Brand Storytelling: Tips to Tell Your Brand’s Story
A good brand story will help you connect with potential customers on an emotional level. It forms the basis of the perception of your brand by the target audience. And if you wish to stand out in an ever-increasingly crowded market space, a compelling brand story is essential.
What is a brand story?
A brand story expresses a company or organization’s values, purpose, and mission in a narrative. It’s about more than just telling your customers what you do — connecting with them emotionally and inspiring them to take action. Brand stories should feel authentic and unique, allowing people to get to know the company and the people behind it.
Why is the brand story important?
Brand storytelling is crucial because it enables companies to authentically stand out from their competitors. It helps customers get to know the company, its mission, and its brand values to decide better if the product or service is right for them. Successful brand storytelling can also set your business apart by providing a unique perspective and creating an emotional connection with customers. For example, a company focusing on sustainable practices might tell stories about its commitment to reducing environmental impact and building products with minimal waste. By sharing these stories, the brand can create an emotional connection with customers who share similar values.
Tips to Tell a Compelling Brand Story
Telling a successful brand story can be a complex thing to do; however, it is also simple. All it takes is knowing what to include and how to do it. Here are three ways to tell your own story more effectively:
Create a brand narrative around your mission and vision
A strong brand is built on having a clear set of values, mission, and vision that can be communicated to customers through storytelling. Your brand story should briefly explain what lies at the heart of your company’s purpose. This helps consumers understand what you stand for while also helping them understand how they fit into your company story even before committing to a purchase.
Follow the steps below to create captivating, authentic brand story:
- Know your audience
The first step to telling your brand story is knowing your audience. The more detailed you can get, the better. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Who do you want to reach? Knowing this will help you decide on a target audience for what to include in your brand story.
- What do they want and need? Understanding your customers’ needs and wants will allow you to focus on providing solutions that engagingly meet those needs.
For example, your target audience is young professionals seeking career growth opportunities. In that case, you should focus on stories of how people have grown within the company. You could also highlight the values and culture of your organization that supports this kind of growth. If your target audience is parents looking for reliable childcare options, you might focus on stories about experienced employees and your organization’s safety protocols.
2. Demonstrate radical transparency
Radical transparency is an excellent way to show customers that your brand is human. You can do this by sharing failures, mistakes, and learnings and being open about your company’s journey. Demonstrating the traits of humility and authenticity will not only help you develop a strong relationship with clients but also increase customer loyalty.
For instance, you can give customers a behind-the-scenes look at your product development process. This could be a video series or an article on how your team created a particular product or service. Additionally, you can create content pieces that showcase the lessons learned from mistakes and failures. This helps show customers that your brand can understand and improve with each experience. Doing this also provides opportunities for customer feedback, which allows you to become even more connected to your audience.
3. Turn your negatives into positives
Negatives can be used to your advantage in your brand story. If you’ve had a negative experience with a product or service, use it as an opportunity to learn, grow and help others. Be sure to include some not-so-pleasant experience as a brand in your story and turn it into striking empathy with your target audience. Share how you used your negative experience to better your brand’s product or service.
For example, if your brand experienced a customer service mishap, you could explain how it led to a significant overhaul of your customer service policies and procedures. Or, if you had negative press due to an oversight in a product launch, include that experience in your story and explain what changes you put in place to ensure no such incident happens again. This shows your customers and potential buyers that you’re learning from your mistakes and working to make a better product. It also adds an element of authenticity to your story. Showing vulnerability is a great way to build trust with current and prospective customers.
4. Aim to solve a problem
For your brand story to resonate with consumers, it must be relevant and vital. The most effective way to tell your brand’s story is to show your target audience that you understand their unique problems and then provide a solution. To do this, you need to find an issue that resonates with your audience and how your brand is at the forefront of creating a solution to such a problem.
The first step in telling your brand’s story is showing people you know what you’re doing. Your work should be clear, well-crafted, and compelling. In other words, it needs to be good. By showing the audience what goes into creating a high-quality product, they’ll have faith that it will be worth their hard-earned dollars when they purchase such from you.
Show your brand in action by showing off your process and results. For example, suppose a business owner has written a book on marketing strategies for small businesses; they could post pictures of themselves working on the project or even relate the events leading up to each chapter.
5. Incorporate video into your brand story
If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase “show, don’t tell,” it refers to telling a story through actions rather than words. It’s an effective technique to make compelling stories and help brands connect emotionally with their audiences.
A video is a potent tool for telling key elements of your brand’s story. It can help you demonstrate your product or service, show how your company’s culture influences its work, or explain its mission and vision. Another reason to include video in your brand story is that it’s quickly replacing written content. You can rely on video as an integral part of your social media marketing campaigns to boost engagement on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You could also create short videos uploaded directly to your website or YouTube.
A great example is Apple’s iconic “Think Different” campaign which emphasized the power of creativity and innovation in challenging times. Another example of video storytelling is GoPro’s “Be a Hero” campaign, which showcases extreme athletes with their GoPros. The videos demonstrate the great stories of how these individuals have embraced risk-taking and achieved greatness through determination and courage.
6. Design a strong visual identity
While telling your brand story, you also want to maintain consistency. You should use the same color palette, font, and logo across all materials. This creates a strong visual brand identity that helps people recognize your brand faster. For instance, Apple’s signature logo is a symbol that appears in many different places on their products but with the same consistency.
Again, if you’re trying to convey that your brand is innovative, more is needed to use an image of someone working in an office. It would help if you had something more tangible such as a close-up shot of their eyes as they stare at their computer screen. This will contribute more strongly to visualizing the feeling or essence of your brand’s values and innovation than a generic stock photo ever could.
Similarly, if you’re trying to convey that your product is fun and easy to use, avoid using sounds from other products, like music from pop songs. Instead, focus your marketing efforts on creating unique recordings that reflect this sense of fun: for example, laughing children playing around or someone singing along to their favorite tune.
Conclusion
A compelling and effective brand story is a narrative told through words, images, and video. Writing a great brand story is only achieved over time. It is a process of reflection, application, and trial and error. If a well-crafted brand story is good enough, it builds a legacy. It immortalizes your business as much more than just another company in its field.
The three strategies outlined are sure to help you tell your brand story. And remember: the most important thing is to take steps to do it. Reaching out to new customers, sharing your brand’s mission and vision, and creating content that tells your brand purpose and story all show how much you care about what you do.
Thanks for reading!
Follow me for regular Web Design, Branding, and Logo design stories.
