Do you know what's common between Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet, Jack Ma, and many such influential people with big empires? It is their skill to connect people with their brand. They always give these empowering speeches that are not mugged instead spoken from the heart.
People nowadays are fed up with sales talks; they are looking to build genuine connections. If you own a brand and want to spread this to the world, start building a strong brand story. Pour your feelings into creating an authentic story that powerfully describes your brand.
Ahh! It is not as simple as it sounds. A lot more work goes through before creating that compelling storyline. This article covers all the significant points that will help you web a great brand story and give you ideas on effectively passing on this information to your target audience.
How Can a Brand Story Affect Your Business?
A brand story is a compilation of events from the beginning of the business idea to describing its success or failure. As an owner, these are not some timelines but your journey, which you must express to the world. Your brand story must be an idea that you genuinely believe in and want to be resonated with.
A compelling brand story can do wonders for your business. Research proves that 55% of people who like your brand story will eventually become your customers, and 15% would buy the product immediately. You must convey your brand ideas to people to ensure maximum customer interaction.
What Are the Components to Build an Exciting Brand Story?
Identify Your Audience
Before starting with the story part, you must know your target audience. A brand story becomes successful when directed towards people who have similar interests as the brand itself.
However, in such a dynamic era, you cannot objectify people. For instance, if you own a bike, your target audience must not be just cult-looking men with big tattoos on their bodies. People have evolved, and you need to niche down to a group that will instantly resonate with your brand.
Resonate Your Brand with the Audience
A brand story must not be a sales pitch bragging about your product or service features. People are tired of listening to these old-fashioned sales speeches, which only care about revenue rather than solving genuine problems. However, highlighting the brand's importance is crucial for attracting the audience to your offering. Your brand story must highlight the targeted audience's concerns and further offer them a solution.
For instance, Dove launched its biggest marketing campaign by bringing together women of all sizes and shapes to highlight that beauty is the right for all. This collaboration resulted in the product's massive popularity, and women started to believe the promoted notion. The company raised over $5 Billion through this campaign.
Briefly Describe What Your Brand Does
While structuring your brand story, it's crucial that you efficiently describe what your brand does for your targeted audience. You must outline their problems and further explain the solution offered by your brand.
The biggest challenge here is to make these people trust your offering. It can be done through a good storyline. You can effectively humanize your brand and communicate with your audience. It can be even more impactful if you add real human emotions. You can do it by adding videos of your customers or clients enjoying or benefiting from your service/product. Or just record and submit video testimonials where people express their real-life experience of how your brand impacted their lives.
Read also about establishing brand identity, which will help you to articulate your brand story better then.
Create an Impact by highlighting Failures
Everyone in this world is looking for inspiration; you can enhance your brand by highlighting your target audience's challenges. It will instantly form a strong connection and create urgency. Your main job is to make your product or service the hero in the eyes of your audience.
In one of the campaigns launched by Subway, the company bragged about a guy named "Jared." He was obese but lost weight by only eating Subway's burger for a couple of years. The company excessively advertised this character through every billboard, claiming that this was not a regular fast-food outlet but a weight-loss plan. It led to immense popularity, and people with weight issues started consuming Subway.
Talk about the Making Process & Future Goals
People nowadays are very informed, and they love to know how a product has been made. During the brand story, you can talk about its manufacturing process and inform them about all the product ingredients. Most big brands use this strategy to highlight their product's superiority and why people should buy it.
If you’re manufacturing soap, talk about its ingredients and how it will function on the skin. It works the same for online products. You can offer a gist of all the topics you have mapped in the course and the results that people can expect after consuming your digital product.
As a brand, you must evolve and integrate your target customer into the loop. People are interested in knowing what they can expect next from the brand.
A brand story must have a solid start that talks about the product, what it does, how it can help its audience. Also, include an extensive ingredient list review and end with your futuristic goals.
