You should read this even though it's about storytelling

As a software engineer who’s relatively new to the world of marketing, I’m implicitly suspicious of anything that feels like magic beans sold by marketing gurus. And now that I’m trying to play the role of the marketing guru with this newsletter, I would expect nothing less from you, dear reader. That makes me a little nervous to write this post about storytelling, which has become a bit of a fad in the marketing world. So to make it clear that this isn’t just magic beans, I want to use this week’s post to explain why storytelling is a real thing, and why you should use it.

Now, before I get into why storytelling is good, actually, I want to clear up two common misconceptions that give stories a bad name:

1. I’m not suggesting you write stories in your blog posts. No “once upon a time” or any of that business. You can see that I don’t write posts that way, and neither should you.

2. I’m not talking about stories about you. No one cares what your story is. (Unless you’re one of my clients, in which case I care. But not because I want to write about it for your prospective customers - for other reasons. No one else cares.)

I’ll write more about both of those in future posts. But for this week I need to address why you should bother with stories in the first place.

So, here’s the thing that, once I realized it, made me a believer in stories:

Stories aren’t about time. Stories are about causality.

It’s common to think of a story as a sequence of events that happened one after the other. This frames a story as being about the progression of time. But it turns out stories are only correlated with time. A story is really about how each event causes other events, which cause other events and so on.

In other words, what makes a story interesting is the causality relationships between the different elements. In fact, any time you talk (or write) about these causality relationships, you’re telling a story whether you recognize it or not. This is even the case for causal relationships where the time element is either not so important or not there at all.

Want to understand why a customer might choose your software over other alternatives? That’s a causal relationship between pain points and action, so it’s a story.

Want to help a prospect understand how the underlying dynamics of their situation are causing their big looming problems? More causality. Another story.

None of that should be too controversial. But the next step is where folks tend to get tripped up. Remember how I said that you shouldn’t actually tell stories in your marketing content? Well, it turns out you can leverage stories without starting each post with “Once upon a time.”

The approach I’ve developed with my go-to-market clients at Merelogic uses stories as internal tools. I’ve found that by writing out prospective customers’ goals, pain points, options, etc. in a narrative form instead of just as lists, it forces us to be much more precise and much more realistic about all those elements. And we can then translate that deeper understanding into much more targeted and effective content.

In the next few weeks, I’ll walk you through this approach in more detail. But for this week, I just wanted to be clear that I’m not writing about storytelling because it’s a fad. I’m writing about it because I’ve seen it work.

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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.