🔎Finding Your Brand's Stories
In-House Storytelling 101: Context Collapse #307
Storytelling is everything in corporate communications.
Unfortunately, stories are hard to find sometimes. Do you ever feel like that?
This is why having strategies for finding your company’s stories for media outreach and content creation are so damn important.
Well-told stories are freakin’ transformative for brand reputation, customer engagement, and internal morale.
Here’s how to find them.
But First… A Message From Neal
I have limited client availability this autumn 2024 + would love to work with your agency or in-house team. Learn more:
What Makes A Brand Story Good?
Good brand stories hit these sweet spots:
Relevance to your audience (Customers? employees? investors? regulators? Your CEO who lives and dies by their Google Alerts?)
Timeliness (Calendar for product announcements. Getting ahead of negative media coverage. Making sure seasonal announcements have enough time to get picked up by media)
Human interest (Do you have employees who are first-generation college students who want to share their stories? Did your product help someone avoid a hospital stay?)
Alignment with company values and messaging (I shouldn’t need to say that, but…)
Make sure you and your team are finding stories that resonate with the media, customers, or employees across the course of your corporate comms duties.
Finding Stories Inside Your Org
The first step of finding stories inside your company is doing some journalism and research work.
Engage with contacts in departments like customer service, sales, R&D, and HR to find potential stories. The more you widen your search outside of traditional contacts in marketing or public relations, the better luck you will have finding stories that resonate with wide audiences.
Look for stories that are compelling, easy to tell, or noteworthy. These can be stories about products or services, team members, company infrastructure, or a combination of them.
A few ways of doing this:
Employee Interviews: Conducting interviews or informal conversations with employees with the aim of finding unique perspectives or achievements.
Customer Interactions: Use customer feedback and success stories as potential sources of content. This can include outbound reachouts (surveys, emails) or inbound (social media, YouTube, TikTok, Google Maps or Yelp reviews)
Event and Milestone Tracking: Keeping track of company events, anniversaries, and milestones as storytelling opportunities.
The more you widen your search outside of traditional contacts in marketing or public relations, the better luck you will have finding stories that resonate with wide audiences.
Path 1: Turning Stories Into Storytelling
Once you’ve found your stories, tell them to your audiences. Tell them through press releases, blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, and social media posts.
Find the best way to adapt your stories for different platforms with the goal of maximizing audiences across the most effective mediums for your brand.
Some stories are better told through articles like this ones. Others are natural fit for video. Yet others are infographics or audio.
If you’re building your own content for your brand—which depends on a number of variables like your team’s size, budget, use of freelancers, etc.—one smart thing to do is to tell the same story across multiple channels. Your fifteen-minute raw video footage of an interview with a team member can be converted into an edited 10-minute YouTube video, a 30-second TikTok, a 30-second Instagram reel, a LinkedIn post, a blog post, a Twitter/Threads post and a segment for a longer podcast.
Use these storytelling exercises as opportunities to build visual assets for your brand as well. See what photos, videos, and graphics you can generate from your brand storytelling for reuse down the road.
The way you should tell these stories should align with your brand’s marketing and advertising voice. A brewery shouldn’t sound like NPR. Your CRM-for-dentists startup shouldn’t use “rizz” every third paragraph.
Path 2: Getting People To Tell Your Stories (Pitching To Media Outlets)
Getting media coverage is much harder than it used to be. Layoffs and declining advertising and subscription revenue mean many journalism outlets are scaling back coverage.
Getting coverage from influencers and smaller media outlets requires much more PR time and investment as well. However, it can be done.
Follow these steps:
Spend time identifying the right outlets and finding publications and influencers that align with your story’s angle.
Reach out to them with a short, succinct pitch. If your pitch is more than a paragraph, you’re doing it wrong. Aim for a three sentence pitch.
Build relationships with journalists covering your brand’s industry. Go to the happy hours. Reach out on LinkedIn. Follow their Substacks and YouTube accounts. Make sure you’re on their radar ahead of the pitch.
If you don’t hear back from journalists you’re pitching to, give them 48 hours for non-time sensitive stories and email followup. If no reply, try again after another 48 hours before moving on to the next opportunity.
Having existing content and stories on your website and social media feeds is an excellent way of getting others to tell your brand’s stories since much of the research is already done for them. So make those TikToks and write those articles!
Brand Story Success
Finding and telling your brand stories isn’t just one more thing in your comms wish list—it's a strategic advantage in a crowded information marketplace.
Focusing on relevance, timeliness, human interest, and alignment with company value will help your org uncover stories that resonate deeply with your target audiences.
Remember, whether making your own content or pitch to media outlets: Be proactive and consistent in your efforts.
The most successful brands are the ones that continuously engage with their internal teams, customers, and the broader community on finding compelling stories.
Once you have these stories, experiment with different formats and platforms for sharing them.
When it comes to media outreach, build strong relationships with journalists and influencers that make a measurable difference in getting your stories out there.
Effective storytelling is about more than just getting the word out—it's about building connections, fostering trust, and enhancing your brand's market presence.
I work with clients all the time on finding their own brand stories and building their team’s storytelling capacity. If that sounds interesting, let’s talk.
- Neal
About the author: Neal Ungerleider runs Chicago-based boutique comms strategy firm Ungerleider Works, which has developed strategy and content for clients including Google, SAP, and T-Mobile.