Storytelling is a huge part of any business, but particularly for a newer one. As a startup founder, it’s essential to get the story of your business down pat and deliver it in a way that’s compelling to customers, potential investors and other stakeholders. A strong brand narrative also builds greater internal unity among your team.
There are many points to consider when laying out your brand story. Some of these have to do with the content of your narrative, while others relate to its delivery. In this piece, we’ll go over ten storytelling techniques that all startup founders should be aware of.
1. Use Compelling Visuals
Whether you’re creating advertising materials or pitch decks, visuals are a massive part of your story. Images have a way of bringing a narrative to life that is impossible just by using words.
What’s more, founders now have access to a wider range of digital design tools than ever. For instance, many platforms offer text-to-video AI features, making it easy to create short, catchy snippets, even if you don’t have any prior experience. As a founder, you have all you need at your disposal to weave in visual imagery to your brand narrative, so there’s no reason not to do so, even if you’re not a professional designer.
2. Tell Your Personal Story
Any story about your business should always involve a human element to make it easier for customers, potential investors and other stakeholders to form an emotional connection with you. Whenever you tell the story of your startup, always connect it back to yourself and your co-founders.
Sometimes, it’s incredibly easy to incorporate your own story with that of your business in a compelling way, especially if you’ve lived an interesting life full of twists and turns. However, even if you haven’t had a wild life, there are sure to be plenty of interesting decisions, experiences and chance meetings that led to your founding the company. Speaking about these publicly humanises both you and the business, making it easier to build public trust.
3. Develop a Core Message
Every business exists for a reason. In order to tell your story more effectively, you should always refer back to the core message/raison d’etre behind the founding of your company. For instance, if you’re a burgeoning marketing agency, your core message might be that you view your clients as family, and that you’re as invested in their growth as they are.
No matter what sort of business you’re running, it’s crucial to get in touch with the reason that you exist in the first place. This allows you to anchor your storytelling in what makes you unique.
4. Build Your Brand Values
Your brand values are an integral part of your story. In this day and age, consumers don’t simply want to buy from the brand that has the best products or services: they also want to spend their money on businesses whose ethics align with their own.
When putting together your story, make sure to set out a list of your brand values and tie them back to your core message and the key decisions you’ve made along the way. Weaving these values into your story when you deliver pitches or advertise your goods or services shows that you truly stand for something, and that your brand values aren’t just there for show.
5. State Your Problem
Every startup’s story begins with a problem that it’s trying to solve. For instance, the idea for Uber came about while its founders were having trouble hailing a cab in the streets of Paris. As a startup founder, the core problem that your business is solving is at the heart of your story.
Obviously, this problem will differ depending on the sort of startup you’re running. If you own an AI resume startup, for instance, you likely want to provide job hunters with a smarter way to improve their applications. On the other hand, if you’re a sustainable fashion brand, your core problem is likely the rise of fast fashion and the lack of ethical clothing options. By focusing on why your business exists in the first place, you can tell a much more compelling story.
6. Put the Customer at the Front and Centre
To tell an effective story, you first need to know who you’re communicating to. Your primary audience is your customers, which makes it essential to have an effective, repeatable customer communication strategy.
How you interact with your customers says a lot about your brand and, ultimately, about who you are as a startup founder. The best way to paint your business in the best light possible is to prioritise customer service. While tools like AI customer support chatbots can help, you always want to add a human touch to your customer interactions. Remember, the narrative around your business is largely dictated by what customers say about you, so always make a good impression.
7. Use Data Strategically
Facts and figures are a key part of any story, but they need to be used strategically. After all, simply giving potential investors or customers a list of statistics probably won’t be an effective way of transmitting your business’ story.
This is why it’s crucial to weave in these statistics in a way that feels organic. For instance, if you’re putting together an advertisement and want to highlight the problem you’re trying to tackle, adding a quick line on how many percent of people face this problem is a good, simple way to back up your claims with facts. Similarly, when pitching to investors, you want to give them data like your year-on-year revenue growth or market share, but you should do this as part of a larger narrative rather than just dumping numbers on them. Effective use of data adds legitimacy to your story, while poor use of it can detract from the overall narrative.
8. Solidify Your Brand
Your brand is the embodiment of your business’ story. Thus, it should accurately reflect your core messaging and values. Moreover, it should also transmit the personality of your brand to anyone who sees it.
There are plenty of ways to make your brand stand out. You can do this through visual elements like colours, fonts and logos, and also through more intangible things like your tone of voice. Building a brand that stands out is a great way to linger longer in the memories of everyone who comes into contact with your business.
9. Utilise Social Media Effectively
Almost everyone knows the power of social media, but few can wield it effectively. As a startup, platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn give you the platform to get your story out into the world, provided that you go about doing this in the right way.
When marketing on social media, it’s crucial to stay true to your brand values while also taking into account the key differences between platforms. You should also place plenty of emphasis on the quality of your content: content that’s genuinely helpful and valuable is the best way to drum up engagement. Of course, the optimal strategy differs from brand to brand, so make sure to do plenty of experimentation during the early days of your startup to find what works for you.
10. End Every Pitch With a Takeaway or CTA
Finally, each pitch or presentation you do should end with a key takeaway. While it’s all well and good telling potential investors how your brand came into being and why you’ve made the decisions you’ve made along the way, the best way to ensure that your story lasts long in the memory is to pull everything together into a takeaway or a call to action.
When coming up with a CTA, keep it simple. During a funding pitch or investor meeting, you likely won’t have all the time in the world. Your key takeaway can simply be a restatement of your core message, or a one-liner of why your business matters or why it’s likely to succeed over your competitors’. What’s important is that you leave your listeners with something to take home.
Use these Storytelling Techniques to Elevate your Startup Branding
Storytelling is a non-negotiable aspect of running any business. A strong narrative not only separates you from your competitors, but also humanises your company, which is more important than ever in this day and age.
In this article, we’ve covered ten tried–and-tested storytelling techniques that all startup founders should use. Use what you’ve learned today when crafting the story of your brand to ensure that both your content and delivery are as effective as they can be.