Inspire Your Storytelling in 5 Practical Steps

Your story is unlike anyone or anything else’s. In this ebook, I will take you through five steps to help you uncover and share your authentic story — the one that will engage your audience and support a desired outcome.From a practical perspective, I outline simple steps to gather your real story, whether it’s the story of a person, business, service or product. I designed this ebook to help you outline your story — or stories — and solve the problem of getting to your real story. The five steps give you the information you need to create an engaging narrative. It’s up to you to put your heart and head into the steps, letting your answers and thoughts build as the process progresses and you begin to spin your tale. If you already know your story but aren’t telling it, I challenge you to ask yourself why. This ebook will be especially powerful for you. I have a hunch you’ll arrive at a stronger story than you started — something you’ll be proud to tell. Throughout the process, stay accountable to these steps, your genuine brand, the good and bad of how you arrived to your story, and creating something that your audience will love to learn about.From an inspiring perspective, I believe we all have something to say, a message to deliver, a package to sell. Your story will find its way into the right hands. Don’t worry about anyone else but your top audience because you cannot be everything to all people, and probably don’t want to be. There are individuals out there you’re meant to help, somehow, and they’ll find you through your story.

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Each step in this process builds on the previous step, so no skipping! If you’re serious about this storytelling business, you’ll honor the process. In each step you’ll see the Take Action Today work; this is where you build your magic. If you find the process overwhelming in terms of time and commitment, carve out as much time as you can each day, whether that’s 30 minutes or two hours, and work the process with the time you have. Another baby step to get you warmed up to the steps is to tell a simple story first. In the first step, choose a “love” that is easy for you to embrace and expound upon. You’ll still unfold your story. After you do this the first time, working the process will get easier and you’ll quickly and accurately hone in on your best stuff. I’m excited to help you get there.At any time, for any reason, feel free to drop me a note with questions or concerns, or — even better — a tip for how you have found to improve or work inside this process. I want to help you, and you can help our community, by sharing what you learn and know about the craft of storytelling. Feel free to connect with me on Twitter @SilverSquare, on Facebook or email me directly (raquel@silversquareinc.com). Don’t try to connect with me on LinkedIn if I don’t actually know you — I won’t connect. It’s just one of my rules.Once your story is complete, send it to me. I’ll share it on our social networks and build an ebook of all of your stories. So let’s go!

Happy storytelling,

Raquel

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But First, a Few Words on Content MarketingAt Silver Square and in the greater progressive marketing community, content marketing is becoming well known. This is good! And bad.Content marketing is storytelling in its simplest form. Taking your story and turning it into content through blogging, presentations, video, guides, white papers and more is how you tactically carry out content marketing. The trick here is that your content needs to be valuable. It needs to be engaging. It needs to be something you enjoy creating and others take joy in consuming. Simply producing a video or writing a blog post isn’t the best way to perform content marketing. This route reminds me of a trend a few years ago when marketers — some even “experts”— kept saying “content is king.” Content alone isn’t king. You must pay attention to the type of content you’re producing, the audience you’re serving, and the story you’re tying in to deliver content that’s meaningful and engaging.REMEMBER: Actual people will read your guide. Actual people will watch your presentation. Actual people will view your video. Content marketing is an approach to marketing that works. It works because creating content that is valuable to your business. This tactic helps the right people find you and engage with you. Creating the right content for your marketing is what we’re here to do. Okay, now you’re ready to get started.

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It sounds like a cliché, but love is the foundation of your story. Stay with me! An engaging story taps into emotion, and those emotions spring from love. Love moves people. You can harness that energy in your storytelling.Love gets a bad rap. It isn’t typically a business term, but we’re going with it here. I like the word love because it’s not common in our corporate language, but everyone knows what it means. Love is something found deep down that makes you say, do and feel things. Love evokes emotion, from the fear of losing something you love or the desire to have something you love to empathy for someone you love. It’s likely that if you love what you’re creating, talking about or writing, these strong feelings will show through in your work. Through your story, the person you want to reach with your content will enjoy it more… maybe even love it.

