Hello and welcome to Storytelling For Business, the podcast that helps you build better customer relationships by telling stories your clients want to hear. I'm Katie Flamman. I'm a voiceover artist specialising in corporate storytelling. I've worked with clients like UNESCO, Cartier, and Pfizer, helping them to share brand stories and business developments.

But why is business storytelling important? What makes a great story and how can storytelling create leads for businesses and build lasting relationships with clients? I've been exploring those questions with a group of amazing and diverse guests in this podcast series. I've loved talking to all of them, and I hope you've enjoyed listening to the interviews.

As you know, I've been summarising the key takeaways from each interview as we've gone along, but I thought it would be helpful to use this last episode to tie everything together. So I've collected all the best advice from all the interviews and created a handy storytelling toolkit for you which you can use in your business marketing. So grab a notebook and let's dive in.

I must admit I'm very pleased with myself because I've managed to get all the advice into a handy acronym. WAAAMMM, or wham, sort of. W stands for why, why stories matter. AAA stands for authenticity, audience, and aim. And MMM stands for meaningful, memorable, and moving. And you'll probably remember we've got story guru Gareth Dimelow to thank for those.

So let's start with the W, why. Why bother telling business stories? My guests were pretty convinced that storytelling is a super effective form of marketing. Let's remind ourselves what some of them said, starting with butcher Mark Turnbull from Turnbull's of Alnwick, who in episode seven told how Britain's most expensive pork pie went viral.

In the end, it was a great story. We just hadn't thought it through very well at the start. But it's a great example of how when you start telling stories, marvellous things can happen for your business.

Creatives know that storytelling reaps rewards. In episode six, we focused on audio storytelling with Ally Lang from Maple Street Creative.

Telling stories is the way that we are going to engage with your potential consumers. It's the way we're going to hook them in, not just for this call to action, but for them to have an ongoing relationship with you and your brand.

And if you like hard evidence, Gareth Dimelow from Inside Stories got scientific. In episode two, he explained that human beings are chemically programmed to respond favourably when they hear a story.

What happens to the human brain when it hears a story? There's a mirroring component where the brain recognises some commonality, shared experience. There's the dopamine that gets released when we experience any kind of emotionally charged moment. There's another trigger that happens where we find that there's some sort of resonance, some authenticity, some connection that again, facilitates recall. That's fine, that's the science. And there's a diagram that talks about how these different parts of the brain react when they hear a story. I looked at that and I thought, firstly, I need something easier to remember than that. And so what I came up with is a simple mnemonic with three Ms, which is, for something to be a story, it has to be meaningful, memorable, and moving.

Whoa. Hold on, Gareth. We'll get to the triple Ms in a minute. You're going to mess up my acronym. Let's just backtrack to what Gareth said about dopamine. It's a feel good chemical. Dopamine triggers feelings of pleasure and motivation. That means if you get it right, the stories you tell about yourself and your business can get your prospects motivated to pick up the phone, click on your link, or buy your product. That's why storytelling for business is so important.

Okay, onto the AAAs. First up, authenticity. All my guests talked about showing up authentically in their marketing and business storytelling. As Gareth put it, you are unique. You are your own USP. Ally Lang said businesses must be really clear about who they are. After my chat with Dai Rose from Sterling Welsh in episode eight, I was in no doubt about his values. He's a caring person. He talked about how he went from being a pharmacist to an independent financial advisor, and loved both careers because they're both about helping people. And he clearly cares enormously for the welfare of the kids he coaches in rugby. I asked him whether his business values and his personal values were the same.

Absolutely, 100% they have to be, don't they, because otherwise you are a fraud to yourself. You're a fraud to the business. So I think the very simple thing, when I take on a new financial advisor, the very simple advice I give them on day one is, "Look, if you wouldn't recommend that your mom or your granny does this, then you don't recommend it." Simple as that. If it's not the right thing to do... It's difficult because the right thing to do is very different in different circumstances, but ultimately, that's the best personal value you can have. Don't recommend something unless you'd tell your mom or your dad or your brother or your sister. As long as you get on with them, obviously.

