3 Secrets to Captivating Storytelling
Stories have so profoundly changed my own journey, that I decided to share a few secrets around storytelling and how great stories can be a catalyst for change.
CONTENT
1. HOW WILL STORYTELLING HELP YOU
Great stories transform audiences. Think of the popularity of TED talks or the famous speech my Martin Luther King. Great communicators make it look easy as they lure audiences to adopt their ideas and take action. But this doesn’t come easy. Great storytelling comes at a price of long and thoughtful hours spent constructing messages that resonate deeply and elicit empathy.
This essay is a brief summary of some tools and techniques you can use to share your story of impact.
These secrets will help you:
Become more visible in a saturated market
Increase engagement with your audience
Leave impact in a meaningful way
2. WHY ARE STORIES SO POWERFUL
Ideas that resonate with your audience always have a particular quality to them. An idea can either puzzle or awaken enthusiasm in people. Haven’t you often wished you could make customers, employees or investors move to a new place they need to be in order to create a new future? This is possible if you can tune yourself into the frequency of your audience so that your ideas will resonate deeply. But first you need to tune your message to fit them by creating a powerful story. You have to understand their hearts and minds and root your message in this understanding.
People love stories because they are 20 times more memorable than facts. They have been around since the time we sat around a campfire to talk about our day out in the wild. Good stories touch us emotionally and allow our brains to release feel-good chemicals that impact our behaviour. We gain a deeper understanding of other people's experiences and want to become part of something larger than ourselves by identifying with a higher purpose that resonates with our values.
3. SECRET I - HOW TO MAKE A STORY CAPTIVATING
A great story starts with a clear structure and good knowledge of your audience. You can’t captivate someone’s attention unless you can bring a clear message or if you don’t know what makes them thick.
SET-UP
CONFRONTATION
RESOLUTION
• BEGINNING―SET-UP
Your role is to be the inspiring guide on the personal journey of your audience. Your audience is the hero of your story and, as their mentor, your task is to support them with insight, training and advice. To instil confidence and provide magical gifts so they can get past their fears and begin a new journey with you. Mentors are entitled to teach others about the journey because they were once heroes themselves. Once upon a time they were going through their own journey and picking up tools and knowledge along the way. Now they feel compelled to share it with the world.
Creating common ground with your audience:
By framing your goals in a personal backstory highlighting your values, you make your mission comprehensible to anyone listening. How are the strategic decisions your are making with your business rooted in deeper purpose born out of past experiences?
a backstory that relates to shared experiences
sharing common beliefs, values, habits that resonate with your audience
Turning point:
An incident, episode or event that spins the story around in another direction. Each turning point sets up the story for a change by capturing the audience’s attention.
• MIDDLE―CONFRONTATION
At the heart of your story there is a confrontation where something is at stake, either personally, professionally and often both. It might involve recasting the shape of an organization or explaining how your product fills the customer’s needs. Whatever it is, adopting to change will require the audience to consciously step into something new.
Define a desire:
The middle of the story is where drama presents itself through confrontation. This is where you explain your problem and how you as the guide have the plan to solve that problem.
Identify challenges:
Which obstacles is your audience encountering that keeps them from achieving their desire?
Empathize with their feelings:
How have you had similar experiences in the past and how did it make you feel? Real empathy is seeing others as we see ourselves. Accurately capturing the current reality and sentiments of your audience’s world demonstrates that you have experience and insights on their situation and that you understand their perspective, context and values.
Establish competence:
How does your business offer to help. Show how your experience can solve the problem. By offering guidance, confidence and tools.
Give them a plan and a call to action:
Then you clarify the steps your audience can take to do business with you and eventually call them to action.
• END―RESOLUTION
How does the world look like once the audience adopts your ideas? How are they going to be transformed? How does your message help the audience to become a better human? And how does it help them to avoid failure?
Help to avoid failure:
Explain what could happen to your audience if they don’t adopt to change. Sometimes it helps to relate to your personal failures and the lessens learned.
Help fulfill the human desire for:
reputation: higher self-esteem, acknowledgment
wholeness: finding belonging by serving humanity and becoming part of something bigger than oneself
self-realization: become more self-accepting by reaching their full potential
Remember that the ending of a great narrative is the first thing an audience is going to remember.
