What is storytelling?

Storytelling has become a bit of a tech marketing buzzword in the past few years. 

What’s behind the rise of this term is that businesses have realized that dry facts, lists of features, and statistics may be compelling to an engineer or accountant who is making a sober comparison of competing alternatives — but that’s not how most people make decisions, most of the time.

People’s brains are wired to resonate with stories: narrative structures that demonstrate change over time. Not just any change, but a positive change, resulting in the resolution of a problem that the audience cares about.

By crafting information in the form of a narrative, it becomes much more memorable and persuasive. 

Neuroscientists have even found that when a storyteller connects with a listener, the listener’s brain synchronizes with the speaker’s. [source] That’s the resonance of storytelling in action.

Storytelling, in a business context, is the art of weaving messages into narratives that synchronize brains, inspire trust, and motivate people to take action.

There are a few crucial steps to developing a compelling business story.

1. Define your audience. Who are you trying to reach? What do they truly care about? Successfully defining your audience means doing your research, understanding their needs and dreams, and listening.
2. Develop your narrative. You need to establish a relatable and trustworthy lead character that your audience can relate to. If you can then define a significant challenge that the audience cares about and show how they can overcome that challenge — just like your lead character — then you’ve got a winning story. You’ll be able to use that story to deliver messages that resonate and that people will remember and respond to.
3. Forge connections. Once you know who you’re talking to and what they want to hear, you can begin creating content and communities that establish connections. Your audience now becomes your tribe: A community of people who feel that they have something in common with each other, and with you, because of your shared stories. 
4. Demonstrate leadership. When you can spark connections in readers’ hearts and minds, that’s when the magic happens. That’s when people start to seek you out because you make them feel good, inspire them, or get them excited about their own potential — not just yours. When you repeat your stories in a consistent, repeatable way, those stories become mantras that gain power with every repetition.