What is business storytelling?

Storytelling in business is a strategic way to share targeted information in a creative, memorable narrative format. It’s an alternative to traditional marketing or advertising methods. You’re telling an emotional story related to your business rather than throwing facts, figures or hard sales pitches at your target audience. Unlike telling a funny story to a friend to entertain them, business storytelling has a specific goal, which could be to encourage sales, gain customer trust, grow client loyalty or improve brand image. 

Why you need storytelling in business

By incorporating narratives into your marketing strategy, you can connect to people in new ways. Using storytelling for business purposes has a number of benefits, including:

• Establishing emotional connections: Customers often feel more drawn to stories than sales pitches, marketing emails or other overtly promotional methods. Stories can grab their attention, encouraging them to listen to your message instead of tuning out.

• Giving you a competitive advantage: If other companies in your niche aren’t using business storytelling, you can set yourself apart. Even if others use similar strategies, your stories are unique to your organization, which can help you stand out. 

• Clarifying concepts: Telling stories can help prospective customers better understand your businesses, the services you offer or complex situations you might address. It gives them real-life examples of your solutions in action.

• Shaping behaviors: Stories can persuade customers and grow brand loyalty by helping people feel connected to your organization.

• Making your business memorable: Hearing a creative story is a memorable experience. Your audience might be more likely to remember the emotions and general plot of a story than facts and figures. 

• Fostering a sense of community: Shared narratives can help unite people from different backgrounds and with varying experiences. For instance, an underdog story in your marketing can encourage people to rally together to root for the underdog.

• Driving improved employee outcomes: Storytelling in business helps convey your company vision, beliefs and goals so current and prospective employees know what to expect. You might share stories about people who exhibit the behaviors you expect from your team and encourage them to adopt those behaviors.

Types of stories to use

Your company’s stories should be as unique as the organization itself, but these themes can help you grab the reader’s attention:

• Challenge: With this strategy, you show how someone faced a challenge and overcame it. Also referred to as the hero’s journey, this type of story follows the mission of the hero, who powers through a challenge. 

• Underdog: The underdog story can take a similar approach. In this option, someone starts out appearing to have little chance for success. However, by the end, they’re victorious. 

• Customer: Focusing on a customer’s story shows a real-life case of how your product or service helped someone. 

• Teaching: This type of story focuses on someone learning a concept related to your business. 

• Pivot: Show your audience that you’re flexible and adaptable with a pivot story, which shows how your company changed directions to improve or better serve customers.

• Values: Telling a story that demonstrates your company’s values can be effective if you’re trying to influence your employees. Incorporate a character who embodies company values to emphasize them to your team. 

Characteristics of effective business storytelling

Stories are more relatable and effective when they have these characteristics:

• Authenticity: While you can get creative in your business storytelling, keep it honest and authentic to build trust with customers. Your stories should be sincere and align with your company’s values.

• Emotions: It’s important to appeal to emotions to create a stronger connection with your audience. 

• Depth: Corporate stories should be clear and easy to follow, but they also need depth to form a strong connection. Being too superficial could cause people to dismiss the story or forget about it quickly.

• Motivation: A skilled business storyteller can inspire and motivate others. When working with employees, make those around you feel empowered and inspired. For example, you can shift the mindsets of your team members by sharing stories that help them understand what they’re capable of accomplishing.

• Branding: Branding creates a story that builds a positive reputation. Companies can use stories for branding within their advertising efforts as well as for human resources purposes.

• Structure: Effective business stories make sense and have a structure that’s easy to follow. 

• Language: Casual, conversational language helps you relate to potential customers better than stuffy, formal language. Use phrasing that helps express your company’s personality while making it easy to understand. 

• Context: Readers or listeners need context to the story for it to make sense. Without it, they’ll likely tune out quickly and never hear the heart of the story. 

• Hook: You need to appeal to your audience immediately to keep them from moving on to something else. Start with a startling, unique or bold hook to pique interest.

• Action: Effective stories have drama or action in the middle. This keeps people interested because they want to know how the situation will be resolved.

• Resolution: Don’t let the story fizzle out at the end without a clear resolution. Business storytelling is most effective when you have a stand-out conclusion.

How to use business storytelling

If you’re ready to incorporate storytelling for business, the following steps can guide the process.

1. Identify your storytelling purpose

Knowing your objectives helps you build a story that fulfills those needs. The story you tell and how you tell it depend largely on what you want the customer to do after they hear it. What feelings do you want them to have and how do you want them to react? Starting with clear goals and objectives also makes it easier to evaluate your storytelling campaigns to determine if they’re working. 

2. Define your target audience

People connect to your story when it’s relatable to them. Spend time clarifying who your target audience is to tailor the narrative to their pain points. Understanding what they want and need can help you choose a story that speaks to them. It can also help you bring that story to life in a way that’s valuable to those people. 

3. Choose your core message

Based on the purpose and audience, define the core message of your story. This central idea helps shape the narrative. All the details of the story should help support that message. 

4. Create the framework for the story

Building an outline for your story ensures you have a solid structure. Outline the hook, action and resolution. These elements should support your core message and create the framework for additional details.

5. Fill in the details

Add the emotional aspect of business storytelling by filling in the details. Use language that evokes the feelings and actions you want from the people hearing the story. The details should also build and express your company’s branding. 

6. Practice telling your story

Writing the story is only the start of the process. You also need to tell the story well to build connections. Rehearse your story before you make an appearance or present it to a group to ensure you hit the right emotions. Recording yourself while you practice or getting feedback from a colleague can help you improve your presentation skills. 

7. Share the story

Now all that’s left is to let others hear your story. Choose the various ways you’ll tell your business story to others. Modify the format slightly for different platforms. For instance, you might record an audio version that you can play repeatedly. Adding background music or sound effects amplifies the story. If you’re posting it on your blog, you might include infographics or other types of design work to add visual elements.

Tips for making business storytelling effective

The more you use storytelling for business promotions, the better you’ll become at it. These tips can help you accelerate your progress toward becoming an effective storyteller:

• Make it a team effort: Storytelling doesn’t have to come from your company’s C-suite executives. Employees from different levels and departments have unique perspectives that can strengthen business storytelling. 

• Focus on the story, not the product: Though telling a story is a way to gain customers, it should be more subtle than a hard sell. Emphasizing your product too much can make the story feel insincere. With a compelling story, you can inspire your audience to try your product without pushing it on them. 

• Incorporate visuals: Adding images or graphics to your story can help drive home the point. You can also help people visualize the story by being descriptive with your language. 

• Offer value: The stories you tell should offer value to the people who hear them. This could be gaining knowledge that helps them with a pain point, for instance. By offering value, you make your audience feel like it was worth their time to listen. 

FAQs about business storytelling

What is a business storytelling strategy?

A business storytelling strategy helps you translate your marketing message into a narrative. Your strategy helps you craft a story that will resonate with your audience. It guides what you should include in your story to guide the journey while having the desired effect.

How can you develop storytelling skills?

Becoming a master at business storytelling takes practice. Include the important elements of the story while adding your distinct voice and twist to it. Get feedback to evaluate the effectiveness of your stories, and use that feedback to help you grow. Track metrics based on your storytelling campaigns to see if they’re compelling enough to encourage customers to take the desired actions.

Where do you share your company’s stories?

Part of your strategy for storytelling in business is knowing when, where and how to share your narratives. You can incorporate the stories into several formats, including your social media channels and advertising methods. They might fit into your media appearances or press releases, or you can share them on your company blog. For stories that target employees, consider sharing them as part of training programs, meetings or internal communications.