Storytelling Archive - Page 4 of 14 - The Art of Communicating

Marketing stories that work

A great product solves a problem, resolves a struggle, or fulfills a desire.

It tastes delicious without me having to cook. It sounds awesome while being affordable. It’s efficient, sustainable, stylish. It gives me a feeling of mastery or pure joy. Or whatever it is for your product.

Great products transform me into a better person. One who eats healthier, takes better photos, works with more focus, or makes better decisions.

Essentially, it gets me from point A where I still have that struggle to point B where my struggle is resolved.

It’s that transformation that great marketing stories capture. They give us the feeling of being seen with our struggle and they light us the path to a better future where that struggle is resolved.

Marketing stories work when the struggle is real and the path to the future is accessible.

They keep working when the product delivers on the promise.

The complete picture

Many communicators struggle with the challenge to convey a complete picture of their topic to their audience. After all, it’s quite a complex topic to understand if you care for the details. Also, your product is a masterpiece of craftsmanship.

Yet, the actual challenge might be much simpler than that.

Because effectively, all you need to do is to tell me one thing that makes me curious to hear the next thing.

When you’ve achieved that, all you need to do is to tell me one more thing that makes me curious to hear the third thing.

Step by step.

When you do this repeatedly, eventually you’ll have told me everything but it doesn’t feel nearly as tedious as we’re used to from the usual approach to communicating.

When you want me to understand the complete picture of your idea, the challenge is not to tell me everything.

The challenge is to figure out what’s the one thing that makes me want to know more.

If you want me to get the complete picture, get me to want the complete picture. A much simpler approach. And much more related to what matters to your audience rather than to yourself.

Avoiding your audience’s autopilot

Our audiences have a lot of bad (or good?) habits that affect us.

When they read a boring headline, the scroll-further habit kicks in.

When they see a PowerPoint deck, the boring-PowerPoint-lets-check-Instagram habit kicks in.

When they read a generic first paragraph of a blog post, the this-is-irrelevant-lets-just-skim-over-it habit kicks in (or maybe even the lets-check-my-phone-and-get-lost-in-social-media-instead routine).

Habits are a big deal because they take over our audience’s brains (more or less) automatically. Once someone experiences a trigger (e.g. the boring headline), the habit kicks in.

The most effective way to avoid this behaviour is to avoid the trigger. And that’s why it matters to a) find trust in your own voice and b) understand what matters to your audience.

If you speak about what matters to your audience in your own distinctive voice, the just-like-everything-else trigger doesn’t fire and so your audience’s attention remains with you.

Speaking up on their behalf

When Simon Sinek or Brené Brown tweet a sentence, it gets them 1000 likes and 100 retweets in a matter of minutes.

When you (or I) tweet the same sentence, it doesn’t work that way.

So, why do people love these words when Sinek or Brown say them but not when you do?

Because you’re a stranger while Sinek and Brown are not. In fact, for many in their audience they are heroes. And as such, they speak up on behalf of their audience. They say out loud their audience’s thoughts.

The appeal of their tweets is not that their audience agrees with the celebrity but the other way around. For the audience, it feels like their hero agrees with them.

And this is why it matters whether you’re a stranger or not. Because nobody cares for when a stranger agrees with them. They don’t know you and so you haven’t earned the right to speak on their behalf.

It’s been the same for the celebrity when she wasn’t famous, yet.

The safest way to earn the right to speak on their behalf is consistency. Show up consistently, speak the truth consistently, capturing your audience’s thoughts consistently. And have a little patience.

Is it a product?

Is it a product? Or a bunch of features?

Can you say why it exists without saying how it does what it does?

Can your customers?

For great products, the features are there for a reason. They serve a cause. That cause sparks a story and that story can be told and retold.

For bad products it’s the other way around. The features are the reason the product exists. There is no clear and concise cause and therefore, there is no simple story to tell.

This is usually the point at which a marketing agency is hired to come up with a story. Which they do. And it might be a good story. Or it might not. In which case, it becomes really hard to sell the product.

I’d suggest starting with the cause so the story is built into your product. It simplifies the whole marketing.

So incredibly powerful when she says it

“It sounds so incredibly powerful when she says it.”

Just wow.

