Elements of Effective Stories
People are exposed to stories all the time. They’re everywhere – and even more so since the advent of the Internet and social media. To be heard above the multitude, you need to make your stories stand out from the crowd. And you can do that by ensuring your stories have all the necessary elements of effective business storytelling.
Specifically, there are four elements that work in concert to make a business story effective.
The first element is relatability
People are more comfortable with things that they know – things they can relate to. It follows then that your audience will be more engaged with a story that features familiar things – a setting or a character they know and can identify with. If your content requires presenting new ideas or context, find familiar analogies to use or ways to compare it to common examples. Relatability is the secret to truly engaging audiences.
Seemingly conversely, the next element is novelty
While familiarity is good up to a point, and audiences love characters they recognize, repeating the same narrative or storyline over and over gets old and tends to make an audience tune out. New stories, or novel variations on a familiar theme, are more engaging for an audience than ones they’ve already heard. A new story is naturally more interesting. It refocuses attention and draws the audience back in.
Another element of effective storytelling is tension
A sense of tension in your story will draw your audience in – you can see it in their physical reaction when they lean forward, concentrating, focused and engaged, anxious to find out how the problem will be resolved. They want to know, need to know, what’s going to happen next.
But it’s a balancing act. You want enough tension to attract and draw in your audience, but not too much tension. Too much tension pushes people away. It takes practice to get it right.
The final element is ease of understanding
It’s important to keep the language and plot simple so that the story is ultimately easy to understand. The audience won’t be engaged if it’s struggling to understand exactly what’s at stake or what’s going on.
Don’t put barriers in the way of the audience getting involved and engrossed. Make it easy for them. And, when necessary, tailor the story to your audience. Experts and novices are very different audiences, and don’t forget that experts in topic A may be novices in topic B.
Storytelling is a powerful, compelling, and engaging way of getting your message across and connecting with your audience. And your business storytelling effort needs to hit the mark. And that means storytelling that has relatability, novelty, tension, and ease of understanding.
