I wanted to create an episode that goes a little deeper into strategy, specifically the idea of storytelling, because it’s about what you say. And that’s often one of the hardest hurdles that a lot of businesses come to me with. They know how to use social media, they can create a website or start advertising, but they don’t know what to put in these channels to actually make someone care enough to listen.
We all talk about how people nowadays have the attention span of a goldfish. Three seconds or less, that sort of thing. But I think a lot of people mistake what that means. Yes, we have a three second attention span, but for the things that we don’t care about. For the things that we care about, I can read an entire book if it’s good enough. I can listen to a podcast for three hours if it’s stuff that I’m interested in. I watch movies that are two hours long because I care about it.
So it’s not a problem of attention span necessarily. It’s a problem of do I care about what you’re trying to tell me. Do I care enough to pay attention, to listen, to stay. And that’s why I thought this would be a good episode to talk about storytelling. Because as humans, we’ve been telling stories since before the invention of the alphabet.
Storytelling Is in Our DNA
Just look at the history of humanity. It’s one gigantic story. There’s paintings in caves from thousands of years ago. Then we started chiseling on rocks to create alphabets, to create something to communicate. Then we started writing on parchment paper, and then books. A lot of indigenous cultures pass their teachings through stories, through verbal communication.
It’s in our DNA as people to tell stories. Think about the way you naturally handle conversations. When you have something interesting to tell, you usually go like, you’re not gonna believe what just happened. Or, I really have something to tell you right now.
And look at what just happened there. You started with attention. You opened a loop. You’re not gonna believe what just happened. That makes people lean in. That makes people go, what happened? And then you start giving the story. You don’t just immediately say, this happened. You start from the beginning. You progress from the beginning to the middle to the end. You give that tension, you give that context, and then you tell the punchline. And everybody’s like, oh my God. And then you have a resolution. You talk about how you felt, or what you’re going to do next based on whatever happened.
These types of stories that just come out of us are natural because it’s how we explain the world. Sometimes telling someone a carefully crafted sentence like, I went to the beach, doesn’t capture how enjoyable it was or what happened in that space that made you want to tell a story.
That’s what stories are for. It’s to retell something in a way that the other person has a deeper understanding than they would have if they hadn’t known the whole thing from beginning to end. There’s a different level of understanding when you tell someone a story and they’re like, that’s so cool, as opposed to just, this happened to me.
Marketing and Storytelling
The funny part about our storytelling is that none of it is planned. I don’t think we get taught in school how to tell stories. It just naturally comes out of us. We listen to how other people talk when we’re little, and then we just kind of pick it up and create our own way of telling stories, our own way of speaking. And it’s in the nuance of how you describe and tell stories that people realize whether they care or not.
You’ve probably been through this experience as well. You’ve either seen speakers or been in conversations where they’re talking about something that you just don’t care about. It’s not relevant to you, or the way the speaker is presenting something is really monotone or really boring. I don’t know how else to say it. But you know. And you’re trying to find ways to get out of that conversation so you can do something that feels more valuable or useful to you.
That is exactly what happens in our marketing. Marketing works the exact same way. Most people are coming into your website or your social media or whatever marketing you’re doing, into your world, and they don’t know anything about you. It’s your job to tell them a story that keeps them engaged and learning more about your business, to lean in so that they get to know more about you.
Storytelling Examples in Marketing
A story that makes them want to remember you and buy from you.
There are some classic examples of companies that do this really well. One of them is Nike. The marketing that comes out of Nike, they’re not selling you shoes. They’re selling you a dream. They’re selling you this story that if you work hard enough and go through the hardships, you keep pushing and keep going, you’re gonna end up being successful. And when you are successful, Nike’s gonna be right there.
So when athletes become successful, they get sponsors approaching them. Nike is one of them. And that is what they have built. They’ve built this story, this marketing that just lives on and captures people and their attention by not talking about their shoes.
Another good example is Red Bull. A lot of their marketing has really nothing to do with selling their energy drink. A lot of their marketing is tied around doing crazy stunts, extreme sports, because that’s what appeals to their audience. That’s what they’ve found that people enjoy. So they put their brand behind athletes that are doing wild things, doing unique things. Because if you like having that level of energy, that feeling of oh my God I did something amazing and it’s so unique and so special, that’s what they want you to feel about their brand. They’re creating a story as well, just through their own lens.
And another popular example is Patagonia. They sell outdoor apparel, but a lot of their marketing is not tied to that. A lot of their marketing is tied to what they care about. And what they care about is saving the world, putting less product into the landfill. They have a lot of unique services and things they’ve come up with, including how long their product lasts, for the specific purpose of creating a better environment. They’re environmentalists and they care about that. So they talk about that and their marketing revolves around that. If you care about the environment, if you care about these things that they care about too, then you have found a place.
It Doesn’t Have to Be About Your Product
A lot of your marketing doesn’t have to be about your product. It can be about what you care about. It can be about what your audience cares about. These companies, they talk about what they care about. And when the audience cares about the same things, they don’t feel sold to. They feel found. They feel like they’ve found a place to belong to.
Just think about how many people there are with Harley Davidson tattoos. Why is that? Why do people choose to put a brand on their body forever? It’s because it means something to them. It tells a story. People identify with what that is.
