Great Storytelling Principles
The Facts
I spend a lot of time writing about storytelling. It’s my passion, and it’s a huge point of difference between Spiker Communications and our competition, just like between you and your competition. Everyone seems to understand that storytelling is important because we’re awash in videos that don’t say anything, that we can’t remember, and because these videos don’t tell us anything. There is no copy, just drone footage mostly these days that looks exactly like the last 15 videos I’ve seen.
Connecting with another person is one of the highest forms of social being for humans, and at its heart is great storytelling. So let’s quit this boring “I’ve got a drone too and I’m going to show you a bunch of roof tops and tops of trees that don’t look anything like your roof tops and tree tops.”
Spiker Insights
Effective storytelling involves a deep understanding of human emotions, motivations and psychology in order to truly move an audience. Luckily, storytelling is something we all do naturally, starting at a very young age. But there’s a big difference between average storytelling and great storytelling.
A few principles we use are:
- Great stories are targeted to your particular target audience. They are not for everybody. If you wish to target everybody, you will reach nobody.
- Great stories are simple and focused. As marketers we naturally want to include as much information as possible in our stories, but we can’t. We have three to four minutes to set the hook.
- Great stories are surprising and unexpected. Surprise our audience with our message so they think about us long after the film is over.
- Great stories appeal to our deepest emotions. Tell authentic stories that reach and move people where it counts.