Finding stories to tell in your sector

There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it.

Terry pratchett

​​Two fish are swimming in the sea. 

“Water’s warm today,” says one. The other looks confused. 

“What’s water?” 

It can be hard to notice something when you’re surrounded by it. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re in finance, energy, biotech – whatever sector you’re in, you are surrounded by stories!

Learn how to spot them, and you’ll supercharge your content, build trust with your audience and meet your marketing goals.

Most stories you use will come from one of two places. 

1. Internal stories come directly from your business or your clients. They narrativise the people and situations that your business is involved with.
2. External stories aren’t about your business directly. Instead, you boil down your key message, and then tell a story that succinctly makes the same point. 

Let’s take a look at some examples.

Internal stories

Before we dive into how you can start telling internal stories for your sector, take a look at these examples from our clients. Through their social, we use internal storytelling to work towards goals like recruitment, staff wellbeing and awareness.

• Here’s an internal story told by one of Base Creative’s clients, MFG, about someone involved in the business.
• Here’s another internal story, this time by our client CleanTEC Services.
• Here’s one last example, from our client Riverdale Healthcare.

Now, imagine you work for a retail franchise called MacDougal’s. 

• Your business goal is to recruit more franchisees to expand the business. 
• Your marketing goal is to promote the company’s culture to attract those potential franchisees. 

You have reached out to several existing franchisees, hoping to find material for good stories.

One of these franchisees is named Helen. Helen first joined the company as a retail assistant when she was a teenager. In fact, it was her first job. After working at the company for fifteen years, Helen was offered the opportunity to run her own site as a franchisee. Later on, Helen took over another two sites. 

Here’s how you could use Helen’s story to motivate prospects to consider opening a franchise, on a social media post: 

It might be short, but pair that with a picture of Helen beaming in front of one of her sites and you’ll have turned a simple piece of information into a story about success and the enticing opportunities MacDougal’s offers. 

Here’s another example

Imagine you work for a London-based cleaning company named Sweep Dreams which, last year, became employee-owned. 

• Your business goal is to hire more cleaning staff. 
• Your marketing goal is to promote the company’s employee ownership to encourage more people to apply to vacancies. 

Not only do the employees now own the majority of shares, but an employee council has also been established to represent their voices. You talk to one of the younger employees, Maya, who has become a member of the employee council. 

Recently, the council voted to support London Cancer Support, a charity. While speaking to Maya, you jotted down a few quotes.  

Here’s how you could announce the new charity partnership while bringing Maya’s story to the forefront and helping you meet your goals.

Pair that with a picture of Maya and the employee council – or, better yet, Maya directly involved in charity work – and you’ve got yourself another simple but effective story.  

Internal storytelling is about narrativising the information you already have. That can be easier said than done. If you get stuck, here are three tips you can use to get started:

1. Put people front and centre. Every story needs characters. Your audience will be more invested in your story if they have a person to be invested in.
2. Open with something surprising. In our first example, Helen went from his first job to owning three sites. In our second example, Maya explains that employee-ownership also helps people outside the business. 
3. Keep your stories concise.

To tell a story effectively, you have to draw out a character to focus on and make the stakes compelling. Then, grab your audience’s attention by subverting their expectations. Like in the stories above, this is possible in just a couple of lines. 

If you’re able to do that, you’ll be off to a great start. These are tricks storytellers have used for thousands of years. 

Think of how important the first line of a book is to keep you reading. Think of how many stories from mythology make characters out of animals, natural phenomena like storms, and even concepts like love and envy.

But what if you have an important point to make, but you can’t find a story from inside your company? That’s where external stories come in. 

External stories

You’re most likely to use external stories to show your expertise when talking to an audience that’s already familiar with your business. This might be a thought leadership article or post you’re writing, in a marketing email, in a book you’re writing on your sector – wherever you’re making a larger point about your industry! Let’s dive in to some examples.

Imagine you work for a management consulting firm. 

• Your business goal is to gain more clients.
• Your marketing goal is to promote your team’s expertise.

