Is Storytelling The Big Secret Behind Marketing Your Business?

Short answer: YES

“Storytelling in marketing.”

“How to tell great stories in your business.”

“Turn strangers into clients with business storytelling.”

Honestly, there’s a part of me that doesn’t even want to write this because GOOD LAWD COULD IT SOUND ANY MORE LINKEDIN BRO?!

You can almost see the accompanying photo of a man in a gilet leaning against a rented Lamborghini telling you that people don't buy products, they buy stories.

And yet I refuse to be put off by the abhorrent way some marketers describe storytelling and how to use it in business, because underneath all the weird formulas, forced vulnerability and stories about missing the bus that somehow end with “and THAT'S why your sales funnel isn't converting”, there is something I think we're massively underusing.

Storytelling is an absolute powerhouse of communication.

BECAUSE MARKETERS DIDN’T INVENT IT

Humans have been doing this for a very, very long time.

We were telling stories considerably before Instagram

One of the things I've been doing lately, because apparently having one thought is never enough for me when I could instead open 46 tabs and accidentally begin an anthropological investigation, is looking at storytelling beyond marketing.

And this is where it gets proper fascinating.

Storytelling appears across human cultures. Researchers studying the Agta, a hunter gatherer population in the Philippines, have even looked at the role stories play in communicating things like cooperation, egalitarianism and social behaviour. Their paper opens with an extremely simple statement: “Storytelling is a human universal.”

Which makes sense when you think about what stories actually allow us to do.

I can tell you something that happened to me ten years ago and, for a few minutes, you can borrow the experience. You weren't there, but you can picture the room. You can understand what I knew at that moment and, crucially, what I didn't know yet. I can show you a mistake without requiring you to make it. I can take something abstract like grief or ambition or belonging or fear and put it inside a kitchen, a conversation or a Tuesday afternoon.

We use stories to carry information between people, and our brains seem to rather like them.

A 2021 meta analysis looked at more than 75 samples involving over 33,000 participants and compared people's comprehension and memory for narrative and expository texts. Overall, narratives were better understood and recalled.

I want to be careful here because this is exactly where marketing internet tends to get overexcited and start shouting that HUMAN BRAINS REMEMBER STORIES 97,000 TIMES BETTER THAN FACTS.

The research is more nuanced than that. The kind of information we're communicating, what somebody already knows and the way a story is constructed all matter. But there is good evidence that narrative structure can help us comprehend and remember information.

And then there's something called narrative transportation, which might be my favourite phrase I've learned this week.

Why you occasionally forget you're being marketed to

Narrative transportation is essentially that experience of getting mentally pulled into a story.

You know when someone starts telling you something and suddenly you're IN? You're picturing it, anticipating what happens next, feeling something about the people involved and, for a moment, your attention is inside their little world.

Researchers have been studying what this does to persuasion for years. One meta analysis looking across 64 articles found evidence that being transported into a narrative can affect things like attitudes and intentions. There is research in advertising and business contexts too looking at how narrative transportation can contribute to trust, connection and responses to brands.

This does not mean tell a story and everyone will buy your stuff.

THANK THE LAWD.

Storytelling isn't a Jedi mind trick, and research into advertising doesn't suggest that putting something into story form automatically makes it brilliant. Things like identification, emotion and the actual story being told matter too.

And I actually love that, because it means the answer isn't simply MORE STORY.

It's better, more human, more recognisable story.

Unfortunately, marketers got hold of storytelling

And this is where things occasionally go tits up.

Because somewhere along the way we took one of the oldest ways human beings make sense of each other and developed a fucking framework for it.

Now everything needs a hook, conflict, transformation, lesson and preferably a CTA.

You missed the train this morning?

Great.

“My train was cancelled at 7:42am. At first, I was frustrated. Then I realised something.

Business is exactly like waiting for a train...”

NO.

Sometimes EMR has simply buggered your morning, Gareth.

You don't need to extract a thought leadership lesson from it.

This is the version of business storytelling that makes my toes curl because I can feel the story being reverse engineered around the lesson, and I think people can feel it too.

The stories I remember from people online aren't usually the ones where they've taken an ordinary event and stapled some business advice onto the end. They're the ones where, after following somebody for a while, I start to know their world.

I know what they care about and how they see things. I recognise the stories they return to and the phrases they use. Eventually I can see something they've written without their name attached and think, oh, that's them.

