Strategic storytelling: how to effectively tell your business narrative
In the increasingly competitive B2B landscape, more and more organisations have realised the importance of communicating their business narrative as part of their thought leadership and PR efforts.
Sharing your brand’s mission and vision, its goals, origins and evolution can be extremely effective in deepening connections with customers and stakeholders. It can help your audience relate to your challenges, sympathise with your team, and wonder at your innovative solutions – in short, it can turn customers and stakeholders into brand advocates.
But to succeed in achieving all this, your brand narrative must be told strategically.
How can strategic storytelling help your business?
Hard facts and data have long been the domain of B2B marketing. However, there is increasing evidence that a compelling story can enhance the power of data, providing context and making information easier to understand and remember for the audience (1).
Storytelling also creates the perfect conditions for your customers to empathise with your brand and understand what you are trying to achieve as an organisation. By having a clear idea of your organisation’s path – where it started, how it’s evolved and where it’s heading – customers can feel part of your brand’s journey and identify as your supporters. This can breathe life into your marketing and create a genuine connection with your audience.
Telling your business narrative also gives you the opportunity to explain any past, present or future challenge in a way your audience can understand and relate to. Let’s say you just started your journey towards cutting your carbon emissions: what prevented you from starting earlier? Maybe outdated regulations didn’t allow you to access the incentives you needed, or maybe there was a talent gap in your team that you’ve struggled to overcome. Let your audience know: they may have experienced the very same problems.
Finally, storytelling can be an amazing tool to communicate business change, such as new processes, policies and ways of working. By telling the story of why these changes became necessary, how they’re going to be implemented, and what the desired results will be, it will be easier for stakeholders to understand business transformation and get on board with it.
What are the key elements of strategic storytelling?
There are some undeniable benefits to sharing your business narrative. But strategic storytelling, to be effective, has to be just that: strategic. This means you need to have a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve by telling your organisation’s story, and need to use different elements in a deliberate and thoughtful way to reach this result.
There are several narrative archetypes that can come in handy to articulate your business narrative in a compelling way, and you can find out more about them in my previous blog post on how to use storytelling to humanise your B2B brand.
But whatever narrative arc you decide to use, there are elements that underpin each and every good story.
The characters
Many B2B brands tend to focus solely on the products and solutions they provide. But what would the product be without the people who conceptualise, design, develop and integrate them? Storytelling is your chance to showcase your brilliant team, letting your audience know about their expertise, their consultancy skills and, why not, even their quirks. Yes, people love to hear about people, and highlighting your team members’ personalities, as well as their skills, helps build trust. You can meet our team here.
Bonus tip: don’t forget your secondary characters. There might be partners, suppliers, trade bodies or other organisations that helped your business along the way: this is your chance to acknowledge them.
The conflict or challenge
Open any newspaper and you will see that most news stories have any element in common: conflict. The drama of conflictual situations is what creates suspense and keeps the reader engaged. But in corporate storytelling, drama doesn’t necessarily need to have a negative connotation. For example, it can be about a challenge that has been successfully overcome, or someone who reached success from humble beginnings.
So, identify your business’ past, present and future challenges and use them to hook your readers and keep them interested. How did you solve them? Did they impact your success? And what did you learn from this experience? These are all things your readers might want to know, and they are much more appealing – and memorable – than a bunch of figures without context.
A challenge can also be the very reason the business was founded. For example, you might have developed your flagship energy management solution as a way to fight energy waste and help accelerate the net zero transition. Here, the element of urgency would contribute to creating interest and suspense: reaching net zero is a race against time, and the stakes of winning this race are extremely high.
The “enchanted weapon”
This is where your product or solution shines. To overcome their challenges, your audience needs the right tools – the ones your business developed, of course. Position your products and services as the solutions that your brilliant characters (your team) developed, or place the customer front and centre of your narrative and showcase how they can use your innovations to solve a problem. By identifying as the main character, your customers will understand that your products and services have been designed with their success in mind.
For example, businesses of all sizes are realising the potential of onsite energy generation, but the barriers to build their own energy systems are high, as lack of capital and expertise might impact projects. These are tough challenges to overcome, and businesses in all sectors might relate. But what if your business provided expert consultants, plus interest-free loans to make these projects accessible? These are just the weapons our decarbonisation heroes need.
The resolution
A satisfying way to conclude your business narrative is by resolving conflict, conveying why your brand is making a difference and changing your industry for the better, and offering a sneak peek at what lays ahead.
This is the perfect stage to offer some hope in a brighter tomorrow: new challenges may emerge in the future, but your business is ready to tackle them, strong from the experience accumulated along the way. This will communicate to readers that your brand is thriving, but also continuously working on solving new issues, navigating new scenarios and adapting to different situations.
Taking your audience with you on a journey is a compelling, engaging and interesting way to grab their attention and trigger their curiosity. What moves us tends to stay in our hearts and memories for a long time, which is why storytelling is a powerful technique to ensure your brand stays front and centre of your audience’s minds.
If you’d like to learn more about creating a narrative that engages stakeholders and drives positive change, you can’t miss the Pod’s ‘Definitive guide to successful strategic communications’. Download your free copy here.