What is brand storytelling?
Brand storytelling is the soul of your business. It’s not how you carry out your business, but instead why you carry out your business; why you do what you do every day. Brand storytelling promotes what you can offer to your clients and potential customers.
It’s not a spiel or a biography. Brand storytelling should build trust among your demographic market and highlight why they should choose you. Customers don’t want to hear everything about you from a me-me-me perspective that many brands choose to take.
Instead, they want to hear about how the brand can best benefit them and their journey to success. They want to know how your brand can best serve them, allowing them to become more productive, happier, and healthier. How can your brand help them increase their revenue to take more family vacations, buy a house, or save money for their child to go to college?
Your customers don’t care about your brand. They want to know how you can serve them.
In business, it’s all about what we can do for one another, and more importantly, what we can do for our clients. Brand stories should explain how your services can better their business or life.
If your company helps out individuals, you should focus on how your brand can improve one’s life. If your company helps out other businesses, you should focus on how you can help them better their business, and in turn, better their life.
Tips for telling compelling brand stories
Know your audience
One of the most important factors to keep in mind is your audience. Who are they, and how do you appeal to them? Even further, how can you appeal to your audience without excluding other potential audiences?
Some ideas about core demographics may potentially limit your market share. For example, skincare is often only marketed to women. However, that’s not their only demographic. There are plenty of men interested in skincare but tend not to purchase it because it’s not often marketed directly to them.
Even further, marketing is often biased. When people look for a product or service, they want to be able to see themselves using it. Exclusive marketing that focuses too heavily on one consumer image can push away other demographics.
For example, when a skincare brand only markets to middle aged-white women, they’re missing tons of revenue through people of color, men, and non-binary people. Shifting your concept of core demographics can open your product up to more potential customers.
And if you think about it, it’s much harder to exclude these groups from marketing than to include them. What message are you sending to your customers when your website is full of one image of your consumer?
What do you believe in?
Through your brand storytelling, you should also be able to show that you stand for something. Whether that’s diversity, environmental friendliness, modernness, feminism and being woman-led, queer-friendly, or fair pay, you should be able to show that you stand for something important.
Company culture is critical, and these days it’s something that many people look at when choosing to purchase from someone. Many people may shy away from your company if you don’t have a good ethos behind your brand.
If you look at popular brands like Ben & Jerry’s and Nike, they’ve recently taken a stand to show that they stand by Black people and the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing this, they’ve not only created a brand that cares about the community but a brand that stands for something.
You can tell how much these campaigns mean to people just by looking at the posts of Black people and POCs in the community talking highly of these brands and how they feel seen and heard by them.
At Site Social SEO, a core value of ours is inclusive representation. We’re led by two queer men, one of which is a person of color. Our team is made up of women, people of color, and queer people. We spend the extra time working with our clients to promote inclusive representation through topics and images that acknowledge the diversity of our society. Our goal is to make sure that the media we create reflects life.
Keep your brand story consistent
Once you’ve determined what your brand story will be, it’s important to make sure that you keep it consistent across all social media platforms and throughout everything you do.
Your brand message may need to be modified for different platforms, and that’s okay. You shouldn’t be posting the same things on Instagram that you’re posting on Twitter because they’re wildly different platforms.
However, while what you post on different platforms may be different, you should still carry the same consistency within your brand message. Everything you post, write, and share should reflect some aspect of your values and brand.
Create a website and copy that tell your story effectively
Your website will be a visual representation of your business and your business’s values. All the text and all of the images on your website matter. If your brand story talks about inclusivity, but your images and copy don’t reflect a very inclusive brand, your brand will come off as inconsistent and unappealing.
However, a compelling and consistent brand story is the first step toward converting a website visitor into a client or customer.
Is your website telling a clear compelling brand story?
You should be able to still your brand into a 30-second elevator pitch that makes it clear what value you provide to your clients, what keywords represent your business, and what your core values are. Bonus points if you can speak on how your values influence the work that you do.
Site Social SEO can help you make sure that your brand story is cohesive, compelling, and inclusive. We are proud of the work that we do, and we want to help you feel the same way about yours.
Not only can we help you develop a concise brand message, but we can help you implement it across your site with content, visuals, and copy.
For more information on how we can help your business succeed so you can prosper, please contact us online or call us at 407-712-0494.
