7 Storytelling Best Practices for Business
We’ve all heard about how storytelling is extremely important for businesses. But have we ever heard about how to actively implement it? Aside, of course, from the usual “tell the story of your company in an engaging way”.
Many people think that the ability to tell a story is a gift given to a few of us. Well, they’re wrong. Stories are something innate in all of us. There are best practices for storytelling, making it a skill that develops with practice. And we have enough material to practice as our lives are full of stories.
Let me assure you, there's much more to a story than just telling it. The structure, organization, and clarity of a story also matter. This is not just about telling, it’s about knowing what to include, what to communicate, what to explain, and to know what’s important.
Yes — rejoice — storytelling has a trick to it. So whether you're a business person, copywriter, marketer, or ended up here for God knows what reason, this blog post is going to be an eye-opener.
But, let’s start with a little introduction.
Why Is Storytelling so Powerful In Marketing? (Or Life in General)
The short answer is that stories are about emotion.
The long, and more well-explained, one is that stories stimulate us. The stimuli we have when we hear a story is to start to empathize with the main character. We unconsciously put ourselves in their place and we wonder what we would do if that were the case. We’re involved in the story and we feel it as if it was ours.
That’s why the most powerful stories are those that make you feel emotion. And there’s something that none of us likes to admit (guilty), but at the end of the day, we’re more emotional than we think.
Look at the case of the viral video Save Ralph from the Humane Society International. This video went viral since its release in April 2021, and was widely shared on social media with more than 13M views on Youtube as of today.
When I watched this short video — of little less than four minutes — I immediately donated to the cause. The storytelling was powerful, the main character was empathetic, and we could relate to the situation as it’s a reality for most popular brands we use. This video was powerful because it incited me, and thousands of other people, to act.
Now, onto the main topic.
Storytelling Best Practices
Before we start with these, I need you to think that when you write you’re actually talking to someone. Yes, I know it’s the oldest advice, but it still works. So, let’s just say when you write you have to picture your audience in your head. You can even go to the lengths of imagining their reactions or comments — it works.
#1. Start Your Story With a Hook
The first step to getting somebody to read a blog post, open an email, or click on something is by catching their attention.
The purpose of the hook is to get the attention of your audience so that they want to know more about what you offer. Here are some examples of my favorite hooks from the book Breakthrough Copywriting by David Garfinkel:
A story always begins by introducing curiosity, desire, or even anger. And it works just as well for marketing tactics. You hook your audience’s interest by hitting their pain points or educating them about a problem.
#2. Talk to People Not Robots
This isn’t just about “writing as you talk” or “writing in a conversational way”. It’s also about how you engage with your audience.
It’s true you have to set a tone and a style that is, most of the time, friendly and ready to help. But you should also put yourself in your audience’s shoes when you’re offering or asking for something.
Once, I got an email from a guy that said something like this:
“Just wanted to know if you needed help with your images”
That was it. No introduction. No portfolio. No website to look at. And cold… a very cold email that was not clear enough. But let’s say the email was different and turned out like this:
“Hi, Jessica!
My name is Elliot and I’m a graphic designer.
I’ve been looking at your website and noticed you use images from free resources. As I know your brand is all about high-quality copy, I wanted to reach out and offer my help.
I can design personalized images for your brand, so they stand out from the crowd and catch your audience’s interest. You can look at some of my previous work at my website elliotdesigner.com or you can email me back to get some samples.
Looking forward to hearing from you,
Elliot”
Now, that’s how you address someone. It was to the point, but it also was friendly and ready to help. Most of us, even if we were not interested in hiring a designer, would’ve gone to the website out of curiosity. Have a pick of what this person was capable of. And by scrolling through the website, some of us would've liked what we saw, and probably sent an email back.
#3. Data Should Be Easy to Understand
I remember when I was in college, doing my thesis, we had to do presentations about why our problem was important. And why it was vital to solving it.
Most of the presentations were the same. One student would come upfront, explain what company they were working with, the problem, and then just throw some data around it. “The machine loses 36.53% of the raw material”, “43.67% of the time is lost” and “26.78% is waste”.
Well… all that meant nothing. There was no grasp of reality to that. Of course, no one was impressed, those were just numbers, and so, knowing why this problem was important to solve, fell behind.
However, there was this one group. They started the presentation and said, “This company has a waste of metal of 45%”. And just when I thought it was going to be the same kind of presentation as the last ones, they continued into the other slide and said “This quantity of metal equals three times the Eiffel Tower”.
