How To Boost Your Brand & Content With Brand Storytelling

People have an innate love of stories. Good stories create magic and a sense of wonder in the world. It draws people in and keeps them salivating for more.  It’s the same with brand storytelling. If done right, it can effectively support and boost your brand, connecting it with customers (readers, listeners, or viewers) and pushing them to come back for more.

However, many businesses do not understand it or how to get it right. So, we’ll start from the basics. 

What is Brand Storytelling

Brand storytelling has to do with connecting your brand to customers using a narrative that links what you stand for with the common values that you share with your customers. It’s using such narrative – stories – to drive customer loyalty and growth because they can relate with you.

With brand storytelling, your messages engage the right audiences and drive them to take the desired action (like making a purchase, calling a salesperson, downloading content or subscribing to an email list, etc.).

You could mistake business storytelling for content marketing whereby you try reaching out to your audience and prompting them to take an action. The two are similar and are closely related, but they are not the same. Brand storytelling is in content marketing, yes, but content marketing is more than brand storytelling.

Business storytelling leverages on well-crafted narratives (it could be real or fictitious) while content marketing, on the other hand, is much complex and talks about the collective efforts the brand uses to communicate with their audiences in informative and engaging ways in other to convince their audience to make certain buying decisions and these efforts also include business storytelling.

Why Brand Storytelling Is ESSENTIAL For Businesses

1. It Gives Your Marketing Intimacy

Business storytelling allows you to communicate a marketing message in an intimate manner that your audience can understand and relate to, without drawing their attention to the fact that you’re trying to sell to them.

You’ll admit that when you’re obviously been sold to, you lose interest pretty fast, hence why radio and TV ads sometimes bring in the story of the brand. Check out Coca-Cola’s and Heineken’s impressive use of this.

2. Brand Storytelling Builds Trust and Engagement

Since it’s a natural form of communication, brand storytelling helps to build trust and more engagement from the audience, which will improve the way people view your brand. When you connect with people through stories, trust is easily built, and much more, you get powerful engagements.

3. Brand Storytelling Improves Customer Loyalty

Brand Storytelling, when done right, improves customer loyalty with time; this is because these stories are capable of connecting and impact your customers. Loyalty comes from trust. As long as the service is great, your right use of storytelling keeps them coming back.
If you think good service is enough, you’re so wrong. If that was so, why aren’t all your previously satisfied customers coming back? You need something stronger to connect with them again and again even as you provide good service.

4. It Makes the Brand Stand Out

We’re not the only ones offering our service; neither are you the only one offering yours. Asides certain things like pricing, before a customer tries out a brand, your story draws people in the first time they encounter your brand. It will be the thing that makes you memorable.

Brand storytelling helps distinctly sell the brand by connecting people with the brand, a product, or a campaign. It’s thus essential that brand storytelling has a core part in marketing strategy, be it social media (other digitals) or traditional.

How Do You Get Into Using Brand Storytelling Right

Frankly, it starts with one simple thing:

EVERY BRAND HAS A STORY

Reading this right now, I’m sure you’re reflecting on your brand story. How it all started for you with an idea and then the struggle to transform that idea from just a dream or concept to reality. The WHY OF YOUR BRAND OR PRODUCT is what your brand story starts from.

Business Storytelling transcends the traditional approach of content marketing and helps you communicate the information in a way that is easier and better to understand and related to by the audience.

Imbibing Brand Storytelling into Content Marketing

To bring in brand storytelling into content marketing the right way, you’ll have to define these four key moments of your business story:

1. Define the problem you solve
2. Understand and note what sparked the start (or pivoting) of your business
3. What solutions are you providing?
4. What’s your mission?

When you have answered and noted all that down, you can then turn the narrative into a story. For example, your reason for starting business could be because there are not enough/no African brands doing the exact same thing you do. Hence, your competitors might not understand your customers as well as you do.

As such, your brand narrative can start from your understanding of your customers’ values and how you come in there.

Have any questions? We’ll answer straight up. Send it in the comments, and don’t forget to share this article.