You already know what brand storytelling is! If you need some more clarity check What is Brand Storytelling.
Brand storytelling is the only way to stand out as an affirmative, authoritative brand in your industry which will not only help you to skyrocket your sales but also to retain customer loyalty to your brand.
But how do you create a compelling story that makes customers fall in love with your brand and products?
Imagine you are in an eCommerce site looking to buy something that makes your beard shine, gives a crisp look and ideal to have a good impression on a Tinder date. You scroll through some of the products with description, product images, rates, and you open another tape on the browser to search alternate options.
On the second website, it’s written “makes your beard shine, smooth and give your girl a dressing surprise” with some images of bearded guys sharing happy moments with beautiful girls.
Which one will you buy?
Most likely you’ll buy from the second website, right?
This is the power of story. This one clearly defines the problem and present you with the solution to perfectly shine in front of the girl.
Although, you can’t apply this strategy if you don’t know your brand story, customer pain points, and how to craft content using brand storytelling.
So, first things first!
Let's find out how do you create your brand story?
Creating a brand story is easy if you know the answers to some provoking questions related to the brand.
Start with “Why” have you established this company? Think about what problems you kept in mind to solve with this company? What motivated you to fire up every single day to work while most of your friends were happy with their 9 to 5 jobs. Write it down in a separate column.
Now think about what vision your company hold to achieve.
Please don’t write we want to be the biggest company or best in the industry. Just think about what positive changes your company wants to bring in this world with the products or services?
How do your customers gain a positive improvement in their life once they share their journey with you? How do you solve the problems your customers are facing?
Finally, write about your values.
What do you stand for? What values do you support?
For example, I’ve created BrandStell to support eCommerce owners, startups with a goal of selling products online or people with bricks and mortar shop who wants to shift into an online business.
I want to help them with their Brand storytelling and online marketing efforts so that they can give more time to make their products better and create a more positive impact on their customer’s life.
I support passion, integrity and dedication.
The answers you come up with the above questions is your brand story.
You'll have a better idea, watching Benelli's Brand Storytelling.
Starts with Why, How and What.
As you discovered your brand story, now it’s time to make it a part of every piece of marketing materials that you share with your audience. It includes your blogs, product description, social media post, PR copies, banners, emails, newsletter etc.
The goal is to whenever an audience interacts with your brand or marketing materials, they should feel the story behind the company which make them align their values.
So, How do you craft your content using brand storytelling that engages your audience?
Different types of stories are used in the marketing world, and every one of them plays a critical role in the overall feel of the brand.
You can tell stories that motivate your audience to do certain tasks or tell about yourself. You can convey value through your stories or educate them passing on knowledge through the stories.
Whatever the stories you tell always make sure that the core brand message remains the same.
It’s important to know when and how to tell stories.
When done right it creates compelling connections in the deeper emotional level. People don’t remember who you are, what you give them, but they will always remember how you make them feel in their journey to solve problems.
A story consists of three parts.
It should have a problem, solutions, and to relate these two, you need to have a character.
The character will change based on the type of stories you tell but, in every story, your audience needs to relate them in the character.
For example, when you tell a story about yourself or your brand the main character should be you or your brand, but the way you tell the stories needs to make your audience feel that you had struggles, conflicts the same way they have now.
You have overcome the problem by finding a solution. The same solution can also be used by your audience to get over their problem. See how easy it is!
Stories can make people laugh, cry, and trigger actions. A good story emphasis on the audience's emotions, their pain points, create connections and shows vulnerability.
Share a relatable journey. Every brand goes through rigorous struggles but their beliefs in achieving something great push through growth-inducing challenges.
Address your struggles, hardships, wins, losses that have been helping the brand to become what is today.
Firmly state what you believe, what you stand for, and why?
Stories help us remember the unfinished things. So try to make stories that are cliff-hanging means something remains strange to unfold as it goes to finish.
So always make sure you focus on these factors before creating stories.
Now, What is the framework that you follow to create your contents?
Let's find it out!
Character
Character is the main component of the story.
They are the heroes, and here it's your audience.
You have to make stories concentrating them as the centre of attention.
Now, you have to know your audience or else how can you make stories based on them!
Knowing your audience seems to be easy, but it’s not. It’s where a buyer persona comes into the picture.
What is a buyer persona? According to Hubspot “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
It’s about whom you’re targeting to sell. What they look like? What do they read? Where they spend most of their time? It’s about finding insight out.
For example: let's say there is a man named Harley. He is a 40 years old guy living with his wife and 2 children. He is a manager in an FMCG firm. He likes to read blogs in his spare time and love to spend his holidays on a beach. He is a diabetic patient.
