Chapter 8. Tell A Story
What is Storytelling?
Storytelling is a lot of different things. At its core, storytelling is the use of
language and narrative in order to communicate something to an audience.
The content of the story itself can be fictional (made up) or factual (using real
events, people, and data). Stories themselves can serve multiple purposes as
well, such as to explain an idea, deliver a message, or simply to be
entertaining. Because stories can be quite flexible, let us take a look at what
storytelling is and isn’t so that we can narrow down the definition.
When it comes to our marketing, we want to ensure that there is useful or
insightful information in our stories. This is because we ultimately want to
use our stories to help drive our conversion rates. Another way of framing
the idea of useful information is to say that our stories have a point. There is
an idea or concept that they want to get across to the audience. For example,
if you run a bakery, then you may want your point to be how delicious your
cookies are. You could do this by just writing, “we have the most delicious
cookies in town.” But that isn’t very catchy, is it? A more eye-catching way
of doing the same thing would be to write a story about one of your
customers, someone who goes out of their way to always visit your bakery
when they are in the area, or who even makes special trips to get cookies
from you despite living so far away. The point of the story is still that “we
have the most delicious cookies in town,” but now there is an intriguing story
that makes us want to know more. Why is that?
Did you notice the main difference between the simple slogan and the story?
It is that we added a character into the mix. Stories revolve around characters.
Notice I didn’t say people. There are many stories in which the characters are
animals. For example, an animal shelter is much more likely to feature
animals as their characters than people. Characters offer readers someone to
see themselves reflected in and someone to connect to emotionally. When
you are telling stories as a brand, you need to make sure that your characters
are your customers. Since people identify with characters, making a character
into a customer helps to make the reader feel like a customer as well.
Another core point of storytelling is the concept of narrative structure. A