4. SECRET II- HOW TO CONNECT EMOTIONALLY
With more than tens of millions of content being created every day the market is becoming a crowded place. A quality product is not enough anymore if it’s not valuable for the greater good. Telling a compelling story of how your company is rooted in purpose has become the most important differentiator in this competitive world.
FEELINGS
Forget about facts, statistics, and testimonials. People only remember a message that’s thoughtful, memorable, and authentic. Wrap your message into a narrative that transports an audience with easy to understand information that provokes an emotional response. Use narrative to share your struggles and victories from the past, failures and growths from the present and the teachings that have set you on the right path for the future.
Your audience may forget what you say, but they will never forget how you made them feel. Great stories that evoke emotions also leave good memories. So ask yourself:
what do I want to be remembered for?
what is the message I want to transmit to my audience?
what do you never want them to forget?
COMMUNITY
Apart from what you offer, what does your audience really need from you? Patagonia, who enjoys a passionate following, is successful not only because of their quality clothing and gear but also because of their integrity and care for the environment.
What do you want your audience to feel after they engage with your brand? How does the story you are telling can become an experience they want be part of because it matters?
Once your audience knows, trusts, and likes you, they will more likely be interested in your products or services. At the very least, you’ll have created relationships with people who will have become advocates for years to come.
EMPATHY
If your business has a deeper purpose to exist than your story is one that creates lasting impact. In today’s day and age, marketing is no longer the key competitive differentiator. Consumers are increasingly demanding for companies to prove how their efforts are making an impact, supporting a cause, and achieving results beyond just profit. Ironically, knowing that a company cares about something other than their own profit is the incentive that consumers need to buy more.
But you have to walk the talk by showing the world how you are acting according to your values. Consumers gravitate towards brands that feel more human. It’s no coincidence that the top 10 most empathetic companies in the Global Empathy Index are amongst the most profitable and fastest growing in the world.
Stories are the only tool to make your brand more human. A memorable story is exactly what leaves a lasting positive impression with people. It’s the only path to loyalty.
Show your audience your brand has a soul:
what makes you human?
how do you touch and transform people’s lives?
how do you putt a positive dent in society?
In a crowded marketplace where everyone is focused on doing things faster, more efficiently, and automated, be the one who empathizes with what humanity needs. Show your customers that you care even if it means slowing down or doing things differently.
5. SECRET III - HOW TO USE PHOTOGRAPHY AS A POWERFUL STORYTELLING TOOL
Photographic presentations have become the common language of business activity because no other communication tool is as effective for transforming an audience. Photographic storytelling holds the power to be the fabric for social change. Great images tend to capture the soul of the subject while conveying a sense of place giving the viewer a moment to think, to react, to feel, to soak in the details of complicated situations.
The goal is to create a cohesive narrative that weaves together the facts and emotions that your business or brand evokes. The central question is: What is the purpose of the story I want to tell? What do I want the pictures to say?
VISUAL VARIETY
In the case of a character as your subject matter, learn what makes them tick, what their personality is, how they do their activity and in which context. Great photography must have an ebb and flow and what provides that movement is contrast―in content, texture and delivery. People tend to be moved by a story that is continually unfolding and developing.
Set up the scene: use a wide angle or aerial shot that sets the subject in its context
Medium: focuses on one activity or one group of people
Close Up: zooms in on one element, like someone hands or an intricate detail of a building
Portrait: usually either a dramatic, tight head shot or a person in his or her environmental setting
Interaction: people conversing or in action
Signature: summarizes the situation with all the key storytelling elements in one photo – often called the decisive moment
Sequence: a how-to, before and after, or a series with a beginning, middle and end (the sequence gives the essay a sense of action).
Clincher: a closer that would end the story
PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS
Research to maximize the potential you have in the field, especially when time is limited. Research the location and visualize your shots.
Keep people featured in your photos and make the target audience the hero of your shots
Use transitional pictures. These are shots that are not per se beautiful but serve as transitional images from one part of the story to another.
Embrace change. Some things can not be planned and happen organically, but you can use those to give the shoot extra character.