To do this, you’re aiming to make your CEO a respected thought leader using social media. 

Here’s a story your CEO could tell on social media to help meet that goal:

Here’s another example

Imagine you work for a marketing agency, with many clients in the tech sector. 

As with the previous story, your business goal is to gain more clients and your marketing goal is to promote your team’s expertise. Here’s a story a team member could tell to do just that: 

Like internal stories, external stories often start with a focus on one character, and kick off with a surprising twist. In our first example the character is Napoleon. The twist is that such a great victory and defeat took place so close to each other. 

However, as our second example shows, you don’t have to follow this formula – these are just techniques to help you get started. You can tell stories in many different ways to meet many different goals. 

External stories aren’t directly about your organisation. Instead, they are an opportunity to introduce storytelling to an otherwise dry point. In this case, that point is the importance of delegating.

There are plenty of situations where you can use an exterior story to demonstrate your point, but be careful. It’s sometimes easy to get carried away with a story, without realising that it doesn’t quite make the point you want it to.

Finding your key message

Your story needs to contain your key message. 

My previous article on storytelling contained a version of the following story:

It’s an interesting story, but does it fit the point we’re trying to make? Let’s say the point we’re trying to make is this:

Stories build trust. Trust builds social networks.

Mike’s story is compelling and it could be used to make plenty of points:

• Humans aren’t the only ones who use tools.
• Brains can be better than brawn. 
• Being an outcast can force you to think outside the box. 

However, Mike’s story doesn’t as clearly make the point “Stories build trust. Trust builds social networks” even though it could be used to make that point in a roundabout way.

Your story has to serve your message, not the other way around. 

To tell the right story, you need to understand your key message.

That means boiling down your main point to just one or two short sentences. You can do this by looking back at your goals. 

Then, you need to boil down the point of any story you’re considering telling in the same way. If they don’t match one for one, you’ll need to find a different story or figure out a different way to tell it.

The fact that the story about Mike needs several paragraphs to link it to the key message is evidence that it might not be the right fit. If you can’t tell your story succinctly and easily link it to your message, it might not be the right choice.

Your stories don’t need to be non-fiction and they don’t need to be long. Take a look at the story we started with:

This is just an old joke, but it sets a scene, it gives us characters and it has a fun twist. It’s everything we need to cut to the chase and dive right in.

Here are some other places you can draw inspiration, with example stories for each.

You can use personal experience.

You can rework famous anecdotes.

You can use stories from other industries.

You can use stories about famous figures.

These are examples to get you started.

Some of these stories can also be reworked from different angles to make different points.

Here’s how you could repurpose the last story to make a new point.

You can find useful stories from across all aspects of life. 

Even if you’re writing stories about events in and around your business, you can still apply some of the same techniques these stories use to make them more enticing.

However, although there will be plenty of stories you can tell that come from within your business and your clients, keep this quote from marketing consultant and NYT bestseller Jay Baer in mind: “If your stories are all about your products and services, that’s not storytelling. It’s a brochure. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger.”

When Steve Jobs announced the Apple Macintosh, his speech included this line:  

“IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns to its last obstacle to industry control. Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry?” 

This is a perfect example of making the story bigger. It tells a story about giants and underdogs, freedom and control, monopoly versus innovation.

Mediocre speeches begin “I’d like to start by telling a story.” Great speeches have a story infused throughout that delivers their point with an emotional punch. 

Remember that storytelling taps into a fundamental part of the human psyche. It’s how we’ve made friends, given warnings, created coherent social groups, and understood the world around us for thousands of years. 

We see our world in stories. Our perception is always limited, always narrativised, and always infused with emotion. 

You’ll need a portfolio of great work to market your business, but your competitors will have that too.

To come out on top, you need to tell the better story.

---

Related articles

• Persuasion in search: using psychology to optimise our content
• Honest content: how to make your marketing feel authentic
• 5 questions you need to ask a prospective SEO agency
• How to create the perfect TikTok Ad

---

More help

Want to get in touch about content marketing? Drop me an email at [email protected].