How to go from complex to compelling storytelling for your business

Jeffro (00:00.834)
Welcome back to digital dominance. In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about creating compelling messaging. I’m joined by Valerie Chan, the founder of platform PR, a boutique public relations agency that specializes in elevating brands in complex industries like legal tech, fintech and security. With a deep expertise in corporate storytelling, Valerie has built a career helping companies navigate growth acquisitions and public offerings by crafting tailored compelling messages that truly resonate. And that means Today, we’re going to dive into how businesses can leverage storytelling to drive success, develop these growth strategies for high impact results and how to incorporate this innovation and emotional intelligence into your leadership while you do this. So whether you’re looking to grow your business or refine your messaging, this episode will hopefully be packed with unique insights that you won’t want to miss. So welcome to the show, Valerie.

Jeffro (00:51.106)
Yeah, definitely. know, Val, I like to jump right into the questions. So I’m just gonna hit you with the first one right off the bat. How is corporate storytelling different than regular storytelling?

Val (01:34.532)
about what are you trying to have them understand. And so the goal is to build an emotional bridge between your brand and your audience. But to understand that, you must understand your customer so that you can create a story that will resonate with your customer.

Step two in trying to create a corporate storytelling narrative is to paint a vision of what success looks like. You kind of want to showcase a solution, then tell the audience how you’re going to get them there. So you want to paint a scenario in which your customer’s pain points are resolved. And obviously, just like the hero’s journey, you kind of want to show that you’re

Val (02:57.242)
Like I had mentioned before, when it comes to the hero’s journey, you know, what is the solution? How are you going to help? then, you know, step five is to have your customer take the center stage in a corporate storytelling narrative. And so in doing that, your customer is the hero and people can relate to stories around people, not products, but your brand plays a large part of the larger narrative that you’re trying to create. step six in creating a corporate storytelling framework is to ground your vision in reality. So, you want to show evidence that the future you’ve laid out is attainable and be wary of over-promising. hopefully that plays a little bit of, you know, like that it’s understandable when I’m talking about it from a corporate storytelling context versus right

Jeffro (04:16.874)
Yeah, well, mean, so that’s a great overview, but it’s also a lot of steps. So let’s kind of break it up a little bit. I like how you highlighted the fact that the customer should be the hero of the story. I think that’s a big mistake that a lot of people make because in our own heads, we envision ourselves as the hero. And if you’re the business owner, that’s kind of naturally the way you start telling your story and about, know, I founded this business and this is what we do. But you can’t do that if you want to connect with that target audience. So you’ve got to do that groundwork first.

Val (05:15.574)
and they come at it and they talk about how they’re solving an industry problem, right? And what they’re trying to do to create a solution to solve that problem. And so out the gate,

Val (06:35.149)
when you’re starting, it’s easy to have a founder story and it’s like an end of ink or an entrepreneur that says, hey, here’s a little bit about me. started with five nickels in my pocket and now I’m worth billions of dollars because I’ve done this. But that’s all about the founder. doesn’t really tell you the problems that they’re trying to solve. So to create an actual viable company that helps people with products and help people, you actually need to communicate to the market why you’re helping the people. So, yeah.

Jeffro (07:09.79)
Yeah. Well, I’m glad you mentioned startups too, because that’s actually a really interesting use case compared to a more established business because they have different audiences. And so sometimes when you’re telling these stories, you have to tell multiple versions of it because for one, yes, if you’re talking to investors and trying to attract money, you need to be focusing on the product you’re solving, why it’s different, how there’s a market for it, et cetera. But once you get some money, you got to kind of shift and talk to the customers, right? And talk about the outcome that you’re going to help them achieve and so that really kind of visualize the difference, I think, between who you’re talking to.

Val (07:44.756)
Yep, definitely. So as part of, I teach at the Nazarene Entrepreneurial Center every now and then. I think I try to teach at least two times a year. And one of the seminars that I actually teach is around marketing through the company life cycle, right? So there’s a difference between whether or not you’re marketing as a seed stage company and startup to a series A, to a series B and beyond, right? And as or even SEO matters. It depends on what you’re trying to do. like going in and being able to talk about startups, and then I’ll tell you how it’s different from a series A to a series B. From a startup perspective, know, at the initial stages of a company, you’re trying to attract new customers, you’re trying to attract investors, you’re trying to show that you have some sort of market viability, so to speak. Your product may or may not have market viability. That’s when you typically have a series A funding because you’ve had a little bit of, you know, success under your belt and you’re trying to get and show that you could actually have annual recurring revenue and actually grow a business at series A and then series B and beyond. But as a startup from a founder’s perspective, the types of stories that you’re

Val (09:59.367)
and industry events that you could have one-on-one conversations with the potential buyers, right? And then start a beta program. And then the stories will be around about features and functionality, you’re launching your product, that sort of a thing, and growing your team and you’re growing your presence. As you get more clients under your belt, then you figure out, hmm, I have market viability.

