8 Steps To Tell Your Brand Story
Throughout time storytelling has been used to share culture and beliefs, pass knowledge down from one generation to the next, and helped humans understand the world around them.
The impact of these stories are embedded in our collective believes; therefore it’s no wonder that storytelling keeps returning to the marketing spotlight. Unlocking the power of storytelling has the potential to enable a brand to create something that is more memorable than anything your competitors are doing.
- How to begin to tell “The Story of Your Brand”?
Every brand story or marketing strategy starts a question. That question is the foundation upon which your story is built. When you begin by wondering how to sell more widgets, you get a different answer than if you start by asking what makes people buy widgets in the first place. By starting with the right question that you can tell a story that resonates with the customer — one that connects your personal brand, product or service with the customer’s wants and needs.
Your marketing will succeed when you understand the answers the customer is hoping to find when they look in the mirror. Your brand story should assist them to find the answers to these fundamental questions.
2. Understanding what people want and value enough to pay for it is the hard part.
Not one of the companies that are grabbing headlines today, from Facebook to Nike started with a product or service. They started with the potential customer’s value story. You create and market a successful product or service by figuring out your target customer’s value story.
3 . Ask Yourself Why
Ask yourself why in the world you would want to take on the role of being a storyteller. It is nothing like doing another marketing campaign. The task is difficult and labor intensive. You want to be ready to tell a believable — honest, authentic and transparent — story.
Storytelling is a great way to help you develop a deeper connection with the people you are trying to reach. But brand storytelling does not mean sharing a narrative where everything is awesome and perfect. In fact, if you set out to create an authentic story and your audience sees it as dishonest, this will have a negative on your impact on the brand.
As marketers, you will need to consider what it is you want to achieve from sharing your story.
Is it to make employees relate to your company or brand culture? Is it to prove that your brand is actually living its values and mission statement? Is it to make people understand your brand by knowing its background and history? In any of these cases, you will need to decide who it is exactly who the target audience is for your brand.
4. Create The Connection
Great stories are capable of creating real connections: whether between the audience and the hero, people and their heritage, your customers and your brand, or your employees and your company culture.
That relationship is created with the audience when they find something of relevance and value in the story. When they hear something that convinces them they should care about your brand. It may be because you share certain values with them, or because they can see something of themselves in your story.
5. Understand Your Stage
As with any words or imagery you want to put in front of an audience, you will need to design your delivery format, be it video, online social media or blog posts, a speech, or something else completely.
Be true to yourself and your story. Be authentic, transparent and honest. Don’t be afraid to admit you need help to tell the story in the right way for the format. This may be from a videographer or a professional writer, and sometimes what seemed the obvious choice for collaboration may not be the best choice. Not all writers’ good storytellers.
6. Message v Storyline
Chances are that most of the marketing you are involved in is structured as formulaic messages, like “Look at this great product, it can make you or your life better, you have to buy it now.” Imagine any good story you know forced into this style. Its not something you would take serous, is it?
To captivate an audience, you need to present a subtler setup. Often it’s the stories about overcoming challenges and adversities, or coming of age and taking responsibility for one’s faults to grow humbler and wiser that captivate us as an audience.
They are stories of evolution that takes the main character — in this case the brand — forward and adds more dimensions. Many of the fictional characters we stick with may have their flaws, but they become relatable, three-dimensional beings who we care about and even forgive.
Compare this to the typical, one-dimensional talking head proclaiming the authenticity, or uniqueness of a brand. Nobody believes in this anymore. And given the communications overload nowadays, almost nobody is listening or paying attention to this type of marketing.
7. Don’t Believe The Hype
As new technology and new marketing disciplines emerge that promise the only way forward, it’s easy to become distracted. New technologies can be great distribution or additive points for telling your story, but technology or special effects will not make a bad story better. It does not matter whether you are putting “digital,” “integrated,” or “non-linear” in front of “storytelling.” If there is no dynamic, no good and bad, no relatable characters, your audience’s interest in the story will quickly fade.
8. Good Stories Take Time
You cannot whip up “The Great Story of Your Brand” in a few hours, and you cannot expect it to make its impact in the hearts and minds of people in an instant. If you think otherwise, be prepared to fail and fail again.
Remember, “The Great Story of Your Brand” is more than a chronology or a list of achievements. You should go back to the first thing you put down in writing several times over, and put this in front of people for to critique and ask for their input and revisions.
Be prepared to scale when the story starts spreading. Be ready to respond to questions, curiosity, and negativity — another reason why it is immensely important your story is true, authentic and honest and not perceived as a lie. You may not win everybody over, nor should you aim to, but at least you will have your audiences respect for being honesty and transparent.
The effect of an irresistible, authentic and transparent story can make us change our mind on the brand we are going to align with and purchase. Now, go tell your story.
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