You can tell stories without telling stories
Last week, I wrote about how storytelling, while it often comes off as a marketing fad, is actually a great way to convey information about causal relationships between concepts, such as your users’ pain points and the solution your software provides. I also wrote that you shouldn’t write stories in your blog/newsletter posts… which I admit probably seems like a contradiction. So this week, I want to explain how you can leverage storytelling without necessarily telling stories.
The key to making this work is that the readers who engage with your content over time are going to piece together a story, or multiple stories, in their heads, about their situation - their goals and pain points, the underlying problem, potential approaches to solving it, potential outcomes, etc. That’s what humans do, particularly when there are causal relationships involved.
I like to think about it the way books, tv and movies create sci fi/fantasy universes. For example. there’s an over-arching story to the Star Wars universe that is built up from countless smaller pieces - movies, TV episodes, cartoons, novels, comic books. Granted, each of these individual pieces are framed as narratives. But the same mechanism of piecing together a universe can happen with other kinds of content.
The Star Wars canon also contains reference materials and explainers. But for these to make sense, they have to be framed in terms of the broader narrative. The authors of those resources have to know the bigger story, even if they’re only writing about starship specifications.
As you read this, your prospective customers are piecing together their own universe. If you want them to trust what you write and to actually benefit from it, the things you write had better fit into a consistent story that you’re helping them to build.
So when I say storytelling without telling stories, I mean deliberately defining the broader story you want your readers to piece together from your content over time. Stories of how their pain points come from tangible problems with specific causes that your software can address.
Next week, I’ll introduce some of the techniques I’ve developed to make this happen.
Thanks for reading Viral Esoterica! In addition to writing this newsletter, my company, Merelogic, helps SaaS teams in emerging technical niches develop targeted and consistent messaging to give prospective buyers conviction that you will reliably solve that looming problem they don’t yet know the words for. Schedule a discovery call to learn more.