Communications strategist Joshua Altman shows SMB owners how to fix scattered messaging using two working frameworks: Story, Narrative, Brand and the Four Languages Model. Practical, plain-language, built for solopreneurs and growing teams.
GROWTH PILLAR: Marketing & Branding
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A working model for brand messaging, a clear read on the difference between marketing and communications, and a two-page desk exercise to audit your own message this week.
Most SMB owners think they have a marketing problem. Joshua Altman thinks they have a communications problem.
Joshua is the Managing Director of Beltway Media — a fractional Chief Communications Officer practice based in the DC area. In this Canada Growth Network Power Hour, he walks through the two frameworks his team uses with clients every day.
The first is Story, Narrative, and Brand. The story is what happened — the events, the characters, the conflict that got you here. The narrative is the ongoing logic that connects your stories to the problem you solve. The brand is everything else — the logo, yes, but also the hold music, the auto-responder, the online reviews you can't control, and the customer experience itself.
The second is the Four Languages Model — what people read, see, hear, and experience. Each language amplifies the other three. Miss one and your message loses power.
Joshua gives a simple desk exercise anyone can run this week. Take one sheet of paper, divide it into three: story, narrative, brand. Take another, divide it into four: read, see, hear, experience. Fill in the blanks with what actually exists today — not what you wish existed. That's where clarity starts.
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Joshua (00:05)
I'm Joshua Altman, Managing Director of Beltway.media. We are based in the DC area and we are fractional chief communications officers. So that means what we do is we focus on shaping perception and building and maintaining trust. It's different from a chief marketing officer, it's different from a chief branding officer. Marketing is strategies to build awareness of your company's products and services. We do a lot more than that.
We're focused on coordinating your internal and external communications, making it all unified with that goal of trust.
So why does corporate communications matter?
c it how a business communicates. Messaging is how you make people care.
So it's as much art as science. You ask a hundred communications experts, you'll get at least 200 different opinions. Communications is a process, it's not the product. You make products, but communications itself is a process. And you do that with developing the messaging and the brand strategy. Everything comes from the messaging and brand strategy. Before
you and your business can successfully communicate effectively, you need to develop this. And you do that with starting with that foundation.
And the foundation is your story. We probably hear this all the time. You know, tell your story, be storytellers. In our structure, that is actually the next step what we're talking about. But it's the story, narrative, and brand framework. The story is what happened. It's the events, the facts, the details. It's how you would tell this to your friends while you're sitting at a bar.
It has characters. It has the setting, the situation, the beginning, the middle, the present. There's no end yet. And what it has is the conflict and choices that got you here to this present.
Tell your narrative. This is when I say you hear a lot of people saying tell your story within this framework, that's your narrative. It's the ongoing logic. It's what connects the dots across your stories. It connects the company's stories, the founder's stories, all the other stories that you need to tell.
It's how you tell the story. It answers questions. It's what we say about who we are. It's how do those plot points, how do those stories connect to our big theme, which is the problem that you're solving. And critically, it's what should people conclude? It's answering that question. What do they bring and take from all these connected stories?
And the third element is the brand. We hear brand all the time. It's a very common, you know, corporate word, but what is it?
Brand is the swag. It's the discrete things, everything people connect with your business. So, yes, it's the logos, the website, the mugs, the pens, the business cards, but it's also everything else that contributes to that stakeholder experience. Which means it's conversations that you have. It's your hold music. It's auto responses on emails. Everything that people connect with is part.
of that brand. So it gives things like your purpose, the company's mission, your position, the value proposition. That swag, it's the identity and crucially the exp. It's also when you go online, people write reviews, you can't control those frequently. That's part of your brand. And it's also your media presence. It's
How they connect. So this is that last top level. The customer experience is that story that contributes to the narrative. That's why those reviews really matter as part of the brand. And it's why you can't control those. It's everything that contributes to that experience.
speaker-1 (03:41)
variance.
