5 Secrets to Create a Stunning Storytelling

Many tales begin with “Once upon a time…” and usually end with “…They lived happily ever after”. Storytelling is also a form of narration, where a hero goes on a journey to fight a villain, with different kinds of help he will be able to face challenges until the final confrontation.

This art of narration is an uncontested lever of communication, allowing you to create a particular link with your audience. It is not an easy exercise to do, so let me share some secret tips with you.

1st secret: Define a goal

Why do you want to do storytelling? To answer you must first ask yourself about the objective of your story. Indeed, this narrative can very well represent commercial or marketing objectives, such as:

• Increase spontaneous brand awareness.
• Reduce the loss of loyal customers during a win-back operation.
• To gain subscribers to the company’s social networks.
• Boosting sales.

Beyond any kind of message, one rule to remember is that the message should be in one sentence. Work on yours, clarify it, and correctly identify your concept so that you can present it in one sentence. The more succinctly your message is explained, the easier it is to convey to the audience.

2nd secret: Define your audience

Before you can even tell a story, you need to know the characteristics of your target audience in order to know exactly how to address them. To do this, you can rely on complete personas, putting your audience in context.

A persona is, in essence, fictional. It is a contextualization based on the interpretation of the company’s segmentation criteria. A persona allows you to give a name, a face, and an identity to a group of individuals. To build it, many elements exist:

—The socio-professional category and the possible profession.

—The age group and gender.

—The geographical and family situations.

—The ambitions based on the needs that the commercial offer meets.

3rd secret: Respect narrative scheme

To achieve this objective, there are several models available to the storyteller, such as the actantial model and the classic narrative scheme. The latter consists in proposing a story where the chronology of events is the main structure:

• Initial situation.
• Disruptive elements.
• The twists and turns.
• The denouement.
• The final situation.

However, this diagram has a major weakness: it does not consider the actors, their relationships, and the influence they have on each other. This is where the actantial model comes in, based on:

—The hero or subject

—The quest

—The object of the quest

—The adjuvant, a force helping the hero to accomplish his quest

—The opponent, a force preventing the subject from reaching his goal

—The sender, attributing the quest to the hero

—The receiver, actor to whom the accomplishment of the quest will benefit

The subject therefore gains in depth and clarity here, since the actors of the story can be people as well as ideas, feelings, or events. The symbolism is stronger here, while maintaining a consideration of the chronology of the story with the quest and its object.

4th secret: Credible

The storytelling must be coherent with the positioning of your product, its added value. Thus, the tone and style of the editorial line are essential. And it is not a question of deviating from the editorial line that you have set. The style can be around humor, ecology, futuristic, traditional, etc.

5th secret: create emotion

A story takes you to another universe. You feel like you’re living it when you watch or listen to it, so put emotion, emotion, and nothing but emotion into your stories!

No matter what story you want to tell, always remember to educate your readers. Bringing the reader/viewer into your sphere will allow you to create a strong temporary bond and peak their curiosity.

Think also about your gestures, tone and rhythm; you need to captivate the audience for a maximum impact. Now that you know all the secrets to create the perfect storytelling, don’t hesitate to share your creation with us!