6 Brand Storytelling and Marketing Lessons I Learned From The Moth

Marketers are storytellers. If you don’t believe me, check LinkedIn. Brand Storyteller, Chief Storyteller, Data Storyteller – these are actual titles that people have. Is “storyteller” just an exaggerated buzzword used to aggrandize modern professionals? It does sound more stimulating than Marketing Director, I suppose, but there’s more to it than that.

I should know. I am a Storyteller.

No, seriously, I tell stories at events produced by The Moth and participate in a variety of other storytelling shows around New York City. These short stories are true tales from my own life told in front of live audiences. Some are a little funnier, some are little sadder, each is a little bit different.

Regardless, every time I tell a story, I learn more about what works and what doesn’t, what phrases seem to flow and which I stumble over, and most importantly, how to communicate my ideas efficiently and effectively.

I’ve sharpened the same skills over the past 12+ years as a marketer in the areas of merchandising, email marketing, and social media strategy. At Sprinklr, I help marketers across industries create valuable experiences for a world transformed by social media.

With that in mind, I want to share what I’ve learned on the storytelling stage that helps me in the marketing meeting.

Keep it Short, Sweetheart.

There’s a five-minute limit at Moth open mic StorySlams, so I need to keep my story tight. The more time I have to prepare, the more concise my story becomes. I eliminate repetitive phrases that don’t enhance a theme, and remove details that don’t support my primary or secondary message.

I don’t try to cover my entire freshman year of college, or even the first semester, or even that party I went to that one night. I describe the moment I spilled a drink on the girl I had a crush on at this party I went to during the first semester of my freshman year in college. Just that moment.

A marketer’s message must be just as simple, and accomplishing this requires the same steps: be prepared and eliminate repetitive or distracting details that don’t enhance your primary message. Don’t try to “boil the ocean” with your calls to action, and instead focus on what you want your customer to do right now.

Have a Beginning, Middle, End…and a Point.

Without a logical narrative structure, you don’t have a story. You have a bunch of words vaguely coalescing to form an anecdote. You need the sense of “I was there, and then this happened and now I’m here…and that’s important because…”

With marketing messages, the beginning is the “current state” – the not-quite-good-enough situation that your audience is in. Storytellers must then establish the “ideal state” – where your audience could be, where things are better. This is our goal: the Emerald City at the end of the yellow brick road.

Then comes the journey – how we’re going to get there; the transition from our sepia-toned today, to a technicolor tomorrow.

This structure holds when marketers describe the improvements they saw when testing a new approach, or when they’re explaining to an internal audience how they’ve accomplished certain goals. They must cover the full journey from point A to point B.

Know Your Theme.

Every open mic StorySlam at The Moth has a theme that all stories must follow. Within this restriction lies opportunity. With a required theme, I must examine my story from a variety of angles and determine the best path to take, and hopefully find a way to reflect the theme in a unique and surprising way.

What is the theme of your marketing message? Of today’s social media content or next week’s email newsletter? How does that tie to the larger themes of your current campaigns, and your broad company goals?

You’re only fenced in if you look straight ahead. Look up! The sky’s the limit even if you are restricted to a small piece of earth.

Know Your Audience.

I don’t tell the same story in the backroom of a bar that I might tell on the stage of a nice theater. I surely won’t tell it the same way, or highlight the same parts. The pace may change, my tone of voice might shift.

Omni-channel marketers need to reach audiences where they are, in their preferred voice. Copy for a Facebook post is going to be different than a banner ad or a billboard.

If I talk to my audience flipping through a magazine as if they were scrolling through a Twitter feed, I’m likely missing them. Consumers are wary of marketing messages to begin with, so it’s crucial to present your story in the smartest possible way.

Know Yourself.

When I approach my storytelling, I try to stay aware of the types of stories I’m comfortable telling, how I perform in different sorts of venues and situations, and whether or not I’ll be comfortable improvising on the spot depending on how the audience is responding to me.

The truth is, you might not know what will work until you are performing. Maybe a line that you thought would get a lot of laughs falls flat, or perhaps a line that you improvised brings the house down.

In a marketing campaign, if you see that something isn’t working, you need to quickly make the necessary change. And if something lands with much more success than you anticipated, then it’s time to shift your approach and follow the momentum.

Find the Human, Find the Human, Find the Human.

Every time I get up to tell a story, the audience is full of human beings. No monsters, no supervillains, no zombies. People who want to feel something, not just be told something. They want to relate to me and hear something unique at the same time. Some of them probably had a bad day. Some of them won’t like my story. Ya know, human being stuff.

I love storytelling as a performance, but since I’m also a human being, I won’t nail it every time. I’ve always got something to learn. A phrase can be tweaked, a sentence polished, but eventually the words need to exit my mouth and enter the hearts and minds of those listening.

At that point, it’s not my story any more. It belongs to all of us.

To you, the reader of these words, I don’t know your business or what your customers need from you, but I can almost guarantee your customers are human beings too. Give them something worth hearing, ideally something worth feeling.

You won’t make it perfect every time, but that’s what testing is for, right? Tell your story, measure your results, be honest about what worked and what didn’t. Forgive yourself when you flop, and then get yourself a fresh sheet of paper, Word doc or PowerPoint deck and start again. Once upon a time. Anything can happen after that.

The author, Joe Charnitski, is the Director of Marketing Solutions at Sprinklr.