What people say behind your back is their most honest opinions. The better the things they say, the more they have respected you, and vice versa. In the modern internet world where people have become a self-publisher with the many available broadcasting tools, websites and blogs, your customers are the best brand storytellers.
As a business, there is no better way to reach your audience other than approaching them by representing your brand. What makes your brand shines is how people sees it, and how people react to it when your brand is delivered in front of their faces.
Your brand is not for sale. Not now, and never should be. People are buying from you not because of what you do. It's because why you do it for them.
Making your customers know what you do for them, will make them know that you're priority is not your self-esteem and profit. But the greater goods: fulfilling their needs.
Inspiring people to tell, and re-tell, your brand stories in not an easy task. There are many factors to make people like you they way you truly are.
Bonding the Physical and Emotional Presence
On the web, you may have a professionally made website that offers the products and/or services that you want to sell. With the platform, you can deliver your brand to the internet's population. But to make your brand bonds with people, you need to put more emotions beside than just your physical presence.
Anything on the internet can go viral. The power is what makes the internet the influence for many brands in their terms to engage customers.
A great and well-crafted story created by people other than those that have connections to your business, is a free advertisement for you that works way better than any professionally made advertisements you actually should pay for.
Many big brands rely more on words-of-mouth marketing to make their brands shine better. They may have spent millions of dollars to create a compelling advertisement, but when a brand should talk, the best ads are made by people. Not you.
By merging your physical presence and emotional influence, you should be able to make people see deeper inside you - deeper than what your marketing campaign can do - and make them understand that as a brand, you're just a human that wants to help other humans.
The Fundamentals
A creative brand storytelling is often subtle and indirect. Storytelling is not always about inventing a story - your brand already exists - what you want is to give what you do to be filled with stories. You want to fulfill needs, and the ways you developed solutions to do so, are stories.
Storytelling can be an approach for your marketing effort, but also in a way for writing and creating content. This is done by merging personal and existing stories to your brand narrative.
When some people say a good storyteller is a gift, that's not happening in some equations. Sometimes content just has to be purely informational. Good storytelling is not necessarily about you, your brands and your products/services. It's about emotions, needs and the written and unwritten images associated with these emotions and needs, in relationship to what your brand evokes.
Everything you wish to say in your story should always fit in your broader narrative: from events to content and campaigns. Note that storytelling should also be per definition, cross-channel and people-centric.
A captivating brand story is similar to fairy tale story. It must have three acts that set up the situation, the characters, the conflict and a resolution. However, business stories are unique because they require a fourth element: a call to action, which is often indirect.
The ultimate goal of marketing is to inspire, whether it motivates change, encourages the buying of a product or draws people into your store. As an author of your brand, your desired outcome in the end should be in the same path as the direction of your story.
A Story to Tell
Stories are captivating for a reason. From childhood through adulthood, we are drawn to the lessons we learn. The exiting journey from stories unleashes our imaginations. Stories are told to celebrate cultures, to be a testament to the lives we have led. Stories are the things that can make messages pass easier.
Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to breathe life into your brand. Because it's so powerful, it's often called the main component in content marketing.
Just like any story written in books, they need to have an identity (your brand). By giving the things you want to sell (your products and/or services) a "character" that works back-to-back with your brand, you're trying to capture and share the story they really are.
A story is a journey. There is no story that is worth sharing if it doesn't have a plot, nor can capture the hearts of the reader. To make your brand a storytelling magnet, you need to capture your audience's attention in a way that your brand can take those people in a journey they yearn to experience.
In order for consumers to form a personal connection with your brand, company stories must be authentic, creative and inspirational.
Emotional branding is a progressive marketing strategy that has the potential to drive revenue and increase customer appreciations. How someone feels about your brand, typically determines whether they want to buy your product or not.
A brand is just a matter of perception. When you tell a story, you need to overcome the challenge to create an experience that resonates your brand with your customers.
Delivering the Facts and Proper Ingredients as Imaginations
Humans are social animals that use language as the ultimate way of communicating. Language is not limited to speech, it can move far beyond words to express feelings and perceive the world around us. Storytelling is the oldest form of passing knowledge, and much of how we look at what we like to call facts is influenced by stories and how we interpret them.
When facts are undeniable, they are the words and images that tell the story. Moving a bit further, a story is what makes people's imagination runs wild. A fact that is told in a well-written story will influence the readers in their own perspective, making them their own illustrator of their imagination, based on the given facts.
When crafting your brand story, you must be specific in what you are asking readers to do and explain why it's important to their lives. Outline actual steps to be taken and show readers how they can recognize the reward.
A great story is what simplifies a complex concept in ways that it can entertain while educating. And a story that can easily spread is the one that is relatable, easy to remember, easy to recall and easy to share. If you can make that happen, you can have yourself a worth telling story.