In today’s competitive marketplace, building a strong brand identity is crucial for the success of your business. Storytelling is one effective way to strengthen your brand. Sharing your brand’s story can captivate your audience, build emotional connections, and differentiate your business from the competition.
Here are seven tips to incorporate into your brand strategy to harness the power of storytelling to engage with your audience.
1. Be authentic.
Storytelling isn’t just about telling customers an entertaining tale. It’s about conveying your unique story and identity so that customers can relate to it and understand the mission and values that drive your business.
Authenticity in your storytelling helps to accomplish this. It also builds more trust from your customers if they feel you’re being honest and open with your company’s story. People connect to authentic stories on a deeper level, which can be very beneficial in building customer loyalty.
Some of the things that make a brand story feel authentic include:
- Consistency – When your message is the same across platforms and content, this gives customers the sense that the values you express are truly central to your identity.
- Transparency – People are more likely to trust brands that are open and honest about their workplace practices, products, and services. Transparency makes customers feel like your storytelling is giving them a behind the scenes look at how your business operates.
- Struggles and weaknesses – No business is perfect in every way all the time. Admitting your mistakes or talking about the challenges you’ve had growing your business can show your humanity and make you feel more relatable and authentic to customers.
- Tone and language – Match your style and the tone of your content to your brand identity. It makes sense for a CPA firm to be professional and business-like, for example, but a company that sells board games or sports equipment will probably want to use a more casual, fun storytelling style and voice.
2. Tap into customer emotions.
Memory is often linked to emotions. When you make your customers feel something, your brand will be more likely to stick in their minds. Like authenticity, emotions also help to build loyalty because you engage with customers on a deeper level.
Evoking positive emotions like happiness, humor, or nostalgia can form a strong bond with customers because they’ll associate your brand with that good feeling. Another angle is to target the negative emotions that could trigger a customer to seek out your services. For example, you could tell the story of how your brand helped alleviate past customers’ frustration with an annoying everyday task.
When you use emotion in storytelling, you want to make sure the emotion is connected to your brand and the tone is aligned to what you want customers to feel when they think about your company. For example, the ASPCA’s commercials showing neglected pets are effective because they’re drawing on people’s sadness and sympathy for the animals they help. However, you wouldn’t want to use those kinds of heart-tugging images for a brand that’s unrelated to the pet industry, or even one that just sells pet supplies. In those cases, you’d want your customers to associate you with happier emotions. Over-using strong emotions like grief or sympathy can also feel manipulative, which can turn customers off from your brand.
3. Incorporate visual storytelling elements.
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words and that is certainly true in brand storytelling. Eye-tracking studies indicate that the average consumer only looks at online ads for 1-4 seconds. You’ll get your customer’s attention for longer with other types of branding, like a blog or social media post, but you still want to get your point across as quickly as possible.
Utilizing pictures, videos, and infographics helps you to do that. Visual elements breaking up long text passages can also help to hold readers’ attention and guide them through so they read your entire story.
4. Use tension and release to create an arc and narrative.
Conflict is the driving engine of a story. It’s what keeps the audience watching, or makes a reader turn the page. Fiction writers and screenwriters typically aim to have some kind of conflict in every scene of a story in order to keep their audience fully engaged from start to finish.
Brand storytelling needs to have this kind of tension, too. This doesn’t need to be something you would think of as outright conflict, though it can be. Other forms of tension could be a problem the customer needs to solve, a struggle you overcome with the business, or a broader societal issue or world concern that your brand aims to address.
The ending is where you resolve the conflict or tension that pulls the audience through your story. Aim to center your brand in this resolution. If the tension came from your company’s struggles, end by showing how you’ve triumphed over them. If the tension is a customer or societal problem, resolve that tension by showing how your brand addresses that issue.
5. Know your audience.
Different types of stories resonate with different people. Knowing your audience can help you to tell a story that they will relate to, one that will make an impact on them and compel them to engage more with your brand.
One way to clarify what types of stories will resonate with your audience is to develop a customer archetype or avatar. Build this from the core traits of your target customer. This includes things like:
- Demographics (age, gender, income level, employment, etc.)
- Personality traits
- Typical behavior or habits
- Interests and hobbies
- Fears, struggles, and concerns
- Dreams and goals
How do you get this information? One option is simply to ask your customers through surveys or direct conversations. You can also use data from your past sales or other customer interactions to clarify the type of person who most often engages with your brand.
6. Make your customers the heroes of the story.
Customers are the people you want your story to reach, so it makes sense to center them in that narrative. This starts with the point above: knowing your audience. Once you’ve identified your customers’ aspirations, you can highlight the way your brand supports those goals and what role it can play in their heroes’ journeys.
A customer-centric approach to storytelling helps to build trust and loyalty. It makes your audience feel like you hear and care about their struggles—like your main goal is to help them, not just to make a profit. It also makes it easy for them to see how your product or service could positively impact their life, which makes them more likely to use it.
7. End with a call-to-action.
At the end of an effective story, your audience will be hooked and ready to find out more, and you want to capitalize on that feeling. Give people a clear action they can take if your story resonates with them. Examples of strong storytelling calls-to-action include:
- A form to sign up for your newsletter or mailing list and stay in touch with your brand
- A “subscribe now” button for a blog, YouTube channel, or similar platform
- A “buy now” button to purchase the product or service that will solve the problem discussed in the story
- A “read more” button taking them to your website, or to download resources like a whitepaper or ebook that will go further into your story or company
- A “contact us” link to schedule a consultation or estimate
Like with emotion and tension, the call-to-action should be related to the story you’re telling. You want it to feel like a logical next step for the customer based on what they just learned about your company, products, or services.
Brand storytelling plays a crucial role in developing your brand identity. It helps shape how your target audience perceives your business and differentiates you from competitors. By implementing these brand storytelling tips and techniques, you can strengthen your brand’s identity and establish a deep connection with your target audience.
