What is Brand Storytelling?

What is brand storytelling? The conventional approach to marketing is to push a brand, increase its visibility, and tout everything a product can do or achieve. While this strategy has some effect, following convention tends to paint your company with the same brush as countless others. Needless to say, blending in with the crowd isn’t a great way to draw attention to your brand. What’s more, this conventional approach has led to the formation of a particular idea of what businesses are, namely that they are faceless, corporate entities. Nowadays, people aren’t thrilled at this kind of stuffy, boring appearance.

In order for your business to thrive, it is crucial to break away from this trend and forge a new path. One alternative path is to breathe humanity into your brand, moving away from a distant entity and instead prioritising a closer connection with your audience members. Emotion should play a primary role, rather than spouting embellished data about the capabilities of what you sell. Brand storytelling is one way to accomplish this.

What is brand storytelling?

Brand storytelling offers businesses a way to bring personality to their brand, in the form of an engaging narrative. By factoring brand storytelling into your marketing strategy, you can benefit from an engaging format that allows for the seamless inclusion of humour and emotion into your marketing. This will give your brand a distinct personality, enabling your potential customers to easily pick your brand out of the crowd. Additionally, brand storytelling allows brands to foster a much stronger connection with an audience when compared to other types of marketing. It allows for the promotion of your brand’s values, while cutting out the usual corporate and stale marketing techniques that are seen as outdated and unappealing. In a time when more and more customers are demanding a genuine and human touch, this approach is invaluable.

Building your brand

Of course, brand storytelling isn’t a template that every business must follow. Brand storytelling is quite malleable, allowing for a wide range of techniques to be used. Stories will look quite different depending on the industry, audience, and ideal brand identity. While this lack of a single template to follow may pose a challenge at first, it works wonders for building a unique identity for your brand. Moreover, as your content will reflect the niche your brand fills, it will be much more appealing to your audience. As such, it will be much easier to develop a strong connection with your viewers, as they will see your content as being in line with their needs, rather than a business just trying to make a sales pitch.

Brand storytelling can take many forms. A company could decide to tell the story of its founder, retelling the journey that led to the creation of the company and resulted in what it is today. Another example could be to focus on the employees and their experience working at the company. This can serve to humanise your company, provided you treat your staff well. You could also fuse brand storytelling with testimonial videos, sharing the story of your satisfied customers in a way that fits your brand identity. This has its own range of benefits, from building trust in your brand to improving brand visibility.

Why use brand storytelling in your marketing campaigns?

It can be a challenge to transition from one marketing strategy to another. It takes time to bring everyone up to speed, you might need to invest in equipment you don’t have, and it can take some trial and error. As such, you might be wondering if brand storytelling is worth the trouble. Let’s consider the benefits of using brand storytelling:

• Humanises your brand and marks your company as something other than the usual corporate impression most people have
• Increases brand visibility and makes your brand unique
• Helps foster a deeper connection with your audience
• Boosts customer loyalty
• Expresses the values and ideas of your brand
• Keeps your brand at the forefront of your viewers’ minds
• Increases traffic to your website and other online presences
• Increases the number of sales

As you can see, brand storytelling has a range of benefits to confer upon businesses that adopt this approach to marketing. By implementing this approach, you can spark a ripple effect that benefits many aspects of your business. From public opinion right down to sales volume. Whether these benefits warrant your investment is, of course, up to you, but these advantages are tough to beat.

Implementing brand storytelling in your marketing campaigns

Though the benefits of brand storytelling are clear to see, putting the approach into practice isn’t quite so obvious. To make the process of creating your own content with brand storytelling, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Authenticity is key

As we’ve mentioned, most people yearn for integrity and authenticity in their brands. Gone are the days when brands could thinly veil their marketing attempts. People see such behaviour as a cash grab at best, and predatory at worst. As such, you should place the point of your brand at the forefront, showing people what you stand for. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but telling people what you’re about is practically a requirement in today’s marketplace.

Put the customer first

It goes without saying that you should prioritise delivering a great experience for the customer. But the reasons are beyond avoiding bad press. In fact, by putting the customer first, you stand a much better chance of having them promote your brand for you. This could be in the form of a written review. Or, if you want to get a bit more hands-on, a testimonial video. In doing so, you will gain access to an entirely new method of marketing. That being the reliable and trustworthy opinions of your customers.

Value customer feedback

This goes hand in hand with the previous point; you should ensure you listen to your customers and not dismiss what could be valuable feedback. Your customers know what they want better than anyone else. So when they have criticisms or praise for your brand storytelling, listen to them. Not only will you be able to refine your marketing approach, you will also build a closer connection to your audience as a result of including them in the process.

Brand Storytelling, Wrapping up

Brand storytelling is the path forward. People are tired of businesses being faceless entities looking only to peddle goods or services. Instead, they want something a bit more human. Brand storytelling can cater to that need, providing your business with a wealth of benefits to boot. As such, you should begin factoring brand storytelling into your marketing strategy today.