16 Ways to Tell a Story to Strengthen Customer and Employee Relationships (and build business, of course!)

April 27 is ‘Tell a Story’ Day, here are (at least) 16 ways to use the theme to strengthen your relationships with employees, customers, vendors and other stakeholders and build business in the coming year.  

When was the last time you told—or even thought about—the story of your business to your customers or even to your employees?  It’s much more than just the date that you opened your doors, the story of your business also includes things like:

• The chronological, major event and turning points history of your company
• What led you, personally, into the industry or to start the business
• Why you choose to operate your business in certain strategic ways
• What values you use to create employee performance expectations, and what values you expect your employees to understand and share 
• What your customers can expect as a result of doing business with you
• How you want to change the lives of your customers for the better
• What you hope you provide to your employees beyond a paycheck
• What you ultimately want your company to become when it’s all “grown up”

Here are some ways that you can tell your story in the coming weeks in order to interest and strengthen your relationships with your customers, investors, employees, vendors, the media and local leaders:

• Tell the story of your business in Facebook posts and in your e-mail newsletter.  
• Post interesting facts about your company story at the point of purchase or on bag stuffers. 
• Create an ‘annual report’ to be sent or given to your most important customers (or all customers), employees, vendors and other stakeholders to retell your story and describe how the business is fulfilling its mission and pursuing the vision. 
• Review your employee hiring, orientation, and annual training plans to be sure that telling and re-telling the story of your company, and especially the story of your organization as it pertains to what you expect from your employees has a prominent role. 
• Include vendors (especially any vendors who have any direct impact to your customer relations) in employee orientation and training.   
• Tell the story of your business in correspondence and during the proposal process with prospective vendors. 
• Create or update the “about us” pages of your website. 
• Create or update your corporate brochure or press kit.
• Send a copy of your corporate brochure or press kit not only to local media, but also to the information distribution staff of large local employers, school districts, the offices of your city government or other influential organizations. 
• Plan a corporate anniversary celebration or annual meeting and include all elements of the company story in some way. 

Here are some ways that you can translate ‘Tell a Story’ Day into business building and fun in your business:

• Hold a story writing or story telling contest 
• Partner with a local author, editor or another writing expert and hold a workshop to help budding authors in your community know better how to get started writing, how to work with an editor, how to self-publish or submit to book publishers, etc.
• Create a running story on Facebook which each new post being the next entry in the story; you can even allow followers to determine alternate endings or vote on options for the next element of the story 
• Hold a contest for customers (and/or employees) to create fictional “stories” around the origin of some of your products or services
• Add some of your favorite children’s story books (or grown up books!) to prize baskets, give them as gifts to your most important customers, use them to incentivize purchase of specific products, menu items or services or give them away as a gift-with-purchase
• Hold a book swap event for customers or create an in-store reading area with a book swap library
• Post a list of recommended reading or customers and employees favorite books on your web site, blog or Facebook, or include it in an upcoming e-mail newsletter
• Create or host monthly book club meetings, or partner with a local restaurant to help sponsor or provide refreshments for book club meetings