And THAT is the kind of storytelling I'm interested in.

We aren’t inventing stories for content, instead we are going wayyyyyy deeper into the stories you already have.

Which brings me to the latest thing Meta would like us all to think about

This month Meta announced Meta One because apparently there weren't quite enough options available to somebody who just wanted to tell people on the internet that she paints things and would quite like them to buy one.

There are now more subscription options for creators and businesses, with various extra features depending on the plan, and I am not telling you this because I think you need to rush off and buy any of them.

I'm telling you because this will never stop happening.

Instagram will introduce another feature. LinkedIn will change something. TikTok will invent a format. AI will change how people search. Something we're all currently doing will disappear and something none of us currently understand will become The Thing You're Apparently Supposed To Be Doing.

And every single time this happens, I watch business owners panic.

Should I be doing that? Do I need this? Are blogs dead? Should I start a podcast? Do people still read emails? Do I need longer Reels? Shorter Reels? Seven second Reels? Carousels? Threads? LinkedIn? Should I pay for the blue tick? Do I now need some sort of AI BUSINESS AGENT?! (Lawd please, no.)

And I've got a hypothesis.

What if knowing your story makes marketing changes exciting instead of terrifying?

This is the experiment I want to run.

Because what if the problem isn't actually that there are too many ways to market our businesses? What if the problem is that we're treating each new format as though it requires us to invent an entirely new marketing strategy, voice and pile of things to say?

If you don't know what you want to communicate, every new platform is another empty box you have to fill.

But if you know the stories, ideas and beliefs already running through your work, suddenly we get to play.

A seven second Reel is one container. A blog is another. So is an email, a podcast or a billboard. Some bloke standing in Nottingham dressed as a crocodile holding a sign is, admittedly, a slightly unusual container, but still.

The mechanism changes. The story doesn't have to.

And I think that gives us an extraordinarily sturdy foundation for marketing, because we're building it around something we actually own: the experiences that shaped us, the things we believe and the stories that show people how we see the world.

Then when the mechanism changes, the foundation doesn't crumble. We can look at whatever ridiculous new thing Instagram has presented us with and think, ohhhh, I wonder how I could tell this story THERE?

That feels very different from:

Bollocks. What am I supposed to post now?

Okay Lauren, but how the f*ck do I know what my stories are?

This is the bit I think people massively overcomplicate.

You don't need to begin with WHAT IS MY BRAND STORY? because I don't know about you, but that question immediately makes me feel like I'm being asked to produce a laminated mission statement.

Start smaller.

If you were sitting across the table from me, I wouldn't ask you for your “brand narrative”. I'd probably ask when you first realised you were really good at what you do, or what you believed about your work five years ago that you'd argue with now.

I'd want to know about the client you'll probably remember forever, the thing that pisses you off about your industry and the story you've told so many times you assume everybody has heard it even though most of your audience probably hasn't.

I'd want to know what almost made you stop. What you know now that you desperately needed somebody to tell you then. What you can accidentally talk about for 45 minutes when somebody asks the right question.

And then, when you gave me a big general answer like “I struggled with visibility”, I'd probably interrupt you and say:

No, tell me about the moment.

Where were you? What were you doing? What did you almost do? What did you say? What tiny detail can you still remember?

Because “I used to struggle with visibility” gives me information.

“I wrote the post, read it seventeen times, changed one sentence so nobody could possibly misunderstand me, hovered over publish and then put my phone face down on the table and went to make coffee instead” gives me somewhere to stand.

Now I can see you.

And perhaps I can see myself too.

Which, incidentally, is exactly why I've made Tell Me Everything

I've been thinking about all of this so much that I've created an entire session around it.

Tell Me Everything is for business owners who are brilliant at what they do, but whose content has stopped capturing any of that brilliance. Maybe you're bored of what you're saying. Maybe you feel like you're repeating yourself. Maybe every time you sit down to post your brain insists you have absolutely nothing interesting to say, despite the fact you can talk for an hour about your work when somebody asks you the right question.

Or maybe your marketing just doesn't sound like you anymore.

Give me 90 minutes and tell me everything about your work.

We are not talking content pillars or posting schedule. I definitely don't need a seventeen page brand document before we begin.

I want the people you love working with, the stories you've accumulated, the things you believe, the bits you can't shut up about and everything you've stopped noticing because it's simply normal to you.