Joshua (03:41)
So looking back on this, the story has those specific characters. The setting, the beginning, the middle, the present, and its conflict. Narrative answers. It answers questions. It's what are we saying about who we are? How do these events connect to our theme? And what should people conclude? And then brand is. It's swag. It's those specific things stakeholders connect with the company and everything that contributes to.
that stakeholder experience. And that's our first of our two major frameworks that we use. Once we work with that one, we have our second one, which is our four languages model. So how do you actually do the corporate communications? How do you put that story narrative brand into practice? That structure, but it's there's no output. That's the structure. So story narrative brand
It's one way to do communication. This is equally important, and it's with language. You can't communicate without language. And language isn't you know English and French, those are languages, but it's everything. It's a lot more than words. It's how your stakeholders engage with your business.
There are four of them that we use, and they're all interconnected. The idea is that each of these four languages amplifies the other three. So the first language is what you. This is probably the most intuitive for people. It's the social media, the blog posts, the white papers, the pitch decks, the investment documents, the biographies. This is a partial list. It's descriptions.
On images, it's captions, all of those things are things that you read. The next is what you see. Most people see what they read, but what we see isn't limited to what. Humans are visual. We use visuals to tell stories. We've been doing it for millions of years. And visual content is a lot more than just an animated GIF, it's a lot more than a video. It's everything those audiences.
speaker-1 (05:21)
Me read.
Joshua (05:32)
It's yes, video. It's the design. It's the visual elements of text. It's layout. So it's the photos, those infographics, the web content, social media content, how it's displayed, what choices you make are very important to what people see.
The next one is here. This often gets overlooked, but it's critical. It's the video's audio. A lot of people might listen but not watch. We see that with podcasts. Some people watch, they sit down, they make an appointment viewing. Other people, they're like me, they put it on the car, they listen while they walk the dog. It's something they listen to. It's that background noise when you're reading. It's articles. If you do text to speech.
That's what people listen to. If you have physical locations, there's a lot of work being done now on in-store audio and how that affects buyer experience throughout the store from the time they enter to the time they check out and leave. Then the last one is experience. And this is the one that probably gets people the most confused. It's experiential marketing. That's part of it. It's other experiences like events and pop-ups and y you know, things on the street.
That's part of it. It's virtual immersion, it's augmented reality, but more day-to-day. It's how people experience what they read, see, and hear. So when I mentioned before that what each language does should amplify the other three, that's where experience is crucial. So it is that listening to a podcast while driving versus sitting down and watching it.
It's if you read an article or you put on the automated AI text to speech and your phone reads it to you. It's what we all do every day if you're experiencing on a mobile versus a desktop.
So what you read
The most common. We do it more frequently than almost anything else, probably in terms of corporate communications. That's social media, the online content, the Google snippets, the AI snippets, all of that. What you see, videos, photos, graphics, hear, the videos, audio, that podcast, the in-store music experience that you get, and experience, which is both experiential marketing and how people experience what they read.
So when you're thinking about corporate communications, when you're thinking about putting together your story, your narrative, and your brand, think about what people are going to be getting from each of these four languages and how they're going to consume content. Because that makes the big difference in if people can take action on it, if people can't, and if they know. These are really easy to do on your own.
speaker-1 (07:39)
And here.
Joshua (08:05)
We encourage it. You take a piece of paper, divide into third story, narrative, brand, take another, divide the front and back each into half, read, see, hear, and experience. Just write down. Fill in those blanks. What are people read? What are they seeing? What do they hear? What do they experience for your business? Go to the other one. What is your story? What is your narrative? What is your brand? And really think about it in terms of what you have, not what's aspirational.
because then that's the next step in the process. But you have to start out with what's there.
ways to reach me. Email is the best one. LinkedIn's also great. J Altman at beltway.media, know.com on our URL, and LinkedIn.com slash in slash Joshua I Altman.