Become A Better Brand Storyteller

Become A Better Brand Storyteller

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen the marketing world recognize, embrace, and (more recently) promote the importance of having a powerful brand story. But for a marketing tactic that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue, there’s still a lot of confusion around what it is, why it works, how to do it well, and how to know you have.

Your brand story is the driving force behind your business. Brand storytelling allows you to use narrative to connect your brand to customers, supporters, and broader audiences. Brand storytellers know that it isn’t just a different name for content marketing—it’s a whole different approach. It isn’t about a product or service or what you do or how you do it. It’s about your WHY.

Some people are natural storytellers while others have to work at it. It’s easy for most of us to evaluate another organization’s brand story and explain why we think it’s good, great, or needs some help. Brand storytelling is a skill. Like any other skill, you can break it down to the basics. Learning the fundamentals, practicing them, and asking for feedback allows anybody to add brand storytelling to their skillset.

Breaking Brand Storytelling Down To The Basics

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a brand-new business or you’ve been at it for a while. It doesn’t matter if your organization has a team of 2 or 200. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, what you do, or who you do it for. Underneath it all, every organization has a WHY.

Brand storytelling is a great way to make sure that all of your messages and all of your marketing take Simon Sinek’s advice and “Start With Why”.

According to Kaitlin Loyal at Scribewise, “Brand storytelling is using a narrative to connect your brand to customers with a focus on linking what you stand for to the values you share with your customers”. She goes on to explain what each of the key pieces in that definition means to the process and practice of great brand storytelling.

·        Narrative: is the interplay of characters and setting as the action rises through conflict, climax, and resolution.

·        What You Stand For: is what defines your organization and differentiates you from competitors.

·        Values: are the traits that your organization aspires to, or, as Kaitlin puts it: “the best behaviors of your best employees on their best days”.

That’s pretty straightforward stuff when it comes to the big picture perspective on what brand storytelling is and how to do it. But we know from experience how easy it is to lose sight of the forest when you’re amongst all of the trees.  So, let’s push on a bit further to see if we can pin down the best ways to get from WHAT to HOW.

Your Brand Story is the Driving Force Behind Your Business

It’s worth digging deeper into this. Depending on how you look at it, it can be hard to tell if it’s advice on where to look for the story you’ll tell or an observation on what the effect of brand storytelling should be. In truth, it’s both. Your brand story should align with your mission and vision. These elements steer your marketing strategy and execution.

The story you tell about the force that drives your business becomes the driving force behind your business through the telling of the story.

Use Narrative to Connect Your Brand to Customers, Supporters, and Broader Audiences

The reason that everyone is big on storytelling right now is that there is a lot of evidence to show that stories work better at doing what we want marketing to do. Stories get people’s attention and capture their interest. Stories activate people’s emotions in ways that they remember. Stories invite audiences to be a part of the story.

When you combine the power of storytelling with a narrative that connects your organization to your audience through shared values, the results speak for themselves.

Your Brand Story Is Not About a Product or Service

When you’re telling your brand story, you should be focused on WHY you do what you do instead of WHAT you do and HOW you do it. That’s not to say that your products and services can’t have a place in your story. They can be characters or part of the setting. They can help resolve the conflict. But there’s a difference between what is in a story and what a story is about.

Building A Brand Story

Now that we’ve talked about WHAT a brand story is—let’s take a closer look at HOW to discover your brand’s story.

The Upland blog provides a helpful guide to gathering the building blocks you’ll need to use to construct your brand story. They point out that “what starts out as a series of facts can eventually yield larger narratives” and remind us that “the deeper you dive into this . . . the more ideas will float to the top”.

Start out by focusing on the following questions:

·        Who are You? What is your organization’s history? Why does it exist? What defines your team?

·        What Do You Do? What products or services do you offer?

·        Who Do You Do It For? Who benefits from your products or services? How do they benefit?

·        Why Do You Do What You Do? What’s the long-term goal? How does your organization’s goal benefit your customers and supporters?

·        How Do You Do What You Do? Is there a part of your process that sets you apart? What about your organization’s way of doing things leads to better results?

·        Where Do You Want To Go? When you hit your organization’s long-term goals, what comes next? What does a better world look like through your eyes and how are you working to make it come true?

From Building Blocks to Blueprints

If you really dig into the work of answering the questions above, you’ll end up with a lot of interesting insights into your own organization and a lot of great things to talk about. But having something to say isn’t the same as being ready to say it. The answers to those questions are building blocks but you need to fit them together the right way to make sure you’re building something strong and beautiful.

