Telling a story: a practical guide

“Tell a story”. It is possibly the most cliched advice in the world of marketing. But what story? And how?

Questions like that illustrate precisely how useless generic advice like “tell a story” really is. But fear not. Help is at hand. What follows is a practical, step-by-step guide to creating a brand story that resonates AND helps you structure the content you create now and into the future.

At the end I’ll include a couple of well-known examples that demonstrate how this works in real life. 

Writing it down

Before I begin, let me just promote (again) the practice of writing things down. I know I’ve said it before but it is still true. If you haven’t written things down:

• You haven’t decided anything

• You’ll end up having the same conversation again in 2 days time

• Nobody has anything to work off in future

• You will go around in circles for eternity

  
  

Not writing things down is a classic sign of a business that is too scared or too incompetent to make decisions and have a real focus. And businesses like that die. 

The goal here is to follow a process and deliver an outcome: a story you can tell. And that starts with writing it down.

The process

The first thing to understand is that this is not a creative process. After the process has concluded we can get creative around the content that tells this story, but at its core this is a step-by-step toolkit that helps anyone figure out what that story is.

As in any story we have:

• A hero

• An enemy

• The battle

• The spoils

The process is about filling in those blanks. Let’s talk quickly about each in turn.

The hero

In most cases in B2B marketing, this isn’t you. Sorry. This is your end user, your buyer, or if you prefer your ICP. The process involves answering the usual questions: who is this person? What are they trying to get done? What do they care about? What keeps them awake at night?

You might be surprised to discover how difficult it is to write this down (there’s the writing thing again: everyone thinks they know the answers until you have to put them on paper). 

Most importantly of all, these answers have to be believable. Your prospect is going to have to recognise herself in the story you tell, otherwise the whole thing falls flat. To make that happen, you must have taken the time to speak to your target audience, and listen with an open mind.

If you start this process ‘knowing’ the answer and only looking for whatever confirms your existing belief, the whole process is doomed.

The enemy

The enemy is whatever stops that person achieving what they want. 

That could be any number of things. It could be a way that things have always been done that doesn’t work in a new environment. It could be a process they don’t trust or that doesn’t give them confidence. It could be a specific product or company. Or, to take another tack, it could be inefficiency, fear of change, or complexity.

Again, you need to be honest with yourself. What you choose HAS to meet the following criteria:

• Be a real problem that your hero has

• Be significant enough to really care about

• Be something that your product or service makes go away - or at least makes a lot better

  
  

The battle

This is where you come in. 

Your product or service defeats the enemy. Whatever it was that stopped your hero achieving their goals, you make go away. Simple. 

Just write down what it is about your product that defeats the specific enemy we are talking about. Don’t worry about the rest of it. Focus on what really matters. 

The spoils

Finally, what will the world be like once the battle has been won? In materials terms, what will have changed? Which of our hero’s worries have gone away? 

It is here that we can paint a picture of what is possible, but yet something that feels achievable. 

When we’ve set that out, the process is complete. But here’s some things to consider whilst you are filling in the blanks.

Doing it right

It’s one thing following a process like this. It’s another to get it right.

Here’s some key things to remember.

• Involve everyone. If we are going to tell a story, we want it to remain as consistent as possible for as long as possible. That means getting agreement from every internal stakeholder that matters. Those outside the process almost inevitably undermine it in future.

• Keep it simple. Don’t get distracted into the detail. Choose the one thing that matters and build your story around that.

• Be brutally honest. If you lie to yourself during this process, you render the results unusable. There’s no point having a story that isn’t going to be believed either inside or outside the organisation. In fact it is actively damaging.

• Sense check with the outside world. Your story is real. It lives somewhere in the minds of your customers and early adopters. Check that it makes sense to them before telling the rest of the world.

  
  

An example, and how it inspires creativity

What follows is a a textbook example that will be desperately familiar to any marketer of a certain age but nevertheless demonstrates precisely how this works:

• The company: Salesforce.

• The hero: founders and key executives (including in purchasing) within SMBs, and particularly the burgeoning start-up space of the early 2000s. These people were open-minded about tech, wanted to build their GTM on tech, but…

• The enemy: existing vendors were enterprise software, that needed to be installed onto each machine and required a significant upfront investment. For SMBs, that caused significant hesitation and stress. Can we really sink this much money and effort into something that might not even work?

• The battle: Salesforce was online and payments were monthly. It was fast, cheap and easy to find out if it worked for the business and delivered value*. Compared to the old, way, it was a no brainer.

• The spoils: For our hero, a working CRM without ANY of the stresses that would normally come with purchase and implementation. These spoils were so significant that they changed the entire industry - and beyond. 

  
  

You’ll notice this isn’t really a ‘story’ in the conventional sense. But it is a framework that we build every story we tell upon. That is the secret. We could say it in words:

The thought of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a CRM system that didn’t work used to keep Suzanne awake at night. Not any more. Now she can implement Salesforce in days - and pay monthly for what she actually needs. Which means sweet dreams all round.

Or it can be summed up in a single image:

Both tell the same story in different ways. Both are valid outputs from the hero/enemy/battle/spoils framework. You can be as creative as you like, as long as the core element of the story are communicated consistently and relentlessly. 

And that consistent communication will be the subject of my next blog.

*This was all true at the time, trust me.