4 Steps to Building a Storytelling 'Fire' in 2020
On a damp, chilly night in September, I was chaperoning my sons' Scouts event. We wanted to fight the bitter cold with a nice, toasty campfire, so we gathered up some kindling and logs, arranged them carefully in the firepit, and struck a match.
We waited for it to catch and even blew air into the kindling pile to encourage a flame, but it kept burning out. We had done everything right, but the problem wasn't our method; it was the fact that the kindling we gathered was too wet to catch fire. We didn't look hard enough for the right materials.
We find this happens a lot in marketing, too. Brands know they need to tell stories to forge a connection with their customers and build the trust that ultimately leads to a sale. To do this, you need to conduct proper research. You need to gather the right pieces of "kindling" – detailed, industry-focused data on customer beliefs, actions, and behaviors – to inform your stories. Otherwise, you'll end up like me and my fellow Scout parents: sitting around with a cold, damp pile of kindling that simply won't ignite.
From story 'spark' to raging fire
In our last blog, we discussed how storytelling in marketing is like a spark plug in a car engine. It's that spark that ultimately starts the vehicle and allows you to move forward.
That initial spark is undoubtedly critical, both for driving a vehicle and gathering momentum on a marketing campaign. But you need more than just the spark to truly have an impact. In fact, there are a few other essential elements you'll need to turn that story "spark" into a raging fire – a source of warm, inviting energy that your customers can't help but be drawn toward.
Let's think back to our campfire for a moment. It's a good analogy for properly crafting a marketing campaign, but it also touches on something deeply primal and universal to all human beings. In prehistoric times, humans sat around campfires swapping stories and imparting information to each other. As Lisa Cron describes it in her book, Wired for Story (2012), "story originated as a method of bringing us together to share specific information that might be lifesaving."
In the modern era, it's a business's job to invite customers to join them around their own brand fire and tell relatable stories that instruct, inform, entertain, and yes, even save their lives (figuratively, of course). You must place their customers at the center of your stories and show them the appeal of the warm, glowing future that awaits if they choose to work with you.
Like building a campfire, planning a successful marketing campaign in 2020 requires you to follow four crucial steps:
1. Gather the right kindling.
When you're building a fire, your kindling is typically small, dry sticks and leaves that will easily catch fire. In marketing, your kindling is a rich, deep understanding of your customers. Because the spark in your marketing stories isn't just about you – it's the Venn diagram between your customer's story and yours.
To gather the proper "kindling" (data) for your storytelling fire, you must take an outside-in approach to truly understanding your customers. You need to thoroughly understand your customer on a granular, individual level. Who are they? What things in your industry do they care about? What challenges do they face in their lives that your product or service can solve?
Digging into these details informs the all-important process of building a buyer persona. This fictionalized representation of your real-life ideal customers offers an in-depth understanding of what makes people tick – their motivators, decision-making approaches, and potential cultural influences that shape the way they understand, seek out, research, and buy products in your category. It is these psychographic factors that separate your personas and makes each group unique.
Your research should explore your chosen personas' relationships with the market and its associated products. Here are a few important questions your research should aim to answer about each persona:
How familiar are they with the markets and technologies?
How comfortable are they in dealing with your product category?
How do they approach decision-making?
Who else they might involve or consult with before they make a final purchase decision?
What sources of information do they trust to inform their decision-making process?
Your in-depth persona research can later be used as the foundation for internal reference stories (which we like to think of as "reverse case studies") for your team. These stories give your internal team a vision of where you want your ideal customers to end up, a blueprint of how to get there, and a sense of accountability and commitment to make it happen.
In your customer research, focus on areas that directly relate to how people that align to this persona engage in the market in terms of learning, purchasing, and support activities that are relevant to your product. These are the pieces of "kindling" you need to start building the right brand stories.
2. Build the proper structure.
A proper pile of kindling is Step 1, but to get your fire going, you must intentionally structure larger pieces of wood around the kindling so that the fire keeps spreading and burning.
