Tips for Mastering Your Brand Storytelling
Brand Storytelling
Brand storytelling is a critical component of your marketing strategy that helps get your values and mission across to your customers. You may have a brand and logo, but do you have a clear picture of the story your brand is trying to tell? Do you know your brand’s mission, message, and goals? Telling the story of your company’s history and mission and building a brand narrative can help you reach your ideal customers, foster trust with them, and help build a winning social media marketing strategy.
Ways to Use Brand Storytelling
1. Fill in the gaps
Brand storytelling allows you to seamlessly fill in the gaps between messages on your platforms and build on your existing business reputation. Telling your brand’s story will help your customer connect the dots. To do this, you need to dive deep into your brand. Therefore, you need to do three things:
- Understand where a gap exists in the picture you are painting for your customers
- Help the buyer see how your company contributes to society, their own goals, etc.
- Use this information to show the customer how you will help them find a solution personally or professionally
2. Invigorate your mission
When you fill in the gaps for your customer, you also invigorate your brand’s mission. Doing so allows you to show your customer why you stand behind the value of your products or services. By telling a story, you can help a customer understand why you are committed to your brand’s mission and purpose.
3. Give a historic background
Customers want to know what happened, historically, that caused you to create and develop your digital brand. Therefore, sharing your company’s history can help your customer see what led you to create your products or services (if you have one). It gives your audience a clearer insight into the marketing values and influences that have driven your brand to its position in the marketplace.
4. Think about the core values of your company
Prior to putting any kind of marketing materials into the world for all to see, consider the basic values of your brand. Does the content of your story match the values and voice your brand is aiming for? If so, you can move ahead.
Seven tips to create powerful, disruptive brand storytelling:
- Keep it simple – our memories and attention spans are short. Stick to one core message. Truly powerful stories are never complicated.
- Make it human – use emotive, engaging yet easy language. Utilize empathy to connect and be relatable. This is not a job for robots.
- Don’t think literally – find an unusual take on your core brand message or idea. Think bigger, bolder and higher.
- Be disruptive yet familiar – it must feel unique yet intuitive to the brand so you can stick out without seeming farfetched.
- Idea before execution – think big idea first then execution. The story determines which influencer or digital platform will be best for the idea, not the other way round.
- Make the touchpoints work for you – different touchpoints have differing capabilities and functions. The story needs to be refreshed differently for each of them.
- Make your consumer a co-author – get audiences to contribute, amplify their voices and replay it in some way. Encourage them to make their mark on the brand’s story.