Mike Nachshen is president & proprietor of Fortis Strategic Communications, LLC.
As soon as upon a time, you will have heard a senior communications chief say, “Storytelling is an important ability a communicator can have.”
In case you had been like me, you may need even believed it as soon as. However in a PR expertise cage match, technique beats storytelling any day of the week.
That’s to not say storytelling doesn’t have an vital place within the Communications pantheon. It does. Actually, storytelling pushed by technique is likely one of the cornerstones of a profitable communications effort.
In response to writer, historian and thinker Yuval Noah Harari we people are “storytelling animals [who] assume in tales relatively than in numbers or graphs, and consider… the universe itself works like a narrative, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and blissful endings.”
A talented communicator understands there’s one thing within the DNA of our species that offers storytelling common enchantment and makes use of this perception to captivate their viewers. They will flip the driest subject right into a riveting call-to-action and ship a message so successfully that the viewers needs extra.
The true core of being an efficient communicator isn’t within the telling of tales.
It’s within the strategic strategy driving the storytelling.
As a result of and not using a communications technique, storytelling is just leisure.
Changing into a communications strategist isn’t one thing that occurs in a single day. It begins with asking onerous questions and doing all your homework.
Probably the most vital questions a communicator can ever ask is, “What’s the enterprise technique?” Simply as vital are the questions, “Who’s our viewers?” and “What do they actually care about?” Collectively, these questions can information an efficient communications technique.
To know the enterprise technique, you want to have an intimate information of your group’s enterprise mannequin. This implies going past mission statements and speaking factors. It’s about having a basic understanding of what retains the lights on and pays the CEO’s wage.
The viewers is probably not who you initially thought they had been. And when you do perceive who you’re actually attempting to achieve, it’s important to dig deep and perceive what motivates them. Transcend superficial solutions and interpretations and uncover what their true pursuits and wishes are.
This strategy applies whether or not you’re at a Fortune 50, a non-profit, authorities company or in some other sort of group you possibly can think about.
For instance, I as soon as labored at a publicly traded Fortune 100 know-how firm that was attempting to deliver a brand new product to market within the federal contracting house.
Once I was introduced in to guide the communications effort across the venture, this system director was past enthusiastic about what he referred to as “eye-watering” new know-how. He stated “give me a press launch” to inform “the entire world” about our revolutionary new functionality.
However after asking some questions and doing my analysis, I discovered that our launch buyer — the federal government company that was paying us to develop this know-how – was already all in. Supplied we achieved sure technical milestones, which we had been on observe to achieve, we’d receives a commission.
However communications nonetheless had an vital function to play on this – and one which had nothing to do with telling our story to your entire world.
The actual downside – the enterprise downside — was that our buyer’s mother or father group thought the venture was a whole waste of tax {dollars}. They wished to scrap the venture totally, and no quantity of nice storytelling about eye-watering know-how was going to influence them in any other case.
However, after doing further analysis, I discovered that the mother or father company was targeted on fixing an totally totally different downside. Congress, the press and different vital stakeholders had been asking the mother or father company lots of onerous questions on this downside.
Our resolution had the aptitude to resolve that downside. However we had by no means publicly talked about that use case, as a result of up till now, we’d solely talked about how cool the know-how was.
That modified.
Armed with a deep perception into what the enterprise actually wanted to realize to succeed, and what our buyer and their mother or father group actually cared about, I used to be capable of develop a communications technique that regarded very totally different from what this system director requested for.
As a substitute of speaking about know-how, my crew and I targeted our power on making a compelling story about how our resolution may resolve the mother or father group’s downside. And we didn’t blast out a sequence of press releases to the world – we targeted on inserting our message the place key choice makers would see it.
The strategy labored. Not solely did the mother or father group fund our progress funds, however they gave the client further funding so we may do extra.
Storytelling was vital – however it was technique that enabled my crew and I to inform the correct story to the correct viewers.
In the end, technique lies on the intersection of understanding and mastering the instruments at your disposal, the organizational targets, the enterprise panorama, and the wants of the viewers. By digging deep into the enterprise downside and always asking questions we will all develop into higher strategic thinkers and communicators – and that’s no fable.
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