It can be difficult in today’s overly digital world to connect with your customer base. Businesses have a duty to engage their audience on a deeper level than ever before. Doing this well can be the difference between an effective marketing brand campaign and a failing one.
Brand storytelling is a chance for companies to engage their audience and get them interested in the emotions and history of the company. Consistently sharing why a product matters, why it was created, and how it changes lives puts attention on something other than the company itself and creates an emotional face of the company that people can connect with and get involved in. With all of that said, here are some helpful things you can focus on to help you apply the practices of brand storytelling!
Key Elements
There are many key elements of brand storytelling. There are books and full six-month classes over this subject! There are some very key elements that you can use to assess and implement into your business quickly. The best way to start this process is to answer these questions and compare them to your current content output. Are you communicating this information effectively, if at all? Here are the questions to help you find the essence of your brand:
What’s your reason for being / What problem are you solving?
What’s the difference between your vision and your goals?
What makes you unique compared to other similar companies or products?
What values do you hold most important?
How have you failed?
Answering these questions will allow you to see what areas of engagement you are currently missing out. Storytelling has to go beyond just the facts, though. It’s about the story itself: the beginning, middle, end, the characters, and the emotions. Striving to fully develop a narrative is a good way to approach brand storytelling.
Be Unforgettable
Today’s marketplace is crowded with millions of companies and products. The digital world allows all kinds of companies a ‘fair’ chance to compete for a piece of the market, but conversely, it makes it hard for original brands to stand out. That’s why just having a quality service or product has become less of a selling point, and in its place stands the way brands can talk about their story and their importance in that particular market. This distinction is why it is so important for your brand to be unforgettable. Audiences are constantly exposed to similar messaging and campaigns, so the best way to stand out is to be you. No other brand can copy your story or the real essence of why your company is here.
Using narrative to share what your company has been through, why your company is here, and by what your company will be remembered for is an effective way of building an engaged audience that continually invests in your future. One of the best ways to go about this is honesty and transparency. The idea of brand storytelling is not to make up stories, but to truthfully communicate to your audience what your company stands for, the challenges you’ve faced, and your successes in a way that encapsulates your audience and provokes their emotional response. Doing this will increase your brand favorability and can make your product or service more memorable.
Drive With Personality
Personification is the part where many companies begin to struggle. The idea of creating a personality in your professional writing is a difficult task. Too much and it’s unbelievable and not relatable, too little and it’s a stale, boring read. The best way to approach this task is to use your company’s preferred buyer persona as your launch point. Create a character that that persona could relate to and can root for. Use this character as the personality at center stage of all your brand storytelling writing. The point of this character is not to be a mascot for your company, but to enable your audience to have a face to emotionally connect. Creatively and effectively implementing this personality will make your brand memorable and create a story arc that your audience wants to follow, causing them to come back and check in with the company continually.
Creating and implementing these stories can be a difficult task. HeadsUp Marketing specializes in brand building and storytelling. If you have any questions about brand storytelling or would like us to help you strategize your next marketing move, feel free to reach out to us!