Brand Storytelling Your Audience Will Actually Care About

Your brand is a precious thing. Deeply personal and carefully constructed, it exists as the most important and effective statement of who you are as a business and why you matter. Companies ultimately exist for the same reason: to make the world a better place. You saw a problem and wanted to help, and this journey from there to here is the most compelling story you can tell. When brand storytelling works right, it inspires customers and creates deep, meaningful engagement. 

How Uniqueness Is at the Heart of Your Brand Story

No other company exists the way yours does. Sure, you’ve got competitors. But only you have got your story. The history of the business, the evolutions, successes, and defeats all play a part in who you are and why you’re unique. Compelling brand storytelling comes from understanding your identity, and more importantly what makes you different. 

Before beginning any foray into brand storytelling, company leaders and key stakeholders need to sit down and make sure everyone is on the same page. Though every employee has a significant shared history, events look different through the eyes of the beholder. Work with team members to craft, edit, and polish brand messaging and to get as many perspectives as possible. If you’re drawing from previously existing interviews or media pieces, be certain any quotes or clips are in-line with current company culture. 

Who’s Listening to Your Brand Storytelling?

It’s difficult to imagine the existence of a story without an audience. This brand messaging was created to speak outwardly about company efforts and experience, all as an attempt to forge connections with readership. However, if you’re ignoring or ignorant of the faces in the crowd, it’s going to be an uphill battle making sure your brand storytelling makes a dent. 

Performing comprehensive audience analysis is a vital step in any brand storytelling process. Start with hard data of key demographics in order to first establish a baseline for your key customer base. Metrics like age, location, marital status, and buying power all provide valuable introductory information. 

From there, the process turns temporarily inward. What does your product or service accomplish? What kind problems does it solve? What would cause an audience member to have one of these pain points? How does that struggle make them feel? These kinds of probing questions can help you in the development of buyer personas, or semi-fictionalized profiles on ideal customers. While these are only a guide and surely can’t sum up the experience of every single audience member, it will be an effective reference point going forward. 

Finally, take a look at your competition, the companies trying to solve some of the same problems as you. While your story will be nothing like theirs, reviewing their content and seeing how customers are reacting will help to further inform your personas and audience analysis. 

The Importance of Campaign Creation

How does a brand tell a story? All at once? Slowly over time? Communicating your company’s journey isn’t something that can be knocked out in a single blog. You may be able to list off the highlights and rattle off some important dates, but brand storytelling is a much longer game. However, taking too long or focusing all advertising efforts on yourself might be enough to turn away readers and potential clients. 

So, what’s a content creator to do? The best approach to making the most of your brand story is to ensure it’s being told, correctly and in completion, across every channel. Campaigns allow you to put further shape around your story by giving it direction, purpose, and consistency. Rather than releasing content on an unfixed schedule, developing a strategy means every piece of storytelling is reaching the right audience at the right time. 

Brands are fickle and can take years to understand and define. But the story of how you got there is something you and your team knows by heart. Retelling these tales with an emphasis on branding is an excellent way to make your company stand out to potential clients and customers. However you choose to tell your story, make sure it’s one you can be proud of.