In an age of explosive amounts of data and digital transformation, breaking through to reach and grow your audience needs a very human approach; not just more data, metrics, platitudes and fact sheets. You need to tell stories. 

Storytelling continues to be one of the most powerful, effective and compelling ways to communicate–to truly reach and move another person. Maybe even more so in an information bombarded world. We need curators and storytellers to make sense of this data assault to provide context, perspectives, wisdom and thought leadership.  Storytelling can impart a lingering cognitive resonance to a topic, invites personal engagement and builds strong connections between people. We, as a species, are hard-wired to listen to and accept authentic  stories.

While an art, storytelling is also a science. It is something that can be learned and honed. Your corporate messages can be fashioned and structured into engaging narratives, dialogues and story formats. You can also look at it as the application of facts and messaging into a format that is designed for the practical purpose of engagement of the reader/listener.

1. Communicating Your Why? – Social scientists, like Simon Sinek, have proven with their research that people are more interested and motivated, not by What you do, but Why you do it? Spend time thinking about Why you are passionate about what you do and try to verbalize it.
2. Sharing Your Personal Story – Everyone's life journey is unique. There may be a number of interesting of formative experiences that shaped your decisions and the development of your firm and services that may resonate with prospects.  You may also have a number of key members of your firm that come from different, non-traditional paths that bring unique perspective or experiences to your firm.
3. Curator of Intriguing Facts/Happenings - You may be focused in an area of the market or investment processes that most intrigue and fascinate you. Share the most unique and not widely known facts and happenings in your area of expertise to further intrigue others about what you do.
4. Deep Thought and Unvarnished Perspectives - Well thought out opinions and perspectives, actively shared, invites people to listen and create a dialogue. To become known as a vocal thought leader on important and core topics can bring kudos to thinkers willing to share and take a stand. It can help you build a tribe of followers who agree with your positions or appreciate your leading important debates and discussions in that area that is also important to them.
5. Stock Stories – Versus focusing on explaining conceptual investment philosophy such as top down-bottom up deep value free cash flow etc, stock stories give you practical, more tangible examples of  the outcomes of your portfolio process that investors can relate to. Three value managers can state the same or very similar investment philosophies but different stock stories can differentiate how they uniquely apply their process to the same universe of stocks and provide investors with a better picture of what to expect from your portfolio management. I can personally vouch from my experience that stock stories work exceedingly well in differentiating your firm and it works not just in retail markets but with pension consultants and institutional markets as well.

Practical pointers on how to keep developing your story, mindset and positioning:

1. 360 discussions – Do not just rely on your own thinking. Openly bring in and ask others for their thoughts and perspectives on your story: other principals, staff, clients, vendors and strategic partners. Sometimes we are so busy and engaged doing what we are doing that we cannot see the big picture or the small but powerful story to tell.
2. Positioning as a thought leader – To build your status as a thought leader and build that social capital for your business, you need to actively and consistently get your message out in multiple formats and places to build that cumulative positioning as a recognized and accessible expert.
3. Curation awareness - Everyone in your firm (not just portfolio managers, researchers, senior management)  and external partners should be asked to be on the watch to find and collect articles, YouTube videos, tweets, interviews, webinars, etc that contain interesting commentary or facts in your area of expertise. They should be put in a central repository in your firm that you can readily draw from to keep feeding your thought leadership and outreach.
4. Build a platform – Besides just internally collecting data points and stories, build out your website to create a carefully curated central repository for your clients and prospects on your areas of expertise—consider it as further positioning your firm as a subject matter network.