In any good marketing plan, customer engagement should be one of the top priorities for your brand. Here at All Good Tales, we have found that storytelling offers an effective and innovative way to grab your audience’s attention.
To produce excellence externally, you need to focus your energy on how to do work internally within the business. One important thing to remember is that brand storytelling is not simply the transferring of information and mundane facts to the consumer. Instead, your team must be motivated, imaginative and should aim to create a customer experience through storytelling. The more engaging the customer experience, the easier it is to compel your audience to connect positively with your brand.
Here are some tips on how to encourage your team to tell better stories.
Innovative strategies
In this fast-paced digital world, presentations laced with boring bullet points are all too common.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has been highly successful in introducing innovative strategies that encourage both engagement and creativity among his team. One well known example of this was the banning of Powerpoint during team meetings. He believes that logic and facts need to be merged with a narrative to be successfully retained in our brains. So, instead of reading bullet points from a slide, the team take time at the beginning of each meeting to read a six-page story.
Bullet points don’t inspire, but stories do. Reading and writing stories require strategic thinking, deeper analysis and encourage more engagement than powerpoints, which will be very beneficial to your team’s storytelling techniques.
The “yes, and” method
Nothing kills creativity and effort more than being constantly denied. So, when a team member puts forward an idea, it is important to encourage it. If you need to offer a further suggestion on top of their idea.
One way of doing this is to employ the “yes, and” method, where ideas are not ignored, but acknowledged, advanced and allowed to gather steam. Of course, coming up with the perfect story can be difficult and time-consuming, and not all ideas put forward are going to be of use.
That said, by exploring the ideas put forward, you’re bound to raise your team’s motivation and ignite the spark of creativity that is key to successful storytelling.
Anecdotes over data
A good brand story is both understandable and relatable to its audience.
In order to increase relatability, encourage your team to gather stories that they hear on a day to day basis. This may include emails or calls from customers, conversations between team members or noteworthy personal experiences both in and outside of work.
Anecdotes are often much more insightful and valuable than data when it comes to forming a successful story. Your team will be able to incorporate information and scenarios that are relevant to your customers in their stories. This should make your brand story relatable and popular among your target market.
Story guide
Writing the perfect story may be frustrating for some, and your team members may need guidance. Give your team a simple story guide to follow, which ensures success while also allowing enough room for originality and inventiveness.
Here at All Good Tales, we use our Storyteller’s Manifesto. The little red book is a simple guide to storytelling for business. It provides users with storytelling structures and tips on how to tell an engaging story. You can request your free copy here.