Storytelling, too, requires a proper structure to ignite and sustain your customers' interest. This is where a persona or customer journey can be incredibly useful. A thorough understanding of your customer's journey as a buyer is essential to crafting effective marketing content that drives them to action.
At Go Narrative, we often help our clients map out their buyer's journey into six distinct phases:
Awareness: The buyer becomes aware of a problem in their life and understands the need for change.
Realize: The buyer realizes they must make that change if they hope to solve their problem, and begins exploring their options for solutions.
Internalize: The buyer matches up what they're finding in the external world through their research, with their internal routines, actions, and beliefs.
Visualize: The buyer's need crystallizes and they are able to visualize a new reality where their problem is solved by one of the solutions they're investigating.
Decide: The buyer shifts from a place of emotion to one of logic and rationality. They use data to confirm their decision to go with one product or service over another.
Evangelize. The buyer is satisfied and spreads the word to their peers about the excellent experience they've had with their chosen solution.
Once this journey is mapped out, it's time to consider the framework you will use to tell stories that align to each phase of the journey. We often use the 3Ds – Desire, Difficulty, and Denouement – as a simple, easy-to-grasp way of mapping out the beginning, middle, and end of your customer's "story."
We talk about the 3Ds often, but if you're unfamiliar, you can learn more about this useful story framework here.
3. Ignite the spark.
When your kindling and story structure are in place, it's time to light the spark that will set the whole thing ablaze and pull your customers in. That initial "spark" is an emotionally-engaging narrative that will grab your customers' attention. This narrative informs the individual stories that your customer needs to hear at this particular moment in their journey, thus continuing the chain reaction of sparks that keeps the fire burning.
You and your team must know how to say the right things, at the right time, to the right people, at the right place on that journey to drive the sales you need. When you truly understand a customer's story, you understand their priorities. You can get an idea of the other decisions they must make in their lives and how you fit in. You come to understand how your product can help shape that person's story for the betterment of their life or business.
The right stories will increase the value your customers perceive from your brand, which in turn increases the likelihood of earning (and keeping) their business. When you're thoughtful and intentional about the use of stories in your marketing efforts, you are boosting the performance of the entire campaign.
4. Fan the flames and watch the fire spread.
So you've lit the spark with a story and everything is catching fire. Your team has done an incredible job of getting inside your customers' heads and crafting a narrative they can really relate to. Now you need to fan the flames and keep it going.
Think about how you keep a fire burning when it starts dying down. You strategically place new logs, stoke the fire, and blow air onto it to encourage the flames. That airflow is your marketing investment and resources. You don't want your team's hard work to fade away into a pile of embers, so make sure they are spending that energy on the right things, causing the fire to spread.
We recommend using a content architecture model (CAM) to keep your storytelling momentum going. In its simplest form, a content architecture model is where your strategy meets the road. It gives you a tangible plan for reaching anyone who's moving through your sales funnel. It lays out what content to put where across the buyer journey, taking into account your persona's specific feelings, actions and challenges at each point along the way – and once you have it, you can automate it and repeat the process over and over again for each new lead.
Depending on where a particular customer is in their journey, you can use your marketing automation system to send them the piece of content at the appropriate "level" for their interests and their familiarity with your brand and product. As they consume and you track their progress, you can deliver the next content piece accordingly, thus ensuring the continued spread of your "fire" – and their passion for your brand – throughout their entire journey.
Remember, your job as a brand is to build this fire for your customers. It is your responsibility to shape stories for better customer outcomes – to invite them to join you beside the fire and bask in the glow of their own success (with the help of your brand, of course). If you do this, you'll find better stories and spread them faster.
Want help with this? Book a complimentary 30-minute consultation with Go Narrative, and we'll give you the tools you need build a storytelling fire that gathers your customers around your brand.
Go Narrative is a marketing consultancy that assists business leaders in technology firms to build and implement advanced marketing strategies. Our secret sauce is storytelling for business growth and transformation. We can help you cut through the noise and improve your reputation. We love helping business leaders understand, use and apply storytelling in business via writing, presentations, video, strategy and actionable plans. Get attention. Be heard. Sell more.
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