Business Storytelling: Crafting a Narrative Likely to Convert
Business storytelling involves shaping a brand’s messaging into a compelling narrative that both captures customer interest and communicates a company’s unique selling points. If done effectively, business storytelling can be a powerful and organic tool to attract press and influencer attention, captivate customers, drive sales, and increase brand loyalty.
But successful business storytelling requires more thought and craft than a simple rehashing of your mission statement and ”About Us” page. In this article, I’ll talk about three key elements to crafting an engaging business narrative that stands out from the content marketing crowd and sparks connections that put your brand on the road to conversion.
Business storytelling should elevate the company’s unique selling point to the big picture
At its core, business storytelling aims to provide the customer a clear and memorable account of a brand’s mission, strengths, and unique value to that customer. The goal is for all occasions of brand messaging to support an overarching story: the cohesive narrative that efficiently and compellingly communicates the big picture of what your company has to offer.
Humans are narrative creatures: we see stories everywhere. In ancient times, people told fantastical stories about the feuds and escapades of divine beings as a way of explaining the world around them. But a story does not have to be fantastical or epic to be engaging: what makes storytelling compelling is the way it makes connections between events and thereby helps us make meaning. Consider the difference between the following two sentences, used by British writer E.M. Forster as an example of how to elevate the most basic form of story to the most complex and engaging level of narrative “plot”:
The king died and then the queen died.
The king died and then the queen died of grief.
The first sentence describes two simple, if unfortunate, events. The second sentence, by including a simple detail about causality, suggests the existence of a far larger and more complex set of events and relationships — a bigger picture that we want to hear more about.
In business storytelling, the features that make your company unique—your mission, strengths, comparative advantages, expertise—are all elements that contribute to the big picture you’re trying to get your customer to see: your unique selling point. Cultivating messaging that treats these features as individual stories that contribute to your brand’s ongoing narrative arc—rather than isolated pieces of data —gives your customers a framework for seeing this bigger picture and puts them on the road to conversion.
To understand the importance of elevating storytelling to the big picture, consider a cloud computing company that helps companies increase information processing power. It will come as no surprise that increasing information processing power does not exactly jump off the page or dazzle the minds of the masses (the wide audience, including but not limited to technologists, in the market for this company’s products). The cloud business would do well to sell not just efficiency but a broader narrative such as the future of computing. This narrative is more likely to entice a broad swath of customers, not to mention the influencers, such as reporters, who organically elevate brands.
Align messaging with your mission and the customer’s needs
Characters are essential to any story. Characters, e.g. individuals, are the ones who drive action, have aspirations, encounter struggles, and dare we hope, overcome those struggles to find a happy ending. Characters lend shape and meaning to action: they give the audience of the story someone specific to identify with, to cheer for, or to oppose.
Business storytelling too should involve characters: executives, representatives, rivals, investors, customers. Messaging that has identifiable players, stakeholders, and beneficiaries makes for its listeners—e.g., your prospective customers—a more compelling story with a clearer message. Compare the following two statements:
“We grew 80% last quarter.”
“We're bringing clients into the future of computing—and saving them millions of dollars in the process—by transitioning them to cloud infrastructure."
The first appears a pretty straightforward statement of fact: growth has occurred, which we can presume to be positive. But growth for whom? Why should we—the “we” reading or listening—care? By contrast, the second sentence answers all of these questions and more: it not only describes in multiple, concrete ways the goals and mission of the brand, but also addresses these goals to “us,” the clients who stand to benefit from these endeavors.
Successful business storytelling is fundamentally “character”-driven, then, in that compelling and cohesive messaging should always be oriented toward two key elements: your company’s mission and your customer’s needs.
Business storytelling should focus on specific audiences
Any storyteller who knows their craft can tell you that no story stays exactly the same with each telling. In fact, the mark of a good storyteller is knowing how to adapt a tale to the particular context in which it is being told and the audience it addresses. You wouldn’t tell the story of your senior-year Spring Break in Miami the same way to your grandmother as you would to your best friend, would you?
The same practice applies in business storytelling. While the core fundamentals of your big-picture narrative—mission + unique selling point + customer interest—remain constant, the details you present and how you communicate them should be tailored based on three specific factors:
Your imagined audience: How does this particular narrative resonate with the audience you’re trying to address with a given piece of content? Are you speaking to customers, investors, or partners? What about journalists and influencers? Whose needs could the story address?
The platform where you will reach this audience: Will this story be released as a video interview, or would it shine best as a long-form article? How can it be compellingly condensed and repurposed for social channels?
The goal of your messaging: Are you trying to inform or spark the imagination? To drive awareness of an industry problem? Or to boost consideration of your brand specifically?
How you answer these questions should inform the particular narrative strategy you employ in telling your business particular story, and in what particular way: Different platforms require changes in your messaging’s form and tone. Audience diversity involves anticipating a range of different questions, concerns, and interests—not to mention flexibility in the degree of industry jargon deployed.
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Business storytelling strives to craft a cohesive and engaging narrative from a brand’s messaging. A successful business narrative communicates a company’s core principles, strengths, and unique value to its primary stakeholders clearly while elevating that value to the big picture, ascending beyond the minute details.
Crafting a successful story requires attunement to the specificity of a brand’s particular contributions as well as the diversity of its audience and the context in which each individual story is told. When undertaken successfully, business storytelling not only reaches but influences its audience, laying the path toward connection and ultimately conversion.