The Marketing Insider Group borrows a page from Marshall Ganz of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. They recommend a 3-step approach to turn your answers into an outline for an effective narrative.

Turn the loose answers to the six questions above into a tight narrative by lining them up with the following prompts:

1.      Self: Focus on the events in your organization’s history that helped to reveal or reinforce the values that define you.

2.      Us: Connect your organization’s values to a broader audience to let them share your purpose and become a part of your community.

3.      Now: Issue a call-to-action that gives your audience an immediate opportunity to do something that affirms their commitment to your shared priorities.

From a Basic Blueprint to a Bespoke Brand Story

In marketing, it’s important to get to a point where you can transition from “following the rules” to “making your own”. When the goal is to stand out, you can’t get to where you want to be by being just like everybody else.

Building a solid foundation for your brand story is a process that needs rules. That’s how to make sure you don’t miss anything important or head off in the wrong direction. From that solid foundation, you’ll need to head off in search of uncharted waters. That’s where you can put some distance between your community and all of the noise and competition.

The best way to steer your brand story through that transition is to set it free within your organization. Letting your whole team help find new, different, and better ways to tell it breathes life into your brand story. The Forbes Agency Council had some good advice on how to make that happen.

1.      Collect and Repurpose Stories from the Whole Organization

2.      Be Authentic, Empathetic, and Practical

3.      Get Clear On Your Message

4.      Find Your Brand Voice

5.      Leverage Your Team to Help Tell Your Story

6.      Listen to Others First

How You Tell Your Story Matters

Stories are things we make. We choose a form to give shape to our tale and then we fill it up with the content that connects us to our audience.

Storytelling is something that we do. How we tell a story, who we tell it to, where and when we tell it—these are all choices we have to make. Our choices have a lot to do with the effect our stories have.

When you put a great story together with great storytelling, you put your purpose at the center of the relationships you build with your audience.

The Neuroscience of Successful Brand Stories

Starting in 2015, Prof. Paul Zak began studying the effects of narratives on the brain. Zak is a neuroeconomist, so his interest in the subject was more than just theoretical. He wanted to see how telling the same story in different ways would result in different neural activity.

In one study, Zak presented audiences with two different versions of a story about a father whose son is dying of cancer. Not only did he prove that an emotional narrative triggered a spike in oxytocin but also that viewers who experienced this spike were more inclined to donate and more likely to donate larger sums.

Obviously, we can’t all measure the oxytocin levels in our audience’s brains to make sure that we’ve gotten both our stories and our telling right. But, knowing that it can and does happen gives us plenty of justification for trusting in the process and sticking with it until we see results.

Think About Your Audience

Neil Patel gives us more neuroscience on stories when he explains that they create trust through the process of neural coupling. He goes on to say that your customers should buy a piece of your story instead of simply buying a product.

If you get the story right and you tell it well, you will likely find that your audience is anxious to help out with the telling in addition to purchasing a piece for themselves.

To take your brand stories to that next level, Patel advises that you:

·        Grow the reach of your brand story by building the personal brand of the people who make up your team.

·        Get active on social media to help your story spread out and get established in the public’s social consciousness.

·        Make the story a part of who and what you are.

·        Encourage customers and supporters to tell their version of the story and make their versions a part of how you tell it.

·        Embrace any accurate telling of your brand’s story.

Know Your Goals

We said at the beginning that brand stories are great at connecting your organization to your audience through your shared values. But what does that look like? Is there a report for that in Google Analytics?

Our friends at Euphonia Communication Partners have put together a great guide to help startups, nonprofits, and small businesses make sure that they measure what matters. It’s a great place to start building a plan to evaluate the effects of your brand storytelling. At the same time, remember that creating and nurturing connections is an ongoing process and not an all-or-nothing proposition.

We try to remember the AIDA Model when we’re analyzing the impact of brand storytelling. Sometimes you want to tell it in a way that just gets attention—views or engagements for example. But you need to follow that up with versions that gain an audience’s interest—click-throughs, shares, follows, and more.

If you tell your story well, you’ll activate the audience’s desire to be a part of what you do and they will act on that desire.

Argonaut Productions Can Help You Become A Better Brand Storyteller

Nobody knows your organization’s purpose better than you and your team. But that doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help finding stories to tell and shaping them into a great story that connects you to your audience.

We use a 3-phase approach to video storytelling. The discovery process helps you get all of your options out on the table and select the right one to focus on. The design phase shapes your story into a narrative that will get an audience’s attention, resonate with their interests, and ignite their desire to take action. The delivery phase makes sure you’re getting your story out there with perfect presentation across every channel and platform.