In the modern world of branding and marketing, your narrative is one of the most important things to focus on. There are so many different businesses, companies, and brands filling up social media and advertisements that it can be hard to create engagement. The oversaturation of the modern marketing world means that creating an emotional connection with your customers is more essential than ever.
There are many ways to create an emotional response with a person, and you can start by showing them your brand’s story. That begs the question — what is your brand’s story, and why does it matter? How can you appeal to people’s emotions in a way that feels natural and not disingenuous and forced? How can you let them know about your mission and core values without making your marketing strategy and brand narrative seem forced?
Here is how to make your brand storytelling matter to the people engaging with it. It can take a lot of effort to tell great stories, but the effort you put into it will almost always be worth the effort. Let’s talk about how to use the power of storytelling to create a marketing campaign that captures the essence of your brand and how you can use it as a driving force behind your own company.
What Is Brand Storytelling?
Brand storytelling comes down to conveying stories to the consumers of your brand. It is the act of using a narrative that captures both your brand personality and the attention of your target audience. These powerful brand stories are focused on linking what your brand stands for with the values and needs of your customers.
Telling a compelling story is one of the hardest things to do, but also something that can result in real increases in your company's performance and brand awareness. When people feel united with your company, your brand loyalty can increase exponentially. Sharing your brand's perspective and inspiration can help potential customers see that your company comprises real people, just like them.
Great storytelling creates a relationship between you, your employees, and your customers. But when it comes to communicating with people, there are a few important things to focus on:
Developing empathy
Cultivating action
Attracting attention
Here are how those three things work together and why they’re so important to focus on.
Develop Empathy
Start by cultivating empathy. The idea here is for your customers to see your brand as heroes who share the same values. Often, the best way to do this is by having founders share their vision.
Most people overlook ads, considering just how many they see every day. But when you use your branding to tell an actual story, you can make a real difference. Instead of portraying your business as a way to make money, cast your founder as the main character who has been advocating for the world since the business’s launch.
Use your marketing to tell personal stories about touchpoints of the brand. Show how you are different from the competition and care about valuable topics, like the planet and its people. Show how the consistency behind your morals and behaviors has influenced your company and that your brand is full of advocates for subjects you’re passionate about.
Using storytelling to provide insights on the best parts of your brand will help boost your brand and platform and show how you care about the people you work with.
Cultivate Action
Create meaningful connections with your audience by cultivating action and lasting transformation. To stand out from the sea of competition, show how your company’s history is full of real action that benefits the world. Show the customer stories that help them see your brand as protagonists in a world full of inaction. Compel people to act themselves.
When you use your own company as an example of what happens when action is taken, it creates a good story and a good brand. Depicting your brand's storyline and inviting viewers to become a part of it is exhilarating, inspiring, and powerful. Use social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and more to inspire real action in your consumers, followers, and fans.
Good storytelling has always inspired action in people. In the modern world, it’s more important than ever to use storytelling as a tool in your arsenal of engagement. People are hardwired to act upon good stories. When you build in action steps in your brand storytelling, it can lead to a real impact on how your company as a whole operates.
Attract Attention
The goal of marketing is to draw attention to your brand and increase brand awareness. However, commercials, ads, and social media posts have gone from exciting and engaging to bland and expected.
How can you reach out to your customers in a way that turns the attention onto you? Through storytelling.
A great strategy is creating engaging long-form content like podcasts, blogs, and films that allow people to see how your company works and why it does what it does. Help potential customers understand what you do in terms of community outreach and customer service. Show it to them in a way that will leave a positive, lasting impression.
Millennials are some of the most difficult people to appeal to, and sometimes it can be hard to get them to spend time reading a blog post. So continue to focus on using advertising to pull them into a deeper relationship with your brand. Calls to action in their daily lives is a great way to interact with these customers genuinely, personally, and meaningfully.
How To Be an Unforgettable Brand
Most marketing and advertising today is, quite simply, forgettable. New innovations are quickly replicated by other brands and businesses and fall out of fashion quickly. So how can you create a marketing program that will consistently be original over a long period? By incorporating honest storytelling into your business.
Instead of just trying to fill in the stock story of how any old startup can succeed, put effort into finding the unique aspects of your brand and history. Whether that’s an origin story, a specific stance, or something else, capitalize on your eccentricities. Be a brand that is easy to Google, not just by having a recognizable name and identity, but by having distinctive features that stick out.
Instead of just listing facts and statistics about your company, use storytelling to provide excitement and personal detail about your brand’s quirks. If you have a funny or interesting story about designing a product, share it! If your business has an origin story that impacts the brand as it is today, let people know about it. If you want buyers to know where you get all of your materials because it matters to you, share that.
Countless small businesses around the world use their unique elements to imbed themselves into the minds of their customers. Find what makes your own business special, and then use it as story material to share in an exciting way.
Build a Company Family
Another way to increase the effectiveness of your marketing is by developing the idea of a family around your company. Show potential customers how your brand fits into a lifestyle and makes them part of a group!
Use storytelling to show how the different people in your company are all a part of a family — and that includes the customers. Break away from the norm and show that your company is made of people who want the same thing as your customers.
Do interviews with employees at your company, and talk about why they work with you and why they love it. Set up situations where customers can meet the people creating and delivering the products and services they value most. Create a company culture that gives value to everyone, from the CEO to the janitor, and make sure your consumer knows that they’re valued as well.
Documenting these changes will allow you to develop a brand family and enable your customers to be a part of it. Nobody wants to buy their goods from a company that feels cold, distant, and greedy. Create a culture that is warm, inviting, and generous to everyone — even if they’re just passing through by engaging with an advertisement.
Capitalize on Your Humanity
It can be easy for consumers to see companies as giant conglomerates only interested in profits. Use everything in your power to actively fight against these notions, and show yourself to be a brand made up of people who are all fighting for the same thing.
When it comes down to it, your company's mission matters to the people who will be interacting with it. Cover the passions that drive the company extensively through intentional, honest storytelling. If your business doesn’t have a great mission or story, maybe you should take some time to reevaluate.
If you are passionate about something, post about it, talk about it, and let other people know how much you care about it. Create content that shows your brand at work changing the lives of other people around you.
Find the parts of your company that make you human, and use storytelling to show them. Show potential customers what’s easy or hard. Show them what makes you excited and what makes you sad. Show people what gets you out of bed every morning and what inspires you to keep going. Your brand’s humanity is one of the most important assets that you have — make use of it as much as possible!
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a company that will help you create this content, look no further than 7 Wonders. Our teams of creative professionals have decades of experience in our fields, and there’s nothing we love more than helping people achieve their dreams when it comes to content creation, video production, and more.
We’ve worked with all kinds of clients, ranging from top-of-the-line companies with thousands of employees to small businesses with a passion for art and development. If you want to share your identity and purpose with the world, we’re here to help make that happen! Don’t hesitate to reach out to us — we’d love to work with you on your next creative project and make your dreams become realities.
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