But just don't do it unless it's the right thing to do. As long as you think like that. You go into work thinking like that, and ultimately, you'll never ever get it wrong. We've been going since 2008. We've never had a complaint.

So it's a recipe for success when your beliefs and values and those of your business are the same. So share them. Tell stories that let people get to know you and find out what you stand for is the best way to forge relationships and build trust.

Lizzy Parsons embodied authenticity, I think, in episode five when she talked about the sunny yellow brand colours she picked because they feel like her and they make her happy. And she also told us about a time when she wasn't feeling happy and decided to address that publicly and authentically. Lizzy was honest about how she was feeling coping with a bereavement at the same time as running her business. She felt very vulnerable opening up and telling the truth in her weekly newsletter, but she did it anyway.

I pressed publish and then I was like, "Oh my God, what have I done? What have I done?" But then I was like, "No, this is okay," because fundamentally, I see people turn up on social media and celebrate all of those life milestones that everybody wants to celebrate along with you. Graduation, getting engaged, getting married, having a child, becoming grandparents. We see these things play out on social media all of the time.

But the reality is part of that life cycle is the end of it. I don't want to just turn up and say, "Today's a great day. We've been great. Everything's gone fine." I just want people to understand that when you turn up as the best version of yourself, some days that requires you to just say, "Do you know what? I'm going to be gentle with myself today because I need it." And that's okay. Getting into the habit of doing that is really important, I think, as a solo business owner because it's easy to neglect yourself, so easy to neglect yourself. And if you get into the habit of that, you'll really find yourself pretty unwell pretty quickly.

Good advice there for us all. Last word on authenticity from Chris Lomas, the CEO of Moldova-based charity Hope4. I spoke to Chris in episode four. He's convinced that authenticity builds relationships.

When people believe in what you're doing, they will rally round and they will support. And this translates to business as well. If people are just real and credible and authentic, got friends now across the LinkedIn platform, and they're not trying to sell all the time, they're just trying to be real and relatable. This will always rely on a community, and the community is all about relationships. So I had to realise that I have to form relationships. We feel over the last two years, we've been building our credibility, our transparency, our authenticity, to a point now where I don't feel the need to constantly beg people. I just feel the need to enter into relationships.

Okay, onto the second A, audience. If you are telling stories for business, you must think about who you're talking to, what they're going to be interested in, and where they hang out. Will they read your posts on LinkedIn? Will they visit your website to watch a video, or are you reaching out to them with a commercial, online, on TV, or on the radio? You might need to tweak the way you tell the story depending on its location. Remember, Ally Lang said the content they create at Maple Street is tailored to different radio stations and platforms, so the stories sound appropriate for those platforms as well as appealing to the right audience.

Okay, when you've found your audience, how do you get them to listen to your story? In episode one and episode two, Gareth Dimelow told us that business storytelling often falls flat because the audience just isn't engaged.

Businesses sit around going, "These are all of our priorities. These are the things that matter to us. These are the things that we want to achieve and accomplish. So we need to tell the world that we're doing those things." And the audience is going, "Great for you. What about me? That's not my priority. That's good for you. It's not really for me." The why of your business has to resonate with your audience. They've got to say, "Ah, yeah, I get that. That connects with me." What I think an audience would say if you say, "I set up this business because I want to have a better life for my kids," it means, "So what you're saying is you want to earn more money and do less work. Well, bully for you. I'd like that too, but I'm busy with my priorities over here." So you've got to find a way of connecting the journey that you are on with somebody else's journey.

That word connecting is really significant. It came up in my chat with Chris Lomas from Hope4 too. Chris uses video pretty much daily on LinkedIn to tell stories of poverty and people trafficking in Moldova and beyond. He discovered he got better results from calls to action when he started reporting the story in a way that presented the facts without guilt tripping the viewer. Chris now invites his audience to be part of the solution, which connects them with the story, and he follows up so the audience gets to find out what happened. Here he is in episode four.