Val (11:29.21)
or something unique that is wholly interesting to the company and the culture. And then you talk about some of the customer problems. And then you have a couple of founding stories, but it’s more along the lines of how the founders really cultivated a community and the products and what the vision is for where the market’s going to go. Then you get series B.

Jeffro (12:13.244)
Yeah, so there’s a constant string of stories that you’re telling and you’re kind of adjusting as you go based on who the audience is, know, that that story is intended for. So you got to, you can’t just keep telling the same story over and over. You got to be aware of, are we using too much jargon in this one? Is the audience going to think this is boring or irrelevant? You know, how do I take something that may be complicated, but make it interesting? Because Like I mentioned in the intro, you you’ve worked with legal tech and FinTech. These are complex solutions sometimes. And, but to the lay person, if they hear a story that was meant for investors, they’re just, their eyes are going to glaze over and they’re not going to connect with that. So how do you even realize when you’re doing that and make sure that you are picking the right tone and the words and everything with who you’re trying to reach.

Val (13:36.596)
what are the piece points to get to step A, step B, step, you know, the five year plan, so to speak. And what are the stories that we need to create, especially based off of where the customer is or where our client is in the life cycle, right? And so typically there’s three to four to five different tracks of different stories that we’re trying to cultivate for different audiences. And then we’ll, you know, we’ll start pitching those stories out and we’ll look at the different mediums on how to actually do it. But it’s more of a, you know, it’s more of a storyboard with an arc, with a corporate narrative and a corporate arc that here’s the journey. And it does play a role in, okay, what are the technical stories we need to tell? What are the business stories we need to tell? What, you know, what do we need to tell? Like, for example, one of our clients who has a product for the insurance industry. How do we tell that story to the insurance industry, the business press, in addition to, the legal press? So it’s really interesting because the way that you craft a story is very different for every single audience, and it needs to play a role in who you want to become or who the company wants to become as they go along and the process. And that’s the reason why we work with a lot of companies that either scale tremendously over a period of 18 months and get acquired, or we work with companies that have started from six and now they’re at 300 or into 300 employees or 1,000 employees or worldwide. It’s fun working with them, but it’s a continual dance of the stories that we tell.

Jeffro (15:33.209)
And also within that, as you’re choosing what stories to tell, you have to choose the medium, right? Is this going to be just a written article or is it going to be a video? What level of production value are we going to use for the video? All of that can play into it.

Val (16:48.362)
there, once stories came out, we translated it and we worked with a video production crew to translate it into just a social media clip. In addition to, they were able to take parts of the violin article and create a webinar out of that, believe it or not. Just because the… talking points were so needy you could. And you could even have a conversation around what the implications of some of the requirements for actually complying with a second request, right? And some of the antitrust challenges that a cross border transaction actually held. So you think about what the story is going to be what the talking points are going to be. And then you think about, okay, how can this translate into multiple medium? So you don’t have to recreate the wheel. And I think for marketers, it’s a fallacy to only think that, say, PR is one medium, when it could be multiple media, right? It could be a way to tell a larger, more fulfilling story that meets your marketing goal and your business goal. And in our case, for this particular client, actually, like none of them, two new clients, like I mentioned in the beginning.

Jeffro (18:29.252)
Yeah, that makes sense. mean, it’s, some of this, think, makes a lot of sense when you’ve got a more established company, you have the resources to put into this. But it got me thinking also about how some people like Gary Vee and Martel and Alex Ormosi are talking about, don’t spend so much time manufacturing content, but you should just kind of document. But really, the difference is you’re front loading the effort of planning the content versus back loading it, where after you’ve got this stuff, you figure out, okay, is this the story I want to tell? How do I edit it, et cetera.

What are your thoughts on those two different approaches?

Val (19:02.132)
I actually think they go hand in hand, right? So it’s funny because a lot of our intake process when we first start with a new client is to look at the documentation that a company has and then to work with them hand in hand in creating the content or actually work with the content that they already have to create and backfill content that could be used for marketing purposes one is not better than the other, think. It’s easier if you look at content that’s already been created, but there are some times where, say you have a product manual, that’s good example. It’s hard to wrap marketing or PR around a product manual if you don’t know the brand or you’re just learning, so to speak.

Some of it’s not sexy, but some of it is. So I think it just depends, really. Yeah.

Jeffro (20:07.534)
So what about for a lot of small to mid-sized businesses? They kind of struggle with not just creating content, but even while they’re doing it, balancing this visibility with also credibility as they’re doing the growth phases, because they have to decide, all right, am I going for the viral trends or am I going to try something that’s unique to us, but I don’t know who’s going to see it? How do you help them kind of navigate that in order to effectively spend their time to achieve a good result?

Val (20:37.652)
I’ll give you the standard answer which is it depends. It depends on if you’re a B2B company or a B2C company. I think going back to how do you balance it all? What do you focus on, especially if you don’t have a lot of dollars? The question is, who’s your ultimate customer? Do you know your customer well?

Jeffro (20:43.949)
Right, sure.

