Why is it so hard to remember key points from a meeting, but it’s so easy to remember that thing your friend told you the other night? And why is that thing from your friend so hard to forget, no matter how hard you try? Why is it so hard to memorise a speech and yet that terrible song you heard twice is permanently burned into your mind?

There are a few answers to these questions, but one which covers all three is storytelling. It’s that secret ingredient that transforms information into something our brains are ready and waiting to soak up. From old parables and sayings to YouTube videos and Facebook stories, there is certainly no doubting its timelessness and effectiveness.

This effectiveness is ripe for business to harness, bringing parts of an organisation to audiences in an impactful way while lending a new lease of life to important areas which don’t always trigger gasps of excitement.

The importance of storytelling in business

It’s not all about making something exciting, however. Storytelling opens up some big and very practical benefits to organisations when they use it to communicate with staff and stakeholders, as well as with customers and other key groups.

The message itself

The importance of storytelling in business is first felt in the messages you share. Using storytelling to share information and news makes them more memorable, engaging and entertaining. These factors matter; they are the difference between your announcement blurring into the information background and capturing the attention of a viewer in a lasting, meaningful way. They allow you to give your message the qualities it needs to create the awareness, change or training impact you are hoping for. The form of storytelling you use makes a difference here too. We conducted research with Professor Richard Wiseman, Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and found that compared with a ‘talking head video’, whiteboard animations were:

• 33% more entertaining

• resulted in a 15% increase in information retention

• 66% more likely to be shared

Going even further, storytelling allows you to make a complex subject accessible and easy to understand. This can happen through the use of metaphors, references or the style of language (written, verbal or visual) that you use. Coming back to entertainment, these things also don’t hurt when it comes to an important topic such as a policy update. The richness and extra flavours storytelling adds go a long way to transforming how these subjects are received and perceived. By coming across as entertaining, viewers are more engaged and so remember a lot more.

Connection, personality and uniqueness

As all this message supercharging is going on, storytelling is also doing something else which is very important - it adds the essence of you. This humanises even the biggest corporation and gives viewers something deeper to connect with. It allows you to be bespoke. From branding and tone to the inclusion of key values and famous faces in your business - storytelling allows you to make more of your message and to make it bespoke. And it doesn’t have to be all about the business, tailoring your storytelling to the subject and audience is a great way of boosting engagement and effectiveness.

The bigger picture

Storytelling, especially visual storytelling, allows you to do something else with your messages and announcements. It allows you to show how points layer and connect with each other, which is ideal when showing how different parts of an organisation or message fit together and build towards one goal.

These stories in the form of a blog post, illustration or whiteboard video are then perfectly placed to take your message far and wide, thanks to versatility of storytelling and technology. This is because messages and formats like video can be made compatible and primed for a whole range of devices and locations - meaning someone on the bus scrolling through Twitter on their phone will see the same thing as someone logged in to the desktop on LinkedIn and a homepage.

Uses for storytelling in business

There are plenty of opportunities for storytelling to bring these benefits to your business at every level.

Pitching

Pitching is a great way to use storytelling. Storytelling combines engagement and being memorable with the ability to communicate a lot of information quickly. This makes it great at informing and connecting with viewers, getting across key points, your personality and what makes you unique. We loved creating this pitching animation for BlueVolt.

Report summaries

Communicating the context as well as the outcomes is an important and carefully considered part of sharing report findings. Storytelling helps you hit this balance by making the context engaging and the findings memorable, making sense of both and completing the package with calls to action and plenty of sharing options. It was great doing this for More In Common and their Britain’s Choice report.

Advertising

Storytelling in business doesn’t have to be reserved for the more corporate things; it can (and probably already is) be an amazing asset in your advertising, whether that is B2C or B2B. The power of a narrative combined with ability of visual storytelling to be tailored so closely to a subject, audience or network let you make adverts that are even more considered and powerful. We did just this for Big Yellow, making these stings for YouTube.

