and that’s what people will love to read, watch, or listen to.

As you read this, dozens of good stories are coming to mind, and you’re starting to think about how you’ll pry them out and tell them. This is where NicheLabs can help.

As a full-service marketing agency, we have the resources to help you identify good stories, tell them and spread them through your website, digital marketing, social media, public relations and advertising across all platforms. And, of course, our analytics can help you fine-tune your messages within your great stories to maximize the effectiveness of your program. We invite you to contact us at 888-978-9254, or by sending us an email using our website contact form to tell us about your needs. Then, we want to have a conversation with you about telling your engaging stories. We love to talk about marketing, best practices for SEO programs, brand messaging and content strategy.