You can create a roadmap to integrate such vast information in just a few seconds or on a single infographic.
How to Convey Your Brand Story Efficiently?
Be Authentic
We cannot emphasize enough how important it is for your brand to convey only genuine and authentic ideas. People do not want to be manipulated. Each day, they get thousands of emails and messages regarding extra lucrative offers, which are mostly fake. It is not the 19th century where a salesperson can sell knives or books by highlighting unnecessary features.
Your brand must talk about the actual issues that your product helps to solve. Do not fluff unnecessary details to get some attention. It's also crucial that your brand stands ahead of its competitors and creates a powerful image. Ensure that you are not copying even a single detail from an existing brand because the world is small, and people are smarter.
Create an Emotional Bond
While conveying your brand story, make sure it stimulates human emotion. You want people to trust your brand and make them understand how it can solve their problems. Research shows that humans have an attention span of only 8 seconds. Whenever you carve your brand story, remember that you have only a few seconds to hook the audience with your product idea.
Telling a brand story means creating an emotional relationship between you and your audience. It’s only possible to do if you can express to your customers that they are a part of your journey. A brand story can achieve that goal through many tools and methods, but a brand storytelling video is the most powerful one. Additionally, if you know how to make a video go viral, success is pre-assured.
Gillet recently uploaded a video about abolishing fake masculinity and allowing men to express their emotions. This video instantly connected the brand's idea with the audience and has been viewed over 33 Million times. Your brand must firmly stand with a picture so that your customers can emotionally bond with the product.
Choose Your Platform
Every content you create must be prioritized according to the platform's user behavior. For instance, social media like Instagram or Facebook can be used to make trendy videos that people interact with and forward. In contrast, content created for YouTube needs to be extensive and maintains attention from the start to the end.
Different social media channels also require different approaches. You won’t post lengthy critical reviews on Instagram. Users come here for inspiration and insider’s perspective. In contrast, your opinion and detailed recommendation will fit your Facebook strategy.
You should take the same differentiated approach to your visuals. Every social media has its own image and video requirements. Use your Digital Asset Management tool to get the right social media presets without extra research and cropping.
By the way, the same DAM tool will help you organize all your branding deliverables in the most effective way. Keep them all in one centralized space, always updated & accessible.
Differentiate Your Content
Don’t stick to a single content strategy. Experiment and use different types of content to tell your brand story. Some of these are mentioned below:
- Articles
- Infographics
- Motion graphics
- E-books
- Case studies
- White paper
- Data visualization
Choose a platform and content strategy that you are comfortable with to reach a larger audience. However, you can also work multiple to test user interaction.
Do Not Fluff Unnecessary Words
A brand story must be personal and straightforward. Avoid any technical jargon.
We understand that you’ve built this product and know everything from top to bottom. However, your target audience isn't aware of these complicated words. If you keep the story emotionally bonded with highlighting the customers' pain points, it will help.
Choose a Suitable Narrative
You have reached the last step before you officially start writing your brand story (or rather updating it). Your presentation is one more crucial thing that affects your brand story’s performance.
You cannot just start anywhere. There needs to be a proper channel that moves your audience from one point to another. You can use the following traditional ways for an appropriate narration:
- Problem/ Solution
- Personal stories
- Tutorials
- Before/After
- Tutorials
Wrap up
A brand story tells very much about the brand itself, its beliefs, and future goals. You should carve a story that resonates with your audience. But keep yourself incredibly authentic too. These were some of the pointers you can keep in mind while you craft your brand story.
While building your brand story, you’ll develop lots of materials in the process. Your logo, mood board, brand guidelines, and many more. If you’re looking for a nice solution to organize and manage your branding materials (and not only them!), consider Digital Asset Management. Keep all your branding deliverables updated and in order.
Author
Elizabeth Luther is a SaaS content writer, TheGratifiedBlog, helping SaaS brands make more revenue through content marketing. In her free time, she likes to travel and read books.