And at this point you’re probably telling me, yes, that’s all well and good, but these companies have millions of dollars in marketing budget. So can I even do this? And the answer for me is yes, because at the end of the day, they’re just telling stories. They pay a lot of money to put them in a lot of places, and they hire people that know how to craft stories very well. But at the end of the day, that’s all they’re doing. They’re telling a story that you care about and a story that the audience cares about.
What Branding Actually Is
And that’s all it has to be. When you’re building your strategy and trying to build the world for people to exist in for your business, it’s about being very clear about what you care about, what you value, and telling it in a way that other people understand.
Because if you know what to say, it will inevitably make things easier for you to say more things worth people’s attention. Because they will resonate with it. They will care.
And that is essentially what the marketing world calls branding. This gets confused all the time. A lot of people think of branding as logos and brand colours and website design. But if you sit down and actually think about the branding exercises that marketers put you through, or if you look at a branding template, what are these things that you have to fill out? You’re asked about your positioning, your values, your voice, your tone. All these things that really all come down to a way of expressing who you are and what you care about to the world.
And that’s exactly all branding is. It’s not logos, it’s not brand colours. It’s a way of expressing who you are. It can very easily be done through brand colours and logos and design that reflects that, but it’s not just about those things. It’s about the story underneath. It’s about the story of who you are and explaining that to the world.
That is your story. That is the thing that you can put in your marketing. That is the thing that shapes how everything around it gets built. Because if you know that story, then you know this would probably work better in a video form, or this would be better to put on my website, or these parts here are probably better for people that have already gone through my business, to bring them back after they’ve bought something.
The Three-Act Structure
In order to make things a little bit easier, I’d like to tell you about how I like to build stories.
This will work for pretty much anything, whether it’s websites or ads or pitches or posts on social media. But a lot of building stories, and any author or any creative person is going to tell you the same thing, a lot of it comes down to practice. Practice and keep doing it and keep trying it. You will get better because you’ll understand the nuance, you’ll understand what people appreciate, you’ll understand how to craft in a way that feels like you.
But to make things a little easier, I like to use something called the three-act structure. That’s essentially a framework for storytelling. You probably already know the main way of telling a story, which is there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The three-act structure works in a very similar fashion, but it uses the setup, the struggle, and the resolution. The setup is exactly the same as the beginning. You’re setting people up so that the next thing you’re going to talk about makes sense, makes logical sense. You’re slowly bringing people through. And then the middle part, the struggle, this is where the conflict happens. This is usually where it leads to the climax, how the problem gets solved. And then the resolution at the end where everybody lives happily ever after.
It’s a very simple way of thinking about it, but practice this and think about how you would tell a story whenever you want to talk about your product or talk about something for your business. Try to tell a story around it instead. Try to craft a story around it. And you can use this three-act structure very well with the marketing journey that I’ve talked about in previous episodes. The not knowing to knowing, knowing to liking, liking to trusting, and trusting to becoming a client.
It all falls in a very similar pattern because the first parts, not knowing to knowing and knowing to liking, can all fall within the setup. And then liking to trusting, that becomes the struggle. The conflict and the things they should know and understand to get to a certain point where now when I tell you this is worth your attention, these features are going to help you, the resolution, then it makes sense for someone to be like, okay, maybe I want to purchase this.
Building Stories Backwards
That is the main way I tell stories in a simplistic way. It can get more complicated, but I want to keep this as clean as possible for someone that has never tried doing it. But there’s another way you could craft stories that could potentially work better for you.
In fact, this was the first method I used when I started crafting stories. I actually used it more because it made more sense in my head. But now that I’ve done it multiple times, I find it easier to just go from the beginning to the end. But the other way you can do it is to start from the end and go backwards to the beginning.
You create a story and start with the end in mind. As an example, the thing that you want at the end of the story is for someone to purchase something. So the end is, I’m gonna buy something. What comes before that? Well, I know all the good things about it, or I’m excited. I’m in an excited state where this solves exactly my problem. What comes before that is my understanding that you have something worthwhile, or an understanding of what my problem is. And the next thing and the next thing until you get to the beginning of, who are you? I’m Googling something or searching because I feel like there’s something I need to learn more about. And it’s not until I find your website that I realize what my problem is, and then you take me through that story.
Starting from the end can be useful for a lot of people that haven’t done this before because it’s about creating logical steps. What do you want people to feel, know, and understand for the next thing to make sense? And you build backwards, one at a time. In storytelling or in writing, it’s called beats. You can have a lot of beats, or you can have two. I want them to buy something. Before that, I want them to be excited about buying something. Before that, I want them to know that this is worth buying. And then you have something, a story that you can craft from there.
Making People Feel Something
A question I tell people to always think about when you’re doing this exercise is, what do people need to know, understand, or agree to in advance so that this point makes sense? If you started from the end, what do people need to know, understand, or agree to so that this ending of buying something makes sense? That’s where you go back to the next logical step.
But the overall point of this episode is that you want people to remember you. You want people to care enough to choose you over your competition. You want to stand out. And in order to do that, you’ve got to know how to make them feel something. Feel something for your business. Feel something for the marketing that you put out. Because anything else is just noise. When you’re putting content out for the sake of content, it’s noise. And there’s a lot of that on the internet. You don’t stand out just by having more of it. It’s not worth remembering.
Your job and our job as businesses is to create stuff that is worth remembering. That is worth being remembered for.
And I have this quote that I absolutely love. It’s one of my favourite quotes of all time. It’s by Maya Angelou. People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.