In this step in the process, where you’re digging into all this love, you’ll likely identify things you don’t love. It’s noteworthy to keep a side list of these things and figure out what you want to do about your new findings at another time. Maybe you’ll change how you do business, weed out those less-than-ideal clients or perform a pivot in your business that falls exactly in line with your love. Whatever you do, don’t try to tackle that scope with this process. The two don’t blend well together. Stay focused on your storytelling and set an appointment with yourself or your team to come back to that list. Don’t fall victim to taking on too much at once — trust me, I’ve been there. It will all work out in time. Remember that what you’re building right now will find more of the work and clients you love, and this is a good thing.

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FIND YOUR LOVE1

NOTE:;

Make a love list. Over the next week (or set a timeframe that works for you) get your mindset focused on finding the love to build your foundation. Build your Love List like this:

LOVE LIST 1. Make a short list of your ideal clients who love what you do. Write down why they love you.2. Think about key, passionate employees and learn from where their passion stems. Write down those passion triggers.3. Know what your audience is actually buying. Write down why they love what they’re buying.4. Think and talk about what you personally do and love. Write those things down.

To help you build your list, develop some simple habits. Each time you come in contact with someone you work with — a client, a vendor, anyone who comes inside your business realm — listen for cues that indicate what they love. Be even more aggressive and work it into conversations. Ask an ideal client or employee, “What do you love about our business?” or “What do you love about working with us?” and sit tight to wait for answers. Do not prompt them for any reason. Take note of how they react and write down those unspoken innuendoes as well. Before you know it, you’ll have a whole collection of love stories you’ll be able to craft into your story.

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TAKE ACTION TODAY:

If you’re willing and able, one way to immediately share some good with this Love List is to create an internal communication — through an article in the company newsletter, blog post, poster of all the best sayings, internal memo — sharing what’s good about your company. It’s almost always certain that not everyone in the company knows what’s going on and what clients think. Not everyone has a finger on the pulse of your business marketing like you. Sharing some or all of these initial sparks of a story will help you build your internal communications process and help the whole company feel invigorated and inspired by all the good vibes. Remember how I said there is some inspiration in this process? This is one of the places inspiration lives. You never know how sharing one person’s love can change another someone’s perspective or help someone feel confident and successful. Most of all, it supports the feeling — and fact —that they are contributing to a larger, inspiring product in the form of your company.

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NOTE:;

This is where we really ruffle some feathers. There are two camps at this point in the process of creating engaging stories: people who understand you need to give away your “secret sauce” for free, and those who think that’s the worst idea ever. I believe you can give your secrets away in a meaningful way.Giving away your best stuff is what helps others find you credible, attractive, valuable and engaging. This is what people want! To get to engaging content, you’re going to need to give a little away. I’ll let you determine just how much, but if we ever talk about content marketing and you tell me it didn’t work, one of my first questions to you will be, “To what degree did you share your secrets?”

When you share how you do your best work, you’re inspiring others to do their best work. More often than not, once they try to emulate your method, it becomes apparent that it’s tougher than it seems. (You don’t see many chefs shying away from writing cookbooks filled with their best recipes, do you?) They’ll realize you really do offer the best method and that they should engage with you if they want to be their best too.

Giving away your knowledge does not mean giving away your time. Don’t confuse the two. You can share what you know through your blog, ebooks like this, case studies or white papers or video. Setting appointments and giving away free consulting is not what I’m talking about here — don’t do that! When someone asks for your time, that’s a perfect opportunity to sell yourself or your company’s time or product to help them get where they want to be.

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GIVE AWAY YOUR SECRETS2

NOTE:;

Attach secrets to your Love List. Organize your loosely written Love List into some sort of organized matrix. Simple tables work for me. It’s useful to separate the item from the reason your audience loves the item. Now for the secret-sharing part. Think about how you are able to deliver that Love List item to your audience. What is it that you do that is your secret to getting to the love? That’s your secret sauce.

What I mean here is this: At Silver Square, we love telling organic, nonscripted stories on video. Luckily, this is one of the things people love about us. Our secret to producing those types of videos is exactly what you’re reading in this ebook. We use a similar process (and extremely talented people!) to find and tell that story, so what you’re reading is our secret. I’m giving it to you right here.

