Storytelling is the backbone of good communication. It makes complex topics, or information, more engaging, relatable, and actionable. It’s no wonder that businesses leverage storytelling to communicate better with prospects and customers.
What makes for good storytelling?
Before you can produce a solid story, you need to go back to the basics. Your story is essentially how you package up your topic, idea, business, or pitch and deliver it to the audience.
Good storytelling plays a crucial role in effective business communications and messaging, which contributes to the overall success of the company. But what makes for good storytelling, and how does that apply to your business? Here are some key elements that can help you craft a better story.
Clarity: A compelling business story should be clear and concise so that the audience understands the main message or purpose with little-to-no decoding.
Authenticity: Genuine stories resonate with people. If your story can incorporate real-life experiences, personal anecdotes, or testimonials it adds credibility and relatability, making it land better with the audience.
Relevance: Tailor your story to align with the needs and interests of your target audience. It should always address their pain points, provide solutions, or inspire them in some way.
Structure: Good storytelling follows a solid structure with a clear beginning, middle, and end. To hook the audience, the story should set up the context, build tension or conflict, and resolve it with a satisfying conclusion.
Emotion: An audience may not remember what you said verbatim, but they will remember how you made them feel. Use storytelling techniques to evoke emotions like empathy, excitement, or inspiration, which can help captivate your audience and leave a lasting impact.
Visuals: We’re visual learners, so when applicable it’s worth incorporating visual elements such as images, videos, or infographics to enhance your storytelling.
Call-to-action: Every story has a purpose, and it’s your job to inspire the audience to take action. Include a clear call-to-action at the end that encourages the audience to take the next step, whether it's making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or sharing the story with others.
Mastering the art of storytelling with generative AI
Mastering the art of storytelling is no easy feat. It has to be intentional, engaging, and clear in order to hook the audience. You can leverage generative AI to help with content creation so long as you have a strong concept or theme for your overarching message.
Keep these 3 things in mind to help generative AI work for your story, not against it.
Start with an outline
Before you even think about going hands to keyboard, you should have a general idea of what you want your story to be. What do you need the audience to know about your topic? That should influence your outline and how you craft the flow of your content. Regardless of whether it’s a presentation, an article, an email, or visual content— having an outline will help you guide the generative AI to fit the narrative you need. What is the structure of your content? An outline will define your beginning, middle, and end prior to opening up a generative AI tool. Similarly, you should already have an idea of the problem you’re aiming to solve, your solution, and a strong call to action or closing statement to bring the content home.
Nail your generative AI prompt
A huge component of nailing your story with AI is mastering the prompt. If you have a thoughtfully curated outline, you’ll know exactly what you need from the AI to fill in the gaps. To get the best, most relevant AI results you’ll want to be specific with keywords, provide real examples of what you’re looking for, and be patient and willing to iterate. However, the most effective way to get relevant results from generative AI is to add your own context, real data or company information, to manipulate the prompt.
Adding context to your prompt will accurately guide the AI to give more relevant results specific to your story using your data. In Beautiful.ai, you can add additional text-based documents, pdfs or webpage urls to your prompt field, and watch DesignerBot transform them into stunning presentation slides, in seconds. This enables the AI to summarize your business documents, proprietary client information, and real reports or metrics into fully designed (and editable) AI presentations, without the need for filling in the blanks after the fact.
Experiment with different techniques
There’s no denying that artificial intelligence is, well…intelligent. But the technology itself is still fairly new, and most people haven’t discovered the full potential of what it can do. Because it’s still in its adolescence, experimenting with different techniques, softwares, and prompts can help individuals get exactly what they need to round out their story. No two results are the same, so you may try generating content several times until the artificial intelligence gets it right.
If you’re starting with an outline (per our recommendation), you might try different keywords or techniques for each section of your story to see what fits best with your topic, and then make revisions based on what works best for the overarching story.
