#105 The Fundamental Thing You Must DO to Tell A Great Business Story
Week One of Our Practical Storytelling for Business Series! ✨✨✨
(some subscriber only content)
A few of you wrote back to me last week requesting I focus my August practical series on the lessons from my storytelling for business course. So, happily, I will be spending the next four weeks doing a mini primer on storytelling for business. If you are a business owner, marketer, or know someone who is this is for you (and for you to share). I’ll be showing you the four things you need to do in order to effectively craft the story of your business and build your brand through the process. It will provide a high-level lens into my course and dive into some of the key lessons. And don’t worry if storytelling for business isn’t your thing, there are universal lessons around storytelling here that you may still find useful in your everyday life and career communications.
If you have a business idea, a business, or a brand you want to evolve, I hope you’ll follow along, using it to apply the lessons I share over the next four weeks. I am also only making this available to subscribers (only a short version of this note will live on on the blog) so if you know someone who may benefit, please encourage them to subscribe so they can get all the lessons.
Okay. Now let’s dive in to the first and most fundamental thing you need to do to start telling a great business story: exploration. This is a simple one that requires a lot of work to get right. This is about establishing the right foundations for the story you want to craft and share. It will help you tell stories of all kinds (share impactful communications of all kinds) across mediums and audiences for your business.
Your brand is one of the most valuable assets your business has. The research also supports this idea. A solid brand is something customers are willing to pay more for over less expensive, non-branded, products or services. If you own a business and want it to have impact in the world and in the lives of the people it exists to serve (customers, users, community, etc.) then you need to at some point get clear about your brand and bring it to life with clarity and consistency. That means diving into your context and getting clear on your vision for your brand so you can share consistent and compelling stories to help grow and evolve it.
In Storytelling for Business we start by establishing the foundations of any brand through the exploration required to establish them. That means insight mining: diving deeply into the context of four key areas of your business to pull out what matters most (and will be most compelling to your customers) in your current context. Those key things are:
Audience Context*
Industry Context*
Cultural Context*
Company Context*
How do you get this context you ask? Easy(ish)! Ask, google, research. Whatever resources you have access to, use them. And none of it has to cost money—I find most clients and customers are happy to provide feedback if you help them understand that it’s meant to make what you do for them even better.*
So this week, I want to challenge you to dive into your context. For each of the four areas identify one thing that is unique about your audience, industry, culture, and company context. Search for meaningful insights. If you’re feeling ambitious, identify five! Let me know how it goes and feel free to either ask questions in the comments, reply to this email or tweet them at me. Happy exploration!
*Subscriber content. Subscribe to Adventures in Storytelling to get access to details and the rest of the series and a summary at the end. (You also getting a free storytelling starter framework when you do)!
A Story Well Told
Do you want to truly understand the power storytelling has to let you in on another experience of life? To foster hope, compassion, connection, and a sense of our common humanity? Read this series of Instagram posts from @humansofnewyork (it's long but worth every minute).
Chantaie Allick
Writer|Strategist|Storyteller
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