Guess what? Spilling the beans about your brand, shouting out its saga is not just a ‘nice-to-have’ anymore. It’s a make or break. The average person is spending a whopping 59 hours a week online, getting bombarded by a blizzard of 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day. Amidst this digital deluge, you ponder, how’s a brand supposed to pop and sizzle?
Here’s the magic wand – brand storytelling. Yup, that’s the secret sauce. Customers are cranking up their likelihood to buy by 55% if they can tie your product to a beloved story. And the cherry on top? If they see themselves in the characters of your storytelling, boom! You’ve hit the jackpot of brand storytelling power.
What exactly is Brand Storytelling?
Breaking it down, brand storytelling is like whispering your brand’s epic in the ears of the world. But hey, it’s not just gabbing about your brand’s birth or the bumps that led to its creation. It’s about voicing your company’s values and ethos with flair and feeling.
This storytelling gig breathes life into your biz, showcasing to your customers that hey, there are real folks with real vibes behind this brand. Spilling your brand’s story is not just sharing; it’s about linking up with folks on a wavelength that brews trust and true bonding.
What would brand storytelling accomplish for your company? Developing a brand story has a number of advantages:
- It jazzes up your brand’s persona.
- It struts the realness and richness of your brand.
- It paints your biz as more human, pumping up brand empathy.
- It makes you glitter by giving your brand a unique echo and hue.
- It enables you to draw in the correct crowd (those who are more likely to support your business since they share your beliefs).
- It provides you with a strong base for your upcoming marketing initiatives.
- It demonstrates to potential customers that your organization is legitimate and has more than just a short-term goal.
A well-known Maya Angelou quotation succinctly captures the significance of developing a brand story: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Even if a product or service is not the finest in its category, it may still be in high demand if consumers perceive tremendous value in purchasing it. This is so that you may add value to the act of purchasing your goods if you have a compelling and moving story to share.
| Aspect | Description | Key Questions/Examples |
| Be Sincere and Reliable | Decide what the real storytelling of the corporation is and communicate it genuinely. | – Existence for your brand.- How were things at the beginning?- What sets the company apart from its rivals? |
| Identify Your Audience | Understand your brand’s true audience. Conduct comprehensive research of the market, existing clients, and potential patrons. | – Who exactly forms your primary demographic?- What are their desires, aspirations, and preferences? |
| Disseminate the Issue You Solve | Eloquently express the specific problem your enterprise eradicates. | – Make your story real, relatable, and resonate. |
| Enhance Your Character | Develop a company personality that connects with the audience. Different tones may be used based on the organization’s goals and target audience. | – Are they social or reticent? extravagant or modest? humorous or serious? |
| Participate in Your Community | Engage with customers and receive feedback through social media marketing. Build relationships with your audience in addition to providing excellent products and services. | – Respond to inquiries and handle feedback effectively to strengthen the brand storytelling strategy. |
The Building Blocks of Brand storytelling
A good storytelling captivates your listener and causes the brain to light up, as was previously mentioned. Consequently, a distinctive brand marketing storytelling should possess the following qualities:
1. Be sincere and reliable
When choosing the companies they support, 86% of consumers say authentic brand storytelling plays a significant role in their decision-making process. A corporation must decide what its real storytelling is before it can begin to tell it.
You may build a foundation of authenticity and consistency by asking founders questions, learning about the storytelling of the firm, identifying important players in the storytelling, and discovering precisely what sets the company apart from its rivals.
Ask the following questions:
- Why is the brand in existence?
- How were things at the beginning?
- What services does the brand provide, and how is it unique from rivals?
Even while the answers to these questions won’t be the entire brand storytelling bundle, they’re an essential place to start. Time to traverse back to your brand’s budding roots. Peer into those initial days and recapture the essence of your fundamental goals. This journey back in time crafts a genuine, heartfelt story that resonates with your audience.
2. Identify Your Audience
The contemporary marketing mavens and PR prodigies have a treasure trove of data analytics at their fingertips. Harness this power to delve deeper into understanding your brand’s true audience. Kick-start your brand storytelling expedition by embarking on comprehensive research of the market, existing clients, and potential patrons.
Don’t just skim the surface. Plunge into the depths of your consumer insights by analyzing their website interactions and past buying behaviors.
For example,
- Who exactly forms your primary demographic?
- What are their desires, aspirations, and preferences?
- Which hurdles are they counting on you to overcome?
With a solid foundation of genuine and consistent knowledge, understanding your customer becomes second nature. Craft detailed, vivid personas for each segment of your target audience. Who are they? What floats their boat? What fuels their fire? Navigating these questions, your brand storytelling morphs, becoming more adept and articulate.
3. Disseminate the Issue You Solve
With a clear, consistent brand narrative and a finely-tuned understanding of your audience, eloquently express the specific problem your enterprise eradicates. Think about it this way:
Your brand story introduces your business and outlines its endeavors. Remember, your business is more than just a collection of products or services. It’s a beacon of solution, established to fill a significant gap – the very one perceived by your founders, inspiring them to embark on this enterprise voyage.
Your business is the bridge, seamlessly connecting problems to solutions, and your brand story is the guide that leads the way. Your audience is waiting to hear your authentic brand storytelling, the story that unveils the problems you passionately solve. Make it real, make it relatable, make it resonate. Your audience is all ears, eager and ready.
They may be interested in your proposed remedy if they can identify their own issue in the one you’re expressing. In fact, according to 62% of consumers, marketing content that speaks to their problems is important, and 56% of consumers believe they will stick with companies who “get them.”
4. Enhance Your Character
The company itself needs to have a personality in addition to the founders and customer profiles as characters within a brand storytelling. A key component of character development is audience connection.
It may be necessary for large organizations to speak in a formal tone that conveys authority and fosters trust. On the other hand, fresh firms aiming for younger customers can decide to use wit and comedy.
This phase can be compared to discussing a friend’s personality. What words would you use to describe the manner in which a close buddy acts, thinks, and speaks? Are they social or reticent? extravagant or modest? humorous or serious? The voice and persona of a company, which are crucial elements of brand storytelling, may also be described using these kinds of terms.
5. Participate in Your Community
Connecting with your community is the last component of brand storytelling. It’s crucial, especially in the current digital era, to forge relationships with your audience in addition to providing excellent products and services. Social media platforms give your business the chance to engage with customers and receive feedback from them.
The optimum outcome of interaction is a satisfying connection. Your company’s brand storytelling strategy will be firmly established in the marketplace based on how you go about marketing your items to clients, responding to inquiries, and dealing with feedback (especially negative feedback).
Imagine that you have a compelling founding team, a salient issue, and a standout solution—but your social media customer support is unhelpful or condescending. The general population is unlikely to accept your storytelling.
Customers say that a brand’s awareness of their unique demands has a 70% positive impact on their loyalty, and 69% agree that individualized customer care has a similar effect. Relationships may be cultivated by dependable communication that is in line with the rest of your business’s brand storytelling, which can assist to increase brand loyalty and drive repeat business.
Why is brand storytelling important and why marketers should prioritize it?
I bet you’re no stranger to the potent pull of a good story. Yup, brand storytelling in the realm of content marketing is now more pivotal than ever. It’s not just a fad – it’s the secret sauce to shoot your brand to the stars amidst the clamor for consumers’ gaze.
Do you get the picture? Take a pause and mull over this – only half of your blog posts content is genuinely catching your readers’ eyes. Staggering, right? Now, the million-dollar question is how to