Corporate storytelling

Nothing can communicate the grand vision of an organisation like a well-crafted piece of business storytelling. Particularly in animated explainer videos, business storytelling connects the different aspects of your business together, from operational areas to your past, present and future. Visual storytelling narratives can weave lots of different information into one thread, allowing you to show a complete picture that is engaging, entertaining and memorable. It was a pleasure to do this for WeTransfer.

Process explanations

It’s not all grand visions though, sometimes what is most important is communicating how a specific process or part of the organisation operates. This can be crucial for staff and clients, showing people how they work and the high level of quality they work to. Visual storytelling is a perfect choice for this, making the complex and important accessible, engaging and memorable. We loved applying our visual thinking skills to the EuroQol EQ-5D registration process.

Training

Staff training is an area which faces new challenges as the working world moves to remote and hybrid models. From communicating the company culture and HR policies to specific tasks, distance has made a lot of things harder. But here too, storytelling can help. Creating visual storytelling which uses all the strengths we’ve discussed to explain a task, or is heaped with company personality and values, can help you ensure new hires are fully up-to-date, even if they’ve never set foot in an office. Made for the Royal Society, in this animation we explained unconscious bias.

Presentations

Presentations to staff, shareholders or the executive board are an important part of company life. Even here, visual storytelling is your willing assistant - helping you to engage and explain key points and details. This often has the added bonus that as well as being more memorable, you can give your viewers the visual storytelling assets as a take-away from the presentation. We had the opportunity to do this for The CRM Agency, this is a clip from the presentation.

Storytelling techniques for business

How can you draw on these strengths to give your message the same sticking power as those songs that stay with us, whether we like them or not? We’ve put together a list of storytelling techniques and tips that allow you to make the most of what storytelling offers.

1. Connect emotionally - the beauty of storytelling in business is that it allows you to combine the rational with the emotional. This powerful combination allows you to make your points in a way which will feel relevant to viewers, staying with them.

2. Be human and vulnerable - going hand-in-hand with emotional connection is storytelling’s ability to humanise even the biggest business. Whether it’s Google or your Uncle’s hardware shop, storytelling allows you to give your business a face, a voice and a personality. Use this humanisation to engage, relate to and inspire viewers at an even deeper level.

3. Narrative structure - use the power of narratives to frame and deliver your points and information. There are different approaches depending on your message and this article has some great options and examples.

4. Be bespoke and unique - this does three things. It highlights your authenticity, ensures your story stands out from the crowd and allows you make your storytelling perfect for your audience or subject matter. This allows you to fully harness the benefits storytelling can bring.

5. Feature your brand and your values - storytelling, especially in the form of whiteboard videos, gives you lots of opportunities to include your brand and company values. From the script, tone of language and voiceover to imagery, you can include these alongside the more specific messages. We go into more detail on this here.

6. Know your audience and set goals - understanding who your audience are and what they relate to gives you the information you need to tailor your storytelling to your audience, boosting engagement and relevance. Setting goals for your storytelling before you begin is a great way to ensure you cover everything you need. The goals you set allow you to keep your storytelling on track from first meeting to finished project.

7. Accessibility - this is an important consideration; storytelling needs to be accessible to all audiences. From your colour choices to the way you use subtitles and audio descriptions, there are several ways of making your storytelling accessible. This article goes into more depth.

8. Calls to action - these are a great thing to use as you reach the end of your story or message. They tell your viewer how to interact with you further, taking their engagement with your storytelling to the next level.

Business storytelling allows you to connect with and invite people into your vision, values, goals and practices. Storytelling allows you to combine a thorough and nuanced explanation with engagement, entertainment and improved information retention - making it an ideal tool for every area of your business.

This is why we love storytelling; it delivers messages in the best way to have maximum effect - informing and inspiring the people it reaches. If you have a message, story or idea that could benefit from storytelling in the form of a whiteboard video, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us today!