Good Marketing is Storytelling — Telling the story of your business. In this segment of Amplify, White Knight’s Madi Tinney talks with Dan Grech about the process of storytelling in your marketing.
Video Transcript:
Your business story has two components; and these two components are the foundation… the foundation of all of your marketing.
Welcome to Amplify:
Welcome to Amplify with White Knight Productions. I’m your new host, Madi Tinney. At White Knight, we’re all about amplifying voices through storytelling. And in this series, we’re connecting with industry professionals who know how to boost messages far and wide.
Today, we’re thrilled to speak with Dan Grech. Dan is the Founder and CEO of BizHack Academy, which trains all types of organizations… from small business startups to nonprofits to Fortune 500 companies… on the secrets of digital marketing. With an impressive background as a marketer and journalist, Dan knows all about telling a story that gets results. Welcome, Dan!
So, Dan, you spent most of your career working as a journalist and a storyteller, and now you work in marketing. How are you tying those two things together, and what’s the secret to telling a good story?
What I learned about digital marketing — and it’s not always taught this way. In fact, often, it’s more taught around the technology and the tools. But, what I learned is that if you don’t have a great story to use the technology and the tools to tell, you’re not going to connect with your potential customer.
And that, whether you’re doing digital marketing or you’re meeting somebody in person… in the end, all marketing, B2B or B2C, is H2H. It’s human to human, nose to nose. And so, if you’re really good at talking about your business story, you’re going to be successful in your digital marketing.
Now, a lot of people will say… “Well, what do you mean by my “business story”? Your business story has two components, and these two components are the foundation… the foundation of all of your marketing. Component #1 is your story of me.
What is your deeply personal reason and motivation for running your business? Why have you sacrificed so much to start and run your business? There are easier ways for you to make money; you’ve chosen this way. Why? What motivated you? Who taught you to care about this?
That’s your “story of me,”… your deeply personal motivation. And everybody has a different motivation for the business that they started, and you need to get really good at articulating this.
You also need to be able to talk about the core purpose of your company. So that’s the second big element of your business story is, what change do you want to make in the world? If your business were to disappear tomorrow, how would the world be a worse place? If you can talk about the change you want in the world (your core purpose) and why you care about making that change in the world, that is your business story. That is the foundation of all of your marketing.
If someone is trying to sit down and figure out what their story is, are there certain questions that they should be thinking about and trying to answer?
Absolutely! We have a technique that we use at BizHack called the “Five Why’s.” This is actually something I learned back when I was an NPR reporter. What I noticed is that if I saw something a little odd about one of the people I was interviewing, would ask them… “Well, why are you doing that? Why does that matter? Why is that important?”
And I would probe, and I would probe, and I would probe. And then, at the end of the fifth “why,” almost magically, they would almost inevitably tell a story about their life that helped explain why they do what they do.
To run a business is, by definition, a crazy act. It is an act of incredible risk and incredible hope. And to do that — to turn your life upside down, to turn your family’s life upside down — there is a reason you’re doing that, but not everybody’s in touch with it. And so, I just will dig in and I’ll ask them, “why” and “why” and “why?” And who in your life taught you to value that? And why does that matter?
It’s an incredibly powerful technique. Anybody can do it. Just sit across the table and ask “why.”
Thank you so much, Dan, for sharing your insights with us today. To learn more about Dan and his business, visit bizhack.com. And to hear more insider scoops on how to Amplify your story, be sure to follow White Knight Productions on your preferred social media for updates on future episodes.
One of Dan’s clients, Yoel Gutierrez, used this marketing storytelling style for his business. Hear Dan recall Yoel’s story.
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