Marketing has evolved over the decades, moving away from the broadcast style of radio, television and print ads, into a more interactive style of relationship-based marketing. In this post you’ll learn how marketing has become a form of storytelling, and how you can make telling stories to develop relationships work for your organisation. But what exactly is brand storytelling?

Brand storytelling…

When you meet a new person for the first time you naturally want to find common ground by sharing anecdotes and stories, and when you discover something interesting about that person you are likely to tell someone else. Moreover, when you think about whether you want to meet up with them again, you draw on how they made you feel.

Brand storytelling is the strategy of using marketing to establish common ground and grow relationships with potential referral partners and customers. The aim is to produce a strong recognisable identity for your organisation, that conveys your purpose and invokes a good feeling.

Think of Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ slogan. Combined with the swoosh logo, it conveys a positive can-do attitude. This strong feeling is backed up by the celebrities who endorse the brand, and Nike’s own stories shared on the website about challenging the status quo, striking out against limiting parameters, overcoming adversity and achieving greatness. Don’t you want to do the same? Well, you can in a pair of these trainers…

As the theory goes, you only buy from people/brands you trust, brands that make you feel something – so how do you get that for your own business or charity?

Telling your brand’s story

Implementing brand storytelling is easier than you think. Let’s go back to the classroom explanation of how to tell a good story – the 5 C’s.

Circumstance – This establishes your why. Using this tactic, you can share your organisation’s values and mission and explain to your audience why you do what you do, what matters to you and your organisation and how it makes you happy/valuable.
Hopefully talking about your circumstances will help you find synergy with others.

Curiosity – Curiosity is what keeps people reading, and it’s what makes them come back, they want to know more… A great way to create curiosity is by asking interesting questions. Think about your week so far, have you shared valuable knowledge with a customer? Did your conversations flow, moving from topic to topic and result in successful outcomes?

Conversations like that, customer service calls, even corporate learning can become something to create curiosity in others.

Characters – Going back to buying from people we trust; you can’t do that without introducing the characters in your organisation. Why not tell a story about your team – try expanding the about section of your website and then turning it into a series of posts or articles. Can you celebrate a team member’s or your own achievements, inside or outside of work?

Conversations – Will your content get people talking? In your posts you can ask them to comment, invite other opinions, even if they’re conflicting. And here’s another idea – join in on other people’s conversations too.

Conflict – Rather than a negative form of conflict, try to use this C to demonstrate the trigger which fired up your passion to begin with. This then circles back to Circumstance, so don’t be nervous of sharing the hard times before the conflict was resolved and resulted in your success story.

Where to share your story

That’s easy too! Out networking, on your website, on social media, in printed collateral – anywhere you are seen or heard.

Use images – banners, blog headers, front covers and so on. Try to use your own photography where possible rather than stock images as you are at the heart of your story.

Take videos – Make at least one! The more your audience hears you speak and observes your body language in video, the quicker they learn about you.

Create written copy – Everyone loves a story, but not many of us have time to read pages and pages, so try to keep your copy to the point. Ask yourself as you write, ‘what’s my point, what do they want to gain from this?’

To help you manage all of this content, consider how you can schedule it in advance, or reach out to a team member or outsource for assistance. 

I hope this article has inspired you to have fun with your brand storytelling, now let’s see where it takes you!