Narrative in Tech: How to Build a Good Story

Marketing in any industry can be difficult. Marketing and narrative building in Technology can add a whole new layer to the equation. How much do you share? What narrative makes a good or bad one? It can be hard to learn where to put your energy when trying to build a good story and with it a marketing strategy. 

Especially when starting as a small company where there is not always a budget for a full marketing team or member, it can be helpful to find out how to build a good narrative in your tech startup. 

A big and almost undeniable need in any marketing plan is how to bring in storytelling. Creating an intriguing and thought-provoking story can help your company during sales calls, but also can bring in new customers through word of mouth. 

Within these narratives, you can retain more customers, solve their questions, and help create a vision of your company for the world to digest easily. While working on forming your narrative, it is important though to take a lot of notes and remind yourself who your audience is. Making sure you are selling to the right person is just as important. 

Creating a Narrative Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

Start from the Beginning 

It always is interesting to hear how an idea became a working company with employees. If you have an interesting story or ways to connect with people through your idea try to pull it into your company’s narrative. 

This helps customers see the passion behind the company. It humanizes it and the people working at the company. This story will thread together why, how, and when the company formed while proving you are actively selling or making products for a greater good. You are answering a question when you share the origins. You are answering why you are there and where your values came from. 

Sharing the beginning of your story can happen in a variety of ways. Here are a few to look into:

• Blog posts 
• Interviews (written, video, or podcasts)
• Creating your own video to put on a website
• Through spoken word at trade shows or conferences 

At FindLight, we did this through our story page. Through this, we have been able to communicate why we built FindLight and also how customers can use our site for their benefit. We also have used the page to prop up our values as a company and show how we have built upon them.

Incorporate Values and Hold them Tight 

Sharing the process of forming your company will help lift your narrative into the current light. What happens after sharing your origins is creating its present tense in your daily meetings and within your own company. Remember: your narrative needs to hold true internally as much as it does externally. So whatever values you decide to implement towards your customers make sure your employees would agree to them as well. 

In return, these values you choose will hold you accountable at work but also will help guide your storytelling as a company. Values can be morals, like “shipping in eco-friendly packaging”, or they can be slogans that speak your morals into a way of life for the company, like “customers first” or “uncompromised quality”. 

Narrative Building Photo by Medienstürmer on Unsplash

Find Ways to Involve the Customer in the Narrative

As your try to build a customer base it is helpful to explain why you are the most qualified to be working with them. Examples of this are breaking down steps you’ve taken, what you are working on now, and where you hope to be as a company. Showing the customer your evolution and how they will fit into it helps them see where your tech and they work in tandem. 

If you are talking to someone technical that understands the jargon used in your industry, great! Feel free to whip out the jargon and dive deep into the technical side. If you are trying to appeal to a wider audience, work with jargon and jargon-free content. 

A great way to show your work to the customer is through case studies and past customer opinions. Whichever route you choose for storytelling it is important to stay connected with your audience and keep them engaged.

Create Customer Voices 

Now that we’ve created great points in your own narrative, you can add another layer. Adding in past customer stories and experiences helps validate your values and the story already being told to customers. 

Through these stories or referrals, future customers can see how your product impacts or creates solutions for other customers like them. 

Your customers are at the heart and soul of your company. Try and create a process where customers can provide feedback. Their words can be the most effective marketing tactics possible. Their narratives help bring your words more validity and life. 

Use Leaders for your Narrative 

We must emphasize that if you are a founder of a company you have to know your voice will be vital to the narrative of the company. People will invest in something that feels human to them. That being said, some companies choose to create an elaborate profile page. This landing page helps bring to life the founders and the leaders of the company. 

On this landing page can be small bios; maybe even a video or past interviews and articles about the founders. This adds to the narrative of the company by involving the people that built it from the ground up. 

People love to know who they are working with, and who is behind the machinery and the technology they are buying. Why not add a page to the website to help intertwine the two?

Building a Narrative Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash

Narratives are important in the end because they are what catch the initial attention of customers. It helps make a sales pitch, more conversation-like. The stories you tell as a company evoke a more intense memory for the customer.  In the end, a story can help create better brand awareness for your company and keep a reputation behind your name.

To communicate our narrative to industrial suppliers and convey the benefits of joining FindLight we have come up with our own Get Started page where you can see that we address two of the most axial problems of sales and marketing: global reach and brand awareness.