Storytelling in Business, Why It Works

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Here at the Lab, we’re huge advocates for storytelling in business and in this blog, we’re allowing you to understand why. Type ‘storytelling’ into Google and the first explanation you’ll be shown is “Storytelling describes the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment”. This explanation is from Wikipedia, which we know isn’t renowned for being a reputable resource, but it’s hit the nail on the head in this instance. 

Let’s get a bit more into the nitty-gritty of storytelling from a business perspective. Improvisation, theatrics and embellishment may all be great aspects of traditional storytelling, for example, Little Red Riding Hood, but we suggest keeping it real when it comes to storytelling in business. It’s not an opportunity to sell a fabricated version of yourself to prospects and other businesses in your industry. 

Storytelling will improve the performance of your Ads, engage your audience on LinkedIn, start a relationship on your businesses about us page, and in blogs. You can do this by offering personality and allowing people to see your business and what you’re about more transparently. We are going to explore four reasons why storytelling works across different platforms for businesses and how you can easily benefit from storytelling.

Storytelling on LinkedIn

LinkedIn may be used by professionals but ultimately it’s still a social media platform used by real humans seeking real human connection with like-minded people, leverage this to your advantage. What makes your business unique, what story can you tell that may resonate with those within your industry? At the Lab we spent a long time during lockdown working from home, now we’ve changed up the way we work so staff can work remotely on Mondays and Fridays, this suits many of our team’s lifestyles better. We have an opportunity to tell this story and echo the feelings of other businesses in our sector, starting a conversation and getting our business in front of more people. 

When we say your business story we don’t necessarily mean its “life” story, though you can speak about how your business started and its progression. It’s important to use storytelling to get across milestones, speak about your staff and what’s happening within your business in general. 

Storytelling in Ads

This part of the blog is going to be beneficial to you if your business runs Ads or if you work for a marketing company. Storytelling within Ads can be difficult if your Ads are through Google where you may have limited characters, but it’s not impossible. Facebook is a great place to story-tell through Ads, it makes the Ad seem more organic and captures the audience’s attention provoking emotion and resonating with them. 

What sounds more appealing?

Black sequined dress with red silk bow for sale

or 

It’s New Year’s Eve, imagine yourself in this stylish black sequined dress, the red silk bow catching the eyes of those on the dance floor and matching your classic red lip, the countdown begins, everything is perfect, hello 2022 – it’s your year! Limited stock so order today.

The story places your audience into the dress, they can imagine the scenario, it creates urgency, we believe it’s the way to advertise.

Storytelling on your About Us page 

Companies can often get the about us page all wrong. How? You’re just writing about your business or the business you’ve worked at for X amount of years, right? Surely you’re the most qualified to write this page and get it right. But, it shouldn’t be all about the business. 

You’re an award-winning business with over ten years of experience, fantastic! How does that benefit me? Use examples, tell your story, say that by winning an award for best customer service provider three years in a row you’re equipped to deal with any client need in a timely and professional manner. 

What specifically are those ten years of experience in and what do they allow you to offer? For example, with ten years of baking experience including a patisserie training course in Paris you can make show-stopping bakes to suit all corporate events for large scale businesses at short notice. Sell your story, your about page should scream your benefits but tell a story about how they could benefit potential clients. 

Storytelling in blogs

When writing a blog for your own business or a client it’s important to work out what the company is looking to get across in that blog, what the end goal is. This will help you set the tone and know what to include and what may not be beneficial to the audience. With this in mind, tailor your blog to the needs of your audience. Use ‘your’ and ‘we’, make it personal, make it conversational and place them in your story. Make it so the scenarios within your blog could be universal and be understood and felt by a wide array of people. 

Storytelling can be factual, it doesn’t need to be fluffy. It just needs to allow the readers to have a deeper understanding and connection with what they’re reading. It can also make the blog appear more interesting and flow more, making the reader want to read on and get to the end of the story that they’ve placed themselves or their business in. 

To conclude, the reasons why storytelling works in business across a plethora of platforms is it’s personable, it can resonate, provoke emotion, engage readers to put themselves into the story and subconsciously sell an idea to an audience about your business or a product without coming across as a sales pitch.

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