The Story-Relationship Funnel

- One of my least favorite cliches in the world is if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear the sound, did it really happen? Well this actually has everything to do with storytelling. Because if you're telling stories, you're trying to build an audience through stories, and no one sees your stories or hears your stories, then what's the point? So, how do you get your stories to an audience? Where should you be publishing? Where should you be talking? I like to think of it as a bulls eye. So you can divide the world of storytelling into two groups. Business storytelling and consumer storytelling.

And then you can divide your goals into roughly two categories. If you want sort of awareness in branding, perception, or if you want someone to take an action, make a conversion, make a sale. And if you divide the world into these four quadrants, then you have the start of the storytelling bulls eye. At the very center of the bulls eye, you can draw a circle. Which is across all of these goals and all of these audiences the very best place on the internet that you can get someone to experience your story is your own home turf, your own website.

It works regardless of what your goal is or who your audience is. If you can get people to come to you, that's great. But your audience doesn't just check your website everyday. So, outside of that, the step removed that also works for all four audiences is email. If you have someone's email address, you can tell stories to them regardless of what your goal is or if they're a business or a consumer. But, if you don't have their email address and they're not coming to your website, you have to meet them on their turf. And this is where the bulls eye comes into play.

So if you're talking to businesses, you're telling stories to business owners, leaders, workers, and your goal is perception or branding, you might want to publish your stories on LinkedIn. If your goal is perception or branding and you're talking to consumers, you might want to go to YouTube. If your goal is to get people to take an action, to sign up for something, to buy something, and your audience is businesses, you might want to go to SlideShare. If your goal is to get people to take an action and your consumers, say it's commerce, or products, you might want to go to Pinterest.

Each of these different channels and social networks and platforms lends itself to different audiences and different goals. But then what you should do is you should lead people deeper into your bulls eye. If you reach someone on LinkedIn with a story, the end of the story should have a call to action. Not to buy something necessarily, but to subscribe to the next layer into the bulls eye, say your emails. Get more stories like this via email. You can do this on almost any platform. And then every email that you send with more stories should have at the end of each email a call to action that says get more of this story, or get more stories from our website.

And this way you can pull people closer in that relationship to the turf that you want. You can start to own your own audience. So the idea is that you should reach your audience on the platforms that they are already hanging out on, and then drive them towards platforms that are closer to you to get them to where you want them to go.