Someone in the US, a friend of mine, Lydia Higgins, made a great statement. She said to me, "So what you're doing is connecting people with their own impact?" And it was just like, "Yes." And I said to her, "You haven't trademarked that or anything have you, because that's now become our signal." Connecting people with their own impact. That's it. Being able to demonstrate to people how, if they trust me with £1, if they trust me with a cup of coffee, cost of a coffee, that they can actually see how that is impacting real lives.

Chris's discovery totally backs up what Gareth Dimelow said at the start of the series, that to make a story effective, the audience needs to feel like they're involved with creating it. And we also saw the proof of this in episode seven in the story of Britain's most expensive pork pie. If you remember butcher Mark Turnbull initially got a terrible reception to it from his audience on social media because people kicked off saying it was insensitive to create this caviar-filled pie during the cost-of-living crisis. But once Mark engaged with the audience and explained that any proceeds would be given to the local food bank, it turned into a feelgood story. The audience got behind it, the story went viral, and Turnbull's received loads of positive media coverage.

And that ticks another one of Gareth's boxes that the best stories are one's people want to share. Okay, the last A in WAAAMMM is aim. What is the aim of your story? What are you doing it for? Here's corporate filmmaker, Jules Sander, from episode three.

It's really good to have a very clear brief so we know what's wanted, we know what the aims are, what needs to be achieved, what success for this particular piece of content would look like. So knowing all that in advance, not necessarily knowing exactly what's wanted from the content, but knowing what it needs to achieve can really help to make sure that we get something that does do that.

And do clients come in with very clear ideas like, we want this to be live filmed footage, or we want this to be an animation, or we want this to be an explainer format? Visually, do they know what they want, or is that often up to you to figure out what would work best?

It really depends on the client. So sometimes they're very clear. Sometimes it's very open, which gives us this amazing opportunity to be creative and come up with different ideas. Sometimes they'll be very clear, but when we talk it through, we're able to look at, will what you've got in mind actually achieve what you want to? And sometimes we're able to change it based on that. And then there's times where we've been working on the strategy or the comms or the planning, and that will lead itself very clearly to a piece of content is needed. So there's all different ways that it comes in and how we develop it.

Sometimes corporate storytelling has a very obvious aim. I narrate a lot of corporate videos, and more often than not, the scripts end with to find out more, visit our website. A nice clear call to action. But sometimes a story's aim is more subtle than that, to entertain the audience or just to share something which invites them to get to know the business a bit better. And the ultimate aim of those kinds of stories is to create trust.

Okay, so we've covered W, why, A, authenticity, A again audience, and still A, aim. Let's move on to the three Ms. I'll let Gareth Dimelow from Inside Stories remind us what they are, as he invented them.

What I came up with is a simple mnemonic with three Ms, which is for something to be a story, it has to be meaningful, memorable, and moving.

Thanks, Gareth. Okay, M number one, meaningful. If you've been following closely, you'll already have figured out that this overlaps hugely with audience. A good story will resonate with your audience. If they actually care about what you are saying, then it's meaningful to them. Here's Gareth Dimelow again from episode two.

Everybody's out there talking about why and purpose-driven marketing and purpose-driven storytelling and all of that. That's become the vernacular now. But I do think that you should hold yourself to a higher standard when articulating a why, and ask yourself, firstly, is this true to me? Yes. Does it mean something to somebody else? Because that's the difficult bit.

I think butcher Mark Turnbull's story in episode seven was certainly meaningful. I reckon anyone would empathise with the anguish and desperation Mark faced in 2020. He told us about running out of money when he tried to expand the family business and building an out of town food hall. He borrowed his dad's life savings, £150,000. It was supposed to tide him over until a bank loan came through, but Mark was hugely over budget, and by the time he got the bank loan, he'd already spent his dad's money.

