Want to Lead your Industry? Start with a Strategic Narrative Workshop

As a CEO or marketing leader, will you shake up and clarify your corporate messaging by elevating it to a higher level?

Many executives are faced with this opportunity, and there can be several approaches to help achieve your goal. However, sometimes it takes an outside perspective to rid yourself of any internal challenges that can get in the way. 

As strategic narrative experts, we believe in taking a different approach to corporate messaging that focuses on industry category leadership and unifies your company. It all starts with our one-day Strategic Narrative Workshop outlined below – and is completed with a complete corporate messaging framework that will align your entire organization! 

If you haven’t received a free narrative assessment yet, what are you waiting for? If you want to learn more before getting started, read the “10 Reasons Why Your Company Needs a Narrative Assessment” and let us know if you have any questions.

What is a Strategic Narrative Workshop and what do I get from participating?

We developed a formalized process to help you define and own new or existing market categories. Catapult experts guide you and your team through this strategic approach – starting with our Strategic Narrative Messaging workshop (and resulting messaging framework) – that transforms the way you communicate with external and internal stakeholders. 

We then help you plan into action with a launch strategy and establish an ongoing PR-centric program that focuses on establishing the category within your industry. The results and impact are profound. Once you have a category to champion, all public relations, analyst relations, content marketing and social media campaigns have focus and, most importantly, are compelling to the market.

Here are the steps and focal points of a Strategic Narrative Workshop:

1. The Catapult team researches your marketplace(s) and competitors (assume top three or four) prior to the workshop.
2. Lead a one-day workshop with key stakeholders and executives to reveal the company’s views on the industry, customers/partners, trends and itself.
3. During the bulk of the Workshop, Catapult will guide conversations and SWOT analysis exercises to reveal your views about:
   • Market Dynamics/Trends
   • Popular Industry Perceptions/Mis-perceptions
   • Challenges (Industry, Customers, Practitioners)
   • Opportunities (Industry, Customers, Practitioners)
   • Best Practices (industry-wide)
   • Benefits/Values (to customers and the industry)
   • The Company – perceived value, current messaging, SWOT, products, services and offerings
4. Compile and analyze results from workshop participants. The analysis typically takes a few weeks and might include interviews of customers, partners, members of the media and industry analyst firms to get a sense of how they view your company as well.
5. Catapult presents its findings and analysis with recommendations on how to improve your corporate messaging through a customized Strategic Positioning and Messaging Framework.

What is a Strategic Positioning and Messaging Framework?

Based on the input gathered from internal and external stakeholders, as well as third parties in your industry, Catapult develops a summary of results from the workshop and perception audit. 

We deliver our own competitive and SWOT analysis and use our decades of experience to develop a new corporate positioning and messaging architecture for the company. This includes:

• A market position you can own and drive as a company
• A new corporate messaging framework and architecture answers and defines:
  • Who are we, what do we stand for, who do we serve, why are we different, and what is our true value proposition?
• New messaging and positioning concepts for:
  • Industry category or best practices (existing or new)
  • Competitive differentiators
• A draft of your company’s industry vision statement – why you do what you do and how you make it happen
• A new PR tagline and company boilerplate that distills your “North Star” into a concise yet powerful statement

Examples of Companies Using a Strategic Narrative Workshop

• A Strategic Narrative Helped DevOps Institute find its ‘Why’ to align the company and its offerings. “Catapult’s narrative process played a powerful role in shaping DevOps Institute’s messaging and offerings” said Jayne Groll, CEO of DevOps Institute. “Through the narrative, we adopted a human-centric focus that has driven everything we do. We wouldn’t be where we are today without looking for an external resource to help us hone in on our ‘why’ and create a company vision that we continue to pursue several years later.” Read the case study »

• “Catapult played a pivotal role in positioning Electric Cloud as an industry leader and helping it move into the forefront of DevOps,” said Sam Fell, former Vice President of Marketing at Electric Cloud. “Their ability to drive results through PR and advise on messaging strategy played a critical role in helping Electric Cloud own the application release automation space, a position that set the company up for eventual acquisition by CloudBees. I’m honored to have partnered with them.”   

I want a Strategic Narrative Workshop – next steps?

There are multiple ways to get started. 

First, if you haven’t taken the 60-seconds to fill out a short questionnaire to receive a free baseline messaging assessment of your existing corporate narrative, you can do so here.

Second, we are always available to connect. If you’d like to learn more you can set a meeting with me, Guy Murrel, Chief Narrative Officer here. 

Third, if you want to read more about the entire process and have your own guidebook for how to get started and what you need to succeed, Guy has written a book called “A Practical Guide to Strategic Narrative Marketing: How to Lead Markets, Stand Apart and Say Something Compelling in a Crowded Content World” available on Amazon.