Jeffro (21:26.034)
You really have to understand your customer. We’ve talked about that on other episodes before, but it underpins so much of this that if you’re just trying to make video because you think I’m supposed to make video, it’s probably not going to do as well as it would if you really understand who you’re talking to. And you go back to what we talked about at the beginning, right? Understanding that hero’s journey, putting the customer at the center of the story you’re telling so that they can connect with that.

Val (21:51.132)
I do think, and I want to bring this up because it’s actually, I see it more and more is the customer profile and really understanding the customer. A lot of people don’t understand the customer as well as they could. They put together like a profile of the customer, but they don’t understand say who they are, what the habits are, know, what the micro challenges are that their customer

are facing, who the influencers are, and how the influencers actually impact the sale, potential sale of the product, from an influence perspective. so asking some of the questions of like, what are they eating? It sounds silly, but or what are some of the challenges that they’re trying to solve, is really important to understanding your customers.

your buyer, your influencer, and the micro movements where you can actually make a difference.

Jeffro (23:00.332)
when you touch those, then it’s a huge difference.

Val (23:06.324)
It’s a huge difference. I will have to say, there’s one startup that we’re guiding right now. They’ll be launching shortly. It’s been fun being a part of their advisory board just because when they launch, they’re going to come out with guns of blazing. Because of some of the upfront work that we’ve done from a startup perspective before launch, they’re going they’re gonna launch with such a powerful force and a powerful voice in the marketplace that, you know, all of a sudden they’ll make a mark to some of the existing players and people won’t know what hit them. So like the upfront work to actually creating a corporate story and to doing the work in marketing is going to be imperative. It’s not just, hey, let’s think about corporate story storytelling, you know, once we have a product, it’s, you know, let’s think about where the company is going, what the goals of the company are, and how marketing and business development can actually solve the problems of the company. And let’s figure out a timeframe to actually do this so we can make an impact because the first couple of months, the first year really does make a difference. And it’s not just about launch. It’s about know, telling the ongoing story and creating this drum beat so that the company can be well known on an ongoing basis.

Jeffro (24:45.696)
Yeah, no, and I think that’s a perfect example of how all the, the work is, if you know, it feels like a lot, but obviously it’s going to pay dividends for a long time if you do it right. And don’t just try to short circuit this like, come on, get it done. got to get out the door, like do it right. And then it will help you for a long time. And we talked a lot about startups, but even if you’re an established business and you’ve never really done this, you can always kind of start over and have a rebirth where you sit down and figure out, okay, I got to better understand my customer. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I should know by now. I’ve gotten all these complaints. understand these things they struggle with. Put it on paper, map it out and figure out, okay, here’s what we’re going to do. And you kind of, you could call it a launch if you want, or, you know, it doesn’t have to be a rebranding, but it’s essentially the unveiling of your story, right? That’s now going to better connect with your audience and better serve you and your business as you’re trying to grow forward.

Val (26:09.914)
with the company, but for them, they became so intimately familiar with their brand and their brand was everything and all the stories that we created actually like went back to who they were, how they actually do things and really communicated the brand promise that what they did really kind of made an impact and that led to their growth and that was viral growth.

Jeffro (26:37.437)
Yeah, well, and once you define that brand promise, it helps your employees and your team actually better deliver on that, right? So you’re going to end up doing a better job and keep those customers because now everybody understands what we’re doing here.

Val (26:50.036)
Exactly, exactly. And I think going back to, you know, complex storytelling, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the problems that people deal with, especially in highly regulated industries, are complex, or they want to feel, like a lot of people want to feel smarter than they actually are, or they’re solving a problem that they think is super important, when in actuality, really understanding the nuances, and when to talk technical jargon, and not is super important. And storytelling and good storytelling really helps you define, okay, when do I need to be technical? When do I need to talk like I’m talking like to my grandmother? Right? When do I actually need to communicate something and something that’s impactful to the layman and to the say the legal audience or the regulatory audience or the compliance audience? Right? Or banking?

You know, it’s one of those things where that’s where the fun kicks in, in telling the different stories in the different ways that you can.

Jeffro (28:00.671)
I love that and that’s kind of a really good way to put an end cap on this conversation here. So thanks for summarizing that so well. And thank you for joining me today. I really enjoyed hearing your insights and perspectives on all of this. You’ve explained it very well and I think that’s helpful. So for you guys at home, you can connect with Valerie on LinkedIn. You can check out her blog or her podcast. Links will be in the show notes as always. And Valerie, I’ll have one last question for you. What is one… actionable piece of advice you give to business owners who are listening to this that want to improve their storytelling and marketing strategies.

Val (28:36.446)
Take a step back and plan. It’s pretty simple, but I cannot stress enough that when you start telling a story or you launch into PR or marketing, it’s not just about action. A lot of it’s about planning and taking a step back and really understanding the larger vision of what you’re trying to create and then creating a work back schedule of how you’re going to get there. So take the time to do that

Jeffro (29:08.146)
Awesome. Simple for some people, maybe harder or easier said than done, but you can do it guys. Thanks again for being here, Valerie. Thanks to all you guys for listening. If you thought this episode was valuable, please leave a review for the show on Spotify or Apple. And after that, take care. We’ll see you next time. Thanks again.