Well, I can tell you in February of 2020, every night I went to bed and said a prayer every night. And in my prayer, I wasn't bothered about the food hall or the business or anything. All I wanted was to get my dad's money back. At that point, nothing else mattered. Just wanted to get my dad's money back. Every night I would go to bed. It's funny, I've got to be careful how I put this, but COVID wasn't sent by God to save Turnbull's, but COVID did save Turnbull's, and it got my dad his money back. And it's not something I'm proud of because I know a lot of businesses struggled through COVID, so I have to be careful how I share this story. But for me personally, it saved our business.

If you want to hear the full story, head over to episode seven. The chances are after that short clip, you are already interested and invested in Mark's story because it was full of drama. At the start of the series, Gareth Dimelow said that for him, for something to feel like a story, it must have a driving force or a moment of inspiration or a test or challenge or failure that they bounce back from. I think most people would agree that Mark's stories got all that covered.

Onto M number two, memorable. The stories you tell to market your business need to be memorable, and you, the business owner, need to be memorable too. I think Dai Rose from Sterling Welsh nailed it in episode eight.

I've got this thing about financial advisors, and the stereotype is that they're generally male. They're generally grey. They're generally in their 50s, boring. And we say on the website, "Look, none of us wear Rolexes," which we don't. "We don't drive Ferraris, and there's nobody in the office called Tarquin." So yeah, we play on that a little bit because again, I think it just breaks down those barriers and people know them what they can expect when they speak to myself or one of my colleagues. We're not going to talk jargon at them for an hour and a half. We talk to them about what they want to talk about. We let them set the agenda, and I think that puts people at ease.

So how do you tell your story in a memorable way? Well, you can make your audience smile like Dai Rose. Everyone wants to be entertained, so using humour is a great way to be memorable. And the worst thing you can do is to be boring.

In episode three, corporate filmmaker Jules Sander talked about capturing people's imagination. She said it doesn't matter whether your audience is internal or external, no one deserves boring content. She talked about giving a sneak look behind the scenes, showing something surprising or unexpected. Anything to grab the viewer's attention.

One of the things, I always think, which came to me from my TV days, is with whatever you're doing, your information you want to get across and your stories in there, but to try and pull out the most interesting points straight away. So we always plan it that way anyway. It doesn't necessarily work out that it does make sense or it does come across, and we can play with the story a little bit once we're in the edit, but we'll often try and find what is most interesting about this. And then you start with that.

I think Jules makes a great point here about not necessarily telling your story in order. Gareth Dimelow talked about this too in episode one.

I get invited to anything that involves stories because people say, Oh, well, you're the storyteller. We want you to come along. We've got a great day of stories planned." And it might be a programme of speakers who've all been invited as special guests to tell their stories. And a lot of the time what actually happens is people just stand up and effectively talk through their CV.

And I would argue, and part of the reason we do what we do at Inside Stories is we all instinctively know what a story is. We feel when we've experienced a story. But a lot of things that people will dress up as a story, because let's face it, story sounds nicer than content or story sounds nicer than prose, but what they're actually doing is they're just reeling off a sequence of things that happened.

To be memorable in your storytelling, the story has to be about something. Your audience won't remember every detail you shared, but they do need to remember what it was about. If you are stumped about how to address this in your business storytelling, there were some great pointers in episode six from Maple Street Creative head, Ally Lang.

She said, "Which station do you work for?" And I said, "BBC London." And she said, "Oh my God, not surprised. That is the most boring radio station I've ever heard." And I'm sitting next to the managing editor. She talked about how you engage with people. And she talked about heart, health, and pocketbook, what the Americans refer to as-

What people care about.

... money. Yeah. These are the three key things that people really care about. And it changed my career because I went back to BBC London and I started telling stories from the inside out. What really helped at that time was we'd expanded the sports brand to seven days a week. So there was a lot of airtime to play with. And also, we were really trying to get more female listeners to the sports show. So that helped as well, because what we started to focus on, or I started to focus on, was the stories behind the individuals in sport. So we stopped talking about the stats. It wasn't like one win in five. It was about rivalries. It was about stepping up to the mark. It was about. It was about these small differences in elite sport.