As you dig deeper, it’s important to find what are Harley's Want, Need, Fear and Hate.
What Harley wants is the starting point of your persona, as you can’t sell anything if he doesn’t want. Then comes the need, which are the basics he can’t imagine his life without it. That’s the reason why plumbers or electrician in your locality doesn’t need much of the marketing.
Fear is what makes Harley buy your products. If you sell a diabetics regulatory tool, he’ll buy it as fear of death trigger his actions. And Hate is what gives him an option to stay away from certain things.
You might be thinking if Needs and Fear are the ultimate triggers to buy, why it’s needed to focus on Want and Hate? Because Harley has an option whether to buy from you or your competitors.
His values in life decide the Want and Hate of his buying decision.
Whenever his values align with yours, he would buy from you.
So create a 2X2 table and write about Harley’s Want, Need, Hate and Fear, it’ll give you clarity in the purchasing decision of Harley’s life.
Defining problems
After finding out your buyer persona, it’s time to pinpoint their problems.
Remember Buyer persona will always be changing based on your new insight data, sales queries and other metrics. It’ll be evolving as you progress in the journey.
You might be thinking, sometimes I can't discover my own problems how can I find someone's problems?
Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Think about what are the problems you faced which made you create your products and services.
Ask your salesperson what frequent questions they get when interacting with customers?
Ask certain provoking questions to clients whenever they interact with your brand like what problems they were facing before accepting your products or services.
Go to social media platforms like Quora, Reddit, Facebook groups. Thoroughly research their interaction, chats, what they are talking mostly about.
Meanwhile also visit your competitor’s website, social media pages, events you’ll find lots of ideas revolving around your prospects problems. Note it down and prioritize them according to the severity and available solutions.
Connecting to a guide
You must notice in movies hero has someone maybe its close friend, parents, coach, teacher, lover or acquaintances who help them, support them, shows them the road to success in overcoming all the obstacles in their journey.
Here, you’re the guide in the character’s journey.
Your brand has the solution to overcome their problems.
The point is if you make yourself move faster in their journey they’ll feel you’re not helping but selling. If you move slower somebody else will make them heroes of their brand.
Remember it’s all about empathizing.
The more you empathize the more they’ll see you as a friend, as a true guide overcoming their struggles.
Plan
You found Character, Problems, now what?
It's time to help your character solve their problems.
But how do you do that?
By creating contents. Content that helps them to realize that they have a problem.
They need to know more about their problems, what are they, how they can solve it.
Create contents that Involve your audience.
It should educate them, make them understand how following a plan can help them to get rid of their problems. As they follow the plan, they'll start trusting you along the journey.
You have to make your content in such a way that it draws maximum attention from your audience.
Your audience needs to feel them as a part of the story, they are the characters, and at the end, they should willingly leave comments or feedback on the contents.
Try to make stories that are so compelling that you’re audience want to build your products into their lives.
Different content formats are available to make your audience educative in their buyer's journey. Blog posts, eBooks, Videos, infographics are some of them which you can use.
Create everything in a conversational tone. Be it a website blog, social media taglines, PR copies.
When the audiences become a part of a conversation you’ll easily know their pain points, you can ask for suggestions and finally, make your products or services more acceptable to them.
You’ll also get more decisive ideas to improve customer service.
Consistency and streamlining everything will make your brand presence firm.
People will perceive you differently if you have disintegration across different platforms and dissimilar tone and voice.
Craft your messages be it a sales copy, marketing, website or PR in the same voice, tone carrying your same brand persona. It’ll make not only your brand presence strong but your audience will see you as an affirmative brand and will deepen the relationship with more trust.
With trust, your offering becomes a viable solution to their problems and they’ll accept happily.
When offering the solutions, make sure to use contrast that shows how your offering has changed the life of the customer after using it.
Call to actions
Make sure to provide values with every piece of content you create. Always ask, what are the key takeaways that your audience is going to take with them.
Make every bit of content as a puzzle piece to the main problem, and put Call-to-action according to it.
Your audience would never know how to go further along their journey unless you specifically tell them to.
Call to action can be anything. Asking for a subscription to blogs, downloading an eBook, following you on social media are some of it.
Do remember every call to action should make your audience go down to your sales funnel so make your strategy accordingly.
Conclusion
Creating content with a brand story requires empathy to your audience and authenticity to the story. You just need to spread the story through the contents so that every time someone reads your content they can feel your brand and connect with it.
In the beginning, don’t stress too much on perfection. As you start creating contents, do focus on audience problems and emotions.
Collect data from analytics, social media, blog comments and analyse it, check what audiences are talking about. Do the necessary changes based on it.
At BrandStell, We help you discover your brand story and create content specifically cater to your audience.
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