To help you build your matrix, think of these questions: • How did I help them? • What did my business do for them? • How many details do I need to gather to really get to the root of the story? • Do I need to interview others internally to learn how they did that job or created that product? • How much detail do I need to provide to communicate my secret?

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TAKE ACTION TODAY:

A matrix for a hypothetical financial planning and investing company might look something like this:

LOVE LIST ITEM WHY SECRET TO MAKING THE LOVE

Clients love that I make them money

because I help them live the life they want.

I have a mean stock-picking strategy.

Clients love that they can trust us to know where their money should be invested

because it gives them peace of mind.

We make client relationships and trust top priorities.

Our employees love that we go to the art museum once a year

because it lets us tap into our creative sides in a business where numbers often rule.

We have a culture that values individuality and creativity.

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Too many of us are uncomfortable talking about what we do, how we do it and why we love our work. However, just talking about these things is most often a much better route to a compelling story than carefully crafting one and turning into a robot on film or paper. I’m not saying that you should wing it. If you’ve built your case in the earlier steps, you’ll create engaging content automatically. This makes a lot of sense if you’re planning to use video as a means to tell your story. While this sort of journalistic style involving informal interviews and more people will take more time and effort, it’s the best route to making your story really great and engaging. Giving one marketer or corporate communicator the task of storytelling without others’ input will not result in your most engaging story. When you’re putting together content to tell your story that’s not video, this advice seems a little out of place, but it’s not. You still want to allow your authentic story to come through. Transparency is your friend! You’ll still go about gathering your story from everyone and placing their parts into your story exactly how they shared it. Don’t rearrange, don’t change their language, don’t make it more “professional” — just deliver it as straight up as it is given.

Gather stories that illustrate your story. You now know what your secret is and that it leads to why your audience loves you or your business. This information serves as the abstract of your story. The best stories are told through anecdotes, so in this step you are gathering those anecdotes. Talk to clients, employees, yourself — essentially anyone your business deals with who has a love story to share. Let your audience talk, show you around and be themselves. When you are asking yourself the tough questions, dig a little deeper into your secret and give away some details.

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SKIP THE SCRIPT3

TAKE ACTION TODAY:

Ask questions like this:

• Generic Business o Ask Your Audience: Why/How do you feel love toward me or my business? Can you give me an example? o Ask Yourself: How is my secret incremental to making the love? Can you give me an example?

And here are some examples featuring the business in our matrix in Step 2:

• Financial Planner o Ask Your Client: How do I help you live the life you want? Can you give me an example? o Ask Yourself: What is the key to my mean stock-picking strategy? Can you give me an example of who that works?

• Attorney (Litigation) o Ask Your Client: How does my work for you support your business goals? Can you give me an example? o Ask Yourself: How did I develop my process for planning strategy? Can you give me an example of it in action?

• Marketing Firm o Ask Your Employees: How does spending time marketing our own firm make you sharper? Can you give me an example? o Ask Yourself: How do you carry out that culture of freedom to learn and do? Can you give me an example?

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• Manufacturer o Ask Your Customers: What’s so great about our hand-twisted pretzels? Can you give me an example of a time you introduced them to someone else? o Ask Yourself: How does our community play a role in the success of the company? Can you give me an example?

In this step, you’ll gather a lot of extra content and footage, which allows you to piece together your final product with the best possible angles you can get. View these pieces as a puzzle and start putting the pieces together. Look at all of your footage, love notes and anecdotes. The essential parts of your story are right in front of you.

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This is about telling your engaging story, but don’t forget who you’re setting out to engage — your key audience. One of our favorite ways to get inside the minds of our and our clients’ key audiences is by creating personas. Personas are detailed descriptions of the people who make up your key audience. You will typically have at least three personas in each key audience. The process of exploring and pinpointing what a particular person feels, thinks, wears and does help you get inside their heads. We often give our personas names, full personalities and hobbies. We consider what other brands, products and services they love. Get the picture?

Develop personas and calls to action. Follow the steps below to work through the process using your own organization style.Think about your best client, the person that shared the most passionate or compelling love story. Write down all you know about this person. Things to think about: • What is this person like? • Are they easy to work with? • Why do they love you? • Are they younger, older? • Where are they spending their free time outside of the office?