What we had then was we discovered that the female listeners that were listening would listen for twice as long as the male listeners because they were buying into the stories we were talking about behind the individuals.

Telling stories from the inside out. I love that. So the final M, moving. This is a funny one because you probably think that a poignant film is more likely to move you than a corporate video. But moving doesn't mean making you go all teary, it just means making you feel something. That's why when I'm invited to narrate a corporate video or a rebrand film or a commercial, I always ask the client to describe the tone of the piece. Is it uplifting and inspirational, exciting and purposeful, informal and tongue-in-cheek, reassuring and calming, formal and authoritative.

I also ask to hear the music that's going with my voiceover. Music really sets the tone, and it helps me understand the feeling of the piece if I can listen to the music. It's my job to deliver the client's message and tell their story in a way that creates the desired emotional response in their audience. So if you are storytelling for business, you need to figure out what you want your audience to feel. Here's Gareth Dimelow in episode two.

If you're making a horror movie, you want to scare people. If you're making a comedy, you want to make people laugh. If you're writing a drama, you generally want to try and make people cry. But we all recognise that those stories give us an emotional catharsis, whatever emotion it is.

So if we just transpose this over onto business storytelling for a second, how often do people think about the emotions that they want to inspire? Of course they don't. What they're doing is they're prioritising, how long have we been in business? What are our annual billings? What are our plans for growth? How many clients have we got? What they're not doing is going, "What do I want to make people feel? And more importantly, what do I already make people feel when they work with me? What is the overriding emotional response that they have to it?"

Lizzy Parsons from Start Small Plan Big addressed this beautifully in episode five. She wants her audience, her clients, to feel relief and respite when they work with her. And her storytelling reflects that.

Start Small Plan Big is all about helping my clients go from feeling like their life is complete chaos to having a sense of calm. When you are a mom, you have lots of things that are on your plate, but then you add a business to that and all of your business' demands, it's really, really hard to feel like you are actually getting it right, that you are delivering in all the right places, that everybody's cup is being filled. And what tends to happen is we go, "Okay, fill the kid's cup fill the partner's cup, fill the parents' cup, fill the grandparents' cup, fill our friend's cups." And then our cup is empty. And we're like, "Oh God, how did this happen?" For me it's all about basically stepping into their business and helping them to take back a little bit of control and just feel like this business is working for me rather than it's like one more thing that I have to just survive through.

Lizzy has thought extremely carefully about how she presents her business and how she wants her clients to feel. I mentioned earlier. Here she is talking about her brand colour.

The colour is a bright, sunny yellow. And I love this colour because... And this is again like a reminder to my grandparents. My grandparents, my grandpa especially, used to always sing. He was a constant singer, which I've inherited, and so is my small human, which I think is wonderful. But this colour reminds me of the song, You Are My Sunshine. So whenever I see that, that's the feeling that I get. And I just said to myself, "That's the feeling that I want to have when I see my own content out in the universe. That's the feeling I want to have, and that's the feeling I want other people to have." So I thought, yeah, let's do it. So I've got this super bright yellow and I've got super bright pink, and they feel like me.

And that warm burst of sunshine brings us to the end of our storytelling toolkit. Whew, we did it. A whole series about business storytelling. And now it's over to you. I want to know how you get on with putting all this good stuff into practise. So please drop me a line with any thoughts or feedback or results you want to share. The best way to get my attention is to send me a DM on LinkedIn and start with the word Storytelling For Business. And if you'd like to work with me, please get in touch, however you like.

A final big thanks to my wonderful guests. I know they'd love to hear from you so do reach out and tell them I sent you. Everyone's contact details are in the show notes, including mine. And now it's time to go. Thanks for joining me. If you've enjoyed the series, please do share it with anyone who might find it useful. I'm Katie Flamman, and this is Storytelling For Business.