Tell Your Story

Structure your pitch as a story, and it’s much more likely to work for you.

I talk a lot about the importance of telling a story in your marketing. But what does that mean, really? What — exactly — IS a “story?”

A story has five things:

• Setting — The Where, and When.
• Character — This is Who, the person you’re rooting for or against.
• Conflict — The struggle at the core of the story, the tandem of outcomes representing success and failure that hold the reader in suspense.
• Plot — This is What, as in What Happens. Beginning, Middle, Climax, End.
• Theme — The Why. This is the connection between the story and the reader, what the reader takes away.

A story ALWAYS has these five things, though one or more can be implied rather than explicitly stated (as the theme almost always is.)

Here’s what Actifio does, as most marketing would explain it:

Actifio is a protection and availability storage platform company that pioneered the industry’s first storage system optimized for managing copies of production data, eliminating redundant silos of IT infrastructure and data management applications. By introducing virtualization into data management, Actifio delivers an application-centric, SLA-driven solution that decouples the management of data from storage, network and server infrastructure and reduces costs by 10X.

Here’s what Actifio does, told as a story:

Actifio liberates your data from the siloed infrastructure that keeps you from advancing your most urgent priorities; liberating you from the excess cost, complexity, and stress of managing cloud-scale application data on infrastructure designed for the client-server era.

Which is more effective at getting you to want to learn more?