But why is it that the same thought that you’ve thought a thousand times suddenly becomes powerful when you hear it ushered out of the celebrity’s mouth?

Because it’s immediately turned into a story. It gets filled with all the things that she’s achieved and said before. She embodies it and so you fill out all the missing pieces. When she says it, it becomes a profound truth that has enabled her path.

The crucial bit, though, is that when we experience a story it’s the hero we look at but it’s us who we see. We project ourselves onto the hero’s canvas.

Hearing the hero say out loud your thoughts brings you even closer. The incredible power of her saying out loud your thought is that it reassures you that you’re on the right track.

It’s not so much that you agree with her but that she agrees with you – which elevates you onto the hero’s podium. She’s picking up your thought. You’ve become the hero because the hero’s saying your thoughts and feelings.

That’s the power of lighting the path. Putting in words and saying out loud what your audience thinks and feels. It’s incredibly powerful.

Unexpected ground

A few years ago, I used Hemingway’s 6-word novel “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” in a keynote to illustrate a point about storytelling. What I didn’t know was that there was a man in the audience whose daughter had been born dead two weeks earlier.

It was an unforgettable reminder for me that people hear what we say in the context of their own experiences. Those experiences can be drastically different from our own.

We certainly can’t always foresee these experiences. Nor can we account for any possible experience someone might have had.

But it’s a good attitude to be sensitive to the possibility. And to be respectful when we recognise that our words have hit unexpected ground.

A fun game with stories

A fun game from impro theater is to tell a story in turns: Everyone’s allowed a single sentence. Then the other person continues, again only one sentence.

You’ll be amazed at how quickly a story can break down. Let’s look at an example.

You and your partner play this game. You might think of a story about a man proposing marriage to his girlfriend. But before you even begin, your partner has said the first sentence: “Alex is seeking revenge.”

Ok. Let’s adapt. You figure out the reason and continue: “Last summer, Casey had stolen his girlfriend.”

Your partner is unimpressed. She continues: “But that’s not the reason why he’s seeking revenge.”

Boom. Your story’s just broken down. Because your partner wouldn’t go along with it. She was stuck with her story.

Which is quite a common behaviour. Look around and you’ll see instances of people being stuck in the stories they’ve built everywhere (it’s true for ourselves at times). Worse, people are rather quick at constructing these stories. Many won’t even listen until the end of what you’re saying before starting to construct their own story.

And once they’ve built it, it’s hard to let it go.

As a communicator, there’s no use in complaining about that. Which leaves us basically two ways to deal with this.

First, we can insist on our story. Keep correcting their story. “No, that’s not what I mean.”
“No, that’s not how I mean it.”
“No, that’s not what I was trying to say.”

Or, we could start from our audience’s perspective. Try to understand which stories they construct; where these stories are coming from. What do we know about their struggles? About their lives? About their believes?

And attach to that. So that the stories we tell are more like the stories they tell. So that it’s easier for them to look at our story through their lens.

The magic of a great story

That brilliant keynote speech that told a story about climbing the Mount Everest and inspired you to finally start your company.

That fascinating book that told the life of a pianoman and inspired you to never give up.

Or that YouTube video that showed you how to capture beautiful pictures and inspired you to capture some yourself.

It’s the magic of a great story.

We look at the hero but we see ourselves.

It’s also the source of confusion in storytelling and why many marketers get it wrong. It’s not about you.

You might be telling a story about yourself. But you’re telling it on behalf of your audience. So that they can project themselves onto the canvas of your story. Learn from it. Change their path based on what they see.

That’s why they listen to our stories.

Start with WHAAAAAT?

When developing your story, it’s a good idea to start with why. But when delivering the story, it’s even better to start with “WHAAAAAT?” – with a question mark at the end.

What would irresistibly lead your audience into a WHAAAAAT?-moment? Something that makes them think “How is that even possible?”. Or “I can’t believe we never saw this, how did you discover it?” Or – if they are more of the cooler kind – just plainly: “That’s rather surprising. Tell me more!”

The WHAAAAAT?-moment is the reason that your audience is dying to know more. Because you’ve sparked their curiosity. You’ve hit the mark. Your intro is a promise that you’ve got something that’s really worth their time.

While others struggle with keeping their audience’s attention for even 2 minutes, your audience would riot if you stopped talking after your intro.

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