I'll listen, investigate, doodle, pull threads, ask questions and probably stop you halfway through something you think is completely irrelevant because you've just said the most interesting fucking thing I've heard all morning.

Then I take all of that away and compose your work back to you.

You get a bespoke, printable Tell Me Everything document filled with the stories, ideas, language, connections and content possibilities I heard while you were talking. I want it alive enough that it ends up battered, scribbled on and sitting next to your computer because you actually use the bloody thing.

I'm not going to create or schedule all your content for you, but along with your composed artefact of your business, I am also going to delve into my own tool, The Cabinet of Curiosities and I’ll pull prompts, hooks and ways for you to share your work now. And I’ll show you how I would use your words to do it, so you have a platform to start sharing straight away.

I want you to see how much you already have to work with, and give you something you can return to the next time your brain announces that you've said everything there is to say.

I'm opening six sessions for the founder's round at £250 each.

Get curious. Get creative. Get connected.

And, obviously, tell me everything.

But before you book anything, run this experiment on yourself

I don't want you to finish reading this and immediately create a Notion database called BRAND STORY CONTENT PILLARS because I will know and I will be cross, soz.

Instead, over the next week, tell three stories.

Keep them easy. Don't try to make them Important Brand Stories. The entire experiment is seeing what happens when you stop trying so fucking hard to turn your life into content and start noticing what is already there.

1. Tell the tiny story that changed how you work

We don’t want your entire origin story, we have to be careful. Give me one moment.

Maybe something a client said, a mistake you made or a completely ordinary Tuesday afternoon when you noticed something you'd never noticed before.

Tell us what happened, then tell us what it made you think about.

2. Tell the story of something you've changed your mind about

What did Past You believe about your work or industry that Current You would now want to have a little word about?

Tell us why it made sense at the time, what happened that complicated it and what you think now.

You don't need to turn it into “FIVE THINGS I'VE LEARNED ABOUT BUSINESS”.

Just let us watch your thinking change.

3. Tell a story that appears to have absolutely fuck all to do with your business

This one might be my favourite.

Tell me about your grandma. The physics lab. The dog. The painting. The holiday. The conversation you overheard in Tesco. Something you cannot stop thinking about even though it does not immediately fit inside one of your approved content pillars.

Then get curious about why you keep returning to it.

Maybe it tells us something about what you notice, what matters to you or how you see people. Maybe there's a connection to your work that you hadn't spotted yet.

Maybe there isn't.

You are allowed to be interesting on the internet without immediately extracting a business lesson from everything that happens to you.

Because that might be the bit we've forgotten in all this talk about storytelling in marketing.

Your stories don't only communicate information about your business.

They let people recognise you.

And if I had to make a hypothesis about what becomes increasingly valuable as platforms get noisier, AI makes technically competent (but arguably boring as f) content incredibly easy to produce and businesses get handed another 400 ways to publish it, I think recognition is going to matter enormously.

It is physically impossible to be everywhere as a business owner unless you have a gajillion person team behind you. But it’s entirely possible to be recognisable where you choose to show up.

So go tell three stories and see what happens.

Do it because humans have been using stories to carry ideas between each other for a very long time.

And I don't think Meta is about to invent anything more powerful than that.

Chat soon, scientists.

Lauren

Also, because I'm a scientist and writing without referencing is just bull 💩, here are my references for this piece:

Storytelling as a human universal and its role across cultures

Smith, D., Schlaepfer, P., Major, K. et al. (2017). Cooperation and the evolution of hunter gatherer storytelling. Nature Communications, 8, 1853.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02036-8

Narrative transportation and digital storytelling

van Laer, T., Feiereisen, S. & Visconti, L. M. (2019). Storytelling in the digital era: A meta analysis of relevant moderators of the narrative transportation effect. Journal of Business Research.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0148296318305356

Storytelling specifically in B2B marketing

Anaza, N. A., Kemp, E. A., Briggs, E. & Borders, A. L. (2020). Tell me a story: The role of narrative transportation and the C suite in B2B advertising. Industrial Marketing Management, 89, 605–618.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019850118300610

The important “stories aren't automatically better” caveat

Dessart, L. (2018). Do ads that tell a story always perform better? The role of character identification and character type in storytelling ads. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 35(2), 289–304.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167811617300915

Meta One Announcement

https://about.fb.com/news/2026/09/introducing-meta-one-subscription-service-more-features-ai/