Not a second passed after he finished that phrase and every person in the room was interested in the project. The moral here is to bring your data to reality.
“Half of the candidates” works better than “55% of candidates”
“Eight out of ten experts” slays “23 million people”
“3 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower” beats “35,000 tons”
Make your data easy to understand.
#4. Don’t Make Stories So Long That They’re Boring
I’m going to make a confession here. I don’t like long series. I hate them. I feel like the media just wants to get more money out of it, so they take advantage of the hype and squeeze season after season. That until it becomes a boring series, we all had too much of, and the love you felt for it in the first season disappears in the seventh.
Yes, I’m personally attacking Netflix...
You have to know when to finish a story. In cases where you’re in a sales environment, the story must be there to help explain something, give your audience a little rest, or even go more in-depth on the topic. But the story shouldn’t be all that it is in the presentation or blog post.
My advice on this is that the story must have a goal, and once this goal is achieved, it should end. Stories aren't there to fill a hole or to make up more time. If your story helped:
Your audience understands something
You moving onto the next point
Catch your audience's attention
Make a point
FINISH IT OFF
#5. Don’t Be So Detailed, It’s Okay to Say a White Lie
In order to entertain it’s okay to lie… a little.
There are some facts that don’t matter when telling a story.
I have a Cuban friend that’s always full of stories, and I love it. But sometimes she stops in the middle of “Roberto didn’t answer his phone since morning, and we thought something might’ve happened to him. We’re in Vegas after all, but then…” and starts to think. She stops because she doesn’t remember exactly at what time the next event of the story took place. She could’ve said the afternoon, but she wanted to say it was at 4:35 p.m.
(Just to ease your mind, Roberto was fine, he just had his phone muted while playing some slots)
When telling a story, get to the point without sacrificing important truths, but also without going into much detail. There’s a fine line between these two.
The rule of thumb is: if it doesn’t change the meaning of the story, it doesn’t hurt anyone or it's not lying about important data, it’s okay to say you valiantly saved your neighbors’ Thanksgiving dinner by giving them one of your pumpkin pies.
P.S. Sheila, if you read this, know that I love your stories nonetheless.
#6. Spread Empathy
When you tell a story try to make the character empathetic. And by that, I mean give your audience the chance of relating to that character by adding similarities. We all, without realizing it, put ourselves in the shoes of characters we can relate to. We’re at their wins, loses, and decisions to make.
I have a friend who lives in Paris. He tells me his daily life as if it was a novel, introducing engagement and anticipation by mixing narrative with feelings. Oh, and he also uses the word “you’’ a lot. He puts you in the scenery and talks about the story as if you were in it. He walks you through the events that took place that day with ease, and when he reaches the climax and asks you for advice, you realize you’ve been talking to him for an hour.
Yes, he’s a good storyteller because he makes his story about you. And we all like to talk about ourselves. So if you have a character in your story, try to make that character empathetic and relatable. My pro tip for this is to have a clear persona of who your audience is.
#7. Put Stories in Between
If you’ve read technical documents or have been to conferences, you know how it feels when you’re thrown a lot of information with no breaks. This is where the importance of storytelling becomes palpable. A story is a glue that you put between segments of a talk or sections of a blog post.
What for?
To give your audience a little break, to re-engage, and to explain something in an out-of-business approach. And here comes one.
When I was in college, there was this mandatory writing class that we, engineers in the making, had to take. A lot of my colleagues were pulling their hair in frustration as writing was not their thing. One of the assignments at that time was to write an article, explaining a subject from our career, to an audience of either children, teens, or old people.
My friend, a civil engineer in the making, told me to give his article about bridge construction to my little 12-year-old sister. I didn’t question him, but I was taken aback by his choice.
My sister loved it. The article was easy to read and even though it had technical stuff, my friend softened it with breaks to incorporate stories. Stories about the most important bridges in the world that had the structures he was describing.
There's no need to say that I never doubted him again and I just started to learn from him.
The End
I strongly believe that a story can get you anywhere. And I think a good company or copywriter knows how to tell a story. Marketing shouldn’t be about lists of features that mean nothing, it should be about stories that explain how that feature helps you reach a benefit.
Think about marketing this way, your character is your ideal client. The problem you’re trying to solve for them is a challenge in the story. And how you solve this problem is the story you have to tell.
And lucky you! Anyone can tell a good story, even in the business ambit.
Do you have a story you want to share with any of these practices? Or Anecdote? I’d love to hear. Comment below and tell me.