Your business story is a kind of drip, drip, drip. It’s not meant to feel like a waterfall or an expensive Super Bowl ad. Like any great story, it’s meant to drip, word by word, into the mind of your customer, accumulating weight and meaning. And trust.
The key to a good business story is that it needs to be unique … yet familiar. Start with what the customer is expecting, what they came looking for, and then tell the story of how different, original, and unique you are.
The nature of your business and that of your customers will change over time, if only because the environment in which you’re both doing business is constantly evolving. Should your story be adapting to all these changes?
As Darren Menabney reminds us in this Fast Company article, “Storytelling is a powerful tool. It … persuades far more effectively than any other form of communication, because we humans are storytelling creatures by nature.”
The more you know about your audience before you begin telling your story, the easier it will be to make decisions about what to leave in and what to leave out. Which in turn increases the odds that it will make the impression you need it to.
The latest “Story Winner” is a company based not far from me here, in Glens Falls, NY. JUST Water has partnered with the community to bring to market a product with a smaller carbon footprint, and it’s a story worth reading.
The goal of a business story is to make every word, every sentence, every idea on the page count. Which means sometimes we have to know what to leave out. As film editor Sara Shaw says, “Omission is a powerful storytelling tool.”
Our websites and About pages aren’t the only places we can tell our business story. Whether we offer a product or a service, there are many options for putting our story out into the world where our customers can be exposed to it.
Sometimes, if we let our clients tell their own stories, they can actually tell a story about us too in the process. An insurance company for small businesses has been doing just that, and it’s definitely worth taking a look at what they’re up to.
Today’s “Story Winner” is Good Spread, a company that produces and sells ethically sourced organic peanut butter, and uses the proceeds to fight global malnutrition. Their story starts off with a bang (literally) …