Want an Impactful PR Campaign to Tell Better Stories with These Tips?

It’s important to tell good stories when creating an impactful PR campaign. That’s because people resonate with stories a lot more than with dry facts. You can talk about your company’s performance, its equity shares, and its vision but if you don’t have a story about it you’re not going to get very far.

That’s what happened recently when Tesla and Facebook came under fire for their misaligned actions. They didn’t want to focus on how much money the companies lost, or where they’re going to be in the next few months. They focused instead on the work. The work that was needed to get the job done and ensure that this doesn’t happen again. That’s why it was such a powerful campaign.

Elon talked about sleepless nights and getting 4 hours max sleep over the issues with production. He wanted to assure the public that he was solving the problem and turned it towards a human-capital issue rather than an automation one. What’s happening now is that companies are firing human labor to replace them with automation. Elon suggested the opposite, and is now hiring a lot more human workers as a result. This has been a good PR move as it tells a redeeming story of when a powerful CEO relies more on the American workforce than Chinese technology.

That’s the power of a good storytelling campaign, where your entire PR team is powered up and ready to talk about your brand to the media. You don’t need a charismatic leader or a good launchpad to tell your story. You can do it all with a tale that makes sense to the gatekeepers (publishing houses, media personalities) and the readers (online, offline and video).

Have a Clear Narrative

One of the worst things we see in the PR industry is an unclear narrative. That’s where buzzwords fuel media launches, and companies don’t understand why their customers aren’t engaged with their product.

Think about Mac and Microsoft. One has a distinctive story, an arch, a leader, and a narrative. The other is a corporate giant. Even though Apple has more cash reserves than any company in the world, it still believes in the basics of storytelling. That story is about how they’re just a bunch of tinkerers and engineers who want to create better products. It was started by its charismatic leader Steve Jobs, and the story is so powerful that it’s stood the test of time.

Having a clear narrative involves bringing everybody on the same page. You don’t want one department talking about the company one way, and another talking about a different way. That’s why it’s the key to have a clear narrative established from the get-go. If you’re doing this exercise for the first time, then chalk out your company’s positioning strategy and understand where you are in the game.

You can also talk to customers and get a better idea of what they think about you. Maybe you’re too corporate or too vague. You can use that as fodder for your company’s story and talk about it to your customers. If you were the corporate brand that didn’t see any merit in talking to its customers, talk about how busy you were changing the industry.

If you haven’t innovated enough, or as much as your competitors have, then talk about how you care deeply about customer service. You need to scale yourself down to the minutest details and see where you fit in the greater landscape of your industry.

A Journey and a Leader

Every company, big or small, started with a leader or a group of friends who came together. That’s the secret sauce behind the company’s core narrative. If you can humanize the company and scale up your leader’s persona then you have a great recipe for success.

PR works both ways – as a journey to building reputation and a message that the brand wants to convey. Every company learns how to crawl and then walk. Running comes after that and being first in the race of life is the ultimate goal. That’s how companies can establish that feeling of ‘journey’ in their narratives.

If you’re able to develop a leader’s journey or that of an underdog, you have the right set of tools to give it your best go. That’s why stories count for so much these days. People want to support you, either with word of mouth or with their money. That’s why it’s important to invoke a sense of passion for your brand, regardless of what industry you may be in.

E.g. if you’re in the janitorial services business for large restaurant chains, you can have a story about how passionate you are about sanitation. You can create a story about your brand, it’s roots and why it’s interested in cleaning up the restaurants of America. That leaves a deeper impact in the minds of the people, than simply talking about how good your service is.

Companies of any sizes can do it – and that’s the best part. You don’t have to be excellent in any one area or have superlative customer service. You just have to have a good enough story so that your customers remember who you are, and the media wants to bring you up. Everyone loves a good comeback story, meaning that even if you make mistakes you can still prop yourself right back up.

It’s all about how well you frame the narrative.

Conclusion

The key to an impactful campaign is a better storytelling. If the story is about yourself, you must be able to establish a clear narrative, have a defining moment in your story, and talk about a key lesson in the end. This humanizes the brand to some level, making it more accessible to the general public. The enforcers of the brand (PR, CEO, CMO) should be all-hands-on-deck when it comes to ensuring that the message is consistent across all platforms.