In today’s world, people crave genuine connections with businesses and brands, and one of the best ways to form a true relationship with your customers is by telling your brand story. Every company has a story to tell, whether it’s the story of how you built your business or the story of how your products improve people’s lives, finding a unique brand story is one of the most effective ways to entice, engage, and encourage people to build a relationship with your brand.
Telling your brand story can be the key to successfully attracting new customers and forming deeper connections with your existing customers. Storytelling is a powerful tool because when people are invested in a good narrative, they naturally respond and remember it. This psychological response grabs people’s attention, elicits emotion, and engages people.
Here are a few key tips to help you tell your brand’s story.
Know Your Brand
Great brand storytelling should communicate who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you can help people. Telling your brand story will humanize your brand and help build personal bonds. But first, to tell your story, you have to understand your own brand.
1. Build your brand heart
The first step towards understanding a company’s brand is to build a brand heart. A brand heart is the core elements of your brand, including your business’ purpose, vision, mission, what products or services you offer to the market, how you provide value to customers, and why it matters. It can be easy to know your company’s name, logo, and what it does, but what the company stands for and what value it brings to its customers, can be harder to understand and explain to others. Developing your brand heart can be done by listening to your customers and other employees.
2. Develop your brand messaging
Next, work on building the brand messaging you want to send out to consumers. Brand messaging is how your business can communicate its values and positioning and this is crucial in helping you tell your brand’s story. Your brand messaging is based on the tone, language, and core messages, therefore, you can use these to convey who your company is.
3. Know your target audience
The last step in helping understand your brand is to know who your target audience is. Developing your target audience can be found by researching your current customer base, your potential customers, and your competition. This data then can assist in creating customer personas that will help in understanding your customer’s motivations, fears, wants, needs, and desires. Once you understand your target audience more deeply, it will be easier to understand how your business and brand bring value to them. Also, by knowing your target audience you can specially tailor the brand’s story content to resonate with these consumers.
Once you have a clear idea of who you are, how to communicate that, and who you are talking to, then you can begin to develop the brand stories that you want to tell.
Craft Your Narrative
Now that you have a better understanding of your business at its core, you can begin to craft the narrative of your story. A brand’s story can be a single standalone story that conveys the business’s founding or a brand can have multiple stories that are a part of a bigger overall narrative. Having multiple stories can guide an audience through a timeline that can give them a better understanding of the entire brand. This will attract consumers' attention because viewers love a storyline that will take them on a journey through a problem and how it was solved.
A tip that can help craft a brand narrative is by listening and observing the experiences of customers, employees, providers, and others that are involved in the business. Your company is filled with real people that run your office, develop ideas, make products, purchase products, deliver products, and more, and these people are all a part of your brand.
Another important key to telling your narrative is to find the right format and medium to convey it. You want your brand’s story to reach the right audience, so it’s important to place the story content in places that your audience will see and engage with it. Some common formats to tell a brand’s story include blogs, articles, case studies, data visualizations, infographics, white papers, and videos. There are many other ways to communicate your story, just make sure that the format accurately fits your brand and your audience.
Overall Keys to a Great Brand Story
Lastly, here are some overall tips to help tell an interesting and engaging brand story.
- Meaningful & Honest
First, make sure that your story is meaningful and honest, consumers can tell when a brand is being disingenuous and this will drive them away. People will more eagerly engage with a brand when they believe it is authentic to itself.
- Simple
Also, try to keep your brand story simple. Do not overcomplicate your brand if it does not need to be. If your story can be communicated through a singular focus then it makes it easier to connect to it because your story should be a channel of continuation, not an end-point.
- Personal & Emotional
Lastly, find your narrative angle that shows the brand story as being personal and emotional. Consumers want to know more than what products you make, they also want to know what it is like behind the curtain of a company by discovering the brand’s personality and character. Also, anyone can tell a story that is educational or engaging, but telling a story that connects with people on a personal level will naturally draw them in. It is not just about what you do, but it’s about how you affect people and how they fit into your brand’s story.
-Claire Clark