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GETTING YOUR STORY TO 4THE RIGHT PEOPLE

TAKE ACTION TODAY:

• What media do they consume? Favorite publications? Social places they hang out? • What tone works best with communicating to them? • What problem did your service or product solve? • Why did they buy from you? These types of questions really help you get to know your best client. Think of more than these questions and really build an awesome persona.Now you’re ready to think about what you want this person to do. This is your call to action. In your story, you have produced some level of emotion that will make them do something. Is it to buy, sign up for something, do something? What is your goal? You have to think about the end in order to have a successful project, so think through what you want this particular key audience to do and write it down.Thinking about how this person spends time — e.g. watching videos vs. reading blogs — and which love story best fits why the person bought from you in the first place is how you pull this all together. You’re using this same story, but you’ll need to potentially tweak it based on the channel through which you wish to push your story. Below are 19 popular forms of content distribution channels or types of media:

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1. articles2. social media updates3. blog posts4. enewsletters5. case studies6. in-person events7. videos8. white papers9. webinars10. microsites

11. print magazines12. traditional media13. research reports (white papers)14. branded content tools15. ebooks16. tweets17. Pinterest updates18. podcasts19. mobile-specific content

Carrying out Step 4 works well in another matrix (who knew you would pull out Excel so much?). That financial planning and investing business might have a matrix that looks something like this:

LOVE STORY CHANNEL #1 (BLOG)

CHANNEL #2 (YOUTUBE)

CHANNEL #3 (SLIDESHARE)

CHANNEL #4 (LINKEDIN)

My stock-picking strategy helps my clients make money and live the life they want.

article on how we research stocks and stay on top of trends for our clients’ benefit

quick video in which financial advisor gives 5 tips for smart investing to live the life you want

a series of slides complementing the 5 tips for smart investing video

share a white paper on figuring out what you want out of life and how much it will take to get you there

Our clients trust us to make smart decisions with their money. We do it, and that’s why we have such strong relationships with them.

article on why trust must be earned, not simply given, to your financial advisor

video case study showing client and financial advisor and how they work together

a series of slides showing the 8 things you should expect out of your financial advisor besides sound financial counsel

ask the client (who is on LinkedIn) for a recommendation

Because we have a culture that values individuality and fun, we do things to tap into our creative sides like an annual art museum excursion.

series of blog posts from different company contributors: what I enjoyed during this year’s art excursion

video featuring each employee’s favorite piece of art and a brief description of their day

a series of slides addressing the value of art, from a financial standpoint to a cultural one

share SlideShare presentation with audience

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Unless you’re working on your master’s of fine arts degree in creative writing, make sure what you’re producing is the real story. If you’ve been authentic in what you and your audiences love about your work, you’re on the right track. Lots of people tell me that their story isn’t interesting or compelling, and I always disagree. If you’re following these steps, you’ve already gathered love stories that some audience will be interested in hearing. There’s a gem or two in that bundle of love that is interesting, compelling and real. Real stories are what we can relate to and feel good about. As our collective emotional intelligence mounts higher and higher as a society, we can swiftly spot individuals who aren’t genuine, stories that aren’t authentic, and companies that are trying to sell. Keeping things real is how we honor our history, credit our employees, admire our clients and earn the privilege of growth.Real stories aren’t comparisons. Keep the focus on you, not your competition and how they are telling their stories. So many brands are forgettable because they sound and look like every other brand — even ones not in the same industry. How many businesses do you know that are “professional,” “competitive” and “high quality”? Your real story is not a collection of adjectives.

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TELL YOUR REAL STORY5

Put it all together. In Step 4, you identified what the content distribution channels or types of media you will use to reach your personas (key audience). Develop a timeline for producing that content and work Steps 1-4 to keep telling your story. You should be feeling a mix of anxiety and inspiration here in that you now know exactly what you need to do but there’s a lot to do! Just chunk it down and take it step by step.

Thank you for following us on our process to telling an engaging story. Remember you can connect with me on Twitter @SilverSquare or Facebook, or email me directly (raquel@silversquareinc.com). To keep up on more content marketing gems, subscribe to our Marketing Brainpower podcast on iTunes. Please send me your stories! I want to read them, watch them and share them among our tribe of storytellers.

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TAKE ACTION TODAY: