126 – Using Storytelling To Engage Your Audience

It’s time to engage your audience using the age old art of storytelling.

Learn how to implement the ultimate storytelling framework into your organisation today.

How did this episode come about?

At a recent business workshop I attended in Sydney, I learned of a podcast that contained a brilliant framework to telling a great story. After doing some more research I found myself totally immersed in learning as much about an art form that literally dates back to the beginning of mankind – storytelling.

The history of storytelling

History clearly shows us a common pattern of storytelling, that is evident in many different forms, throughout many cultures.
The Indigenous Australian Aboriginal people were masters in story telling in the forms of rock paintings, corroboree (an ancient method of combining story with music and dance) and campfire storytelling.

In fact, back in episode TSS074, indigenous role model Ben Stainer talked to me about how his ancestors used to use storytelling to navigate.

Cultures right across the globe have been using storytelling for centuries. The Chinese, the Japanese, the Vikings, the Persian Empire and of course the Egyptians are very well known for telling amazing stories using their hieroglyphs and detailed carvings.

Are you telling your story?

I was interested to learn in my recent discoveries that pretty much every story that we come across, old and new – follow a similar framework with a similar structure.
The reason that successful stories follow a similar framework is because as humans, we’re wired to respond to stories in a certain way. if you can get good at adopting the same framework, it will mean that you’ll become the master of getting your message through to your ideal customers.

So here we are today and my question to you is how are you telling your story?

At Tradie Web Guys and The Site Shed, we work with tradies & contractors all day, every day. I can honestly tell you that 95% of the businesses that we work with really struggle with telling their story.

For example, when I ask our new building clients what they do, they tell me they build reliable homes at an affordable price.
Or they tell me they do renovations and build decks and pergolas.

What they should be telling me is that they transform homes into the ultimate living space. Or, that they help bring families together.

My sources for this podcast

The framework that I go through in this episode came from a recent podcast I heard on the ‘Perpetual Traffic Podcast’, with guest Donald Miller from StoryBrand [here’s the link to the episode].

Donald is a world renowned expert on the topic of storytelling and has written many books on the topic. A couple of which I have downloaded.

I reached out to Donald to see if he’d be able to appear on the show, however he is in the middle of (another) book launch that has him pretty tied up at the moment. He did say he’d be happy to come on the show once the mayhem dies down a little though, so we can all look forward to that.

Anyway, I hope you can all go and apply this framework to your business. It would be the defining point in successfully communicating your message to the people that are out there looking for you 😉

You can check out Donald and StoryBrand at the following links.

• Storybrand.com
• The Building A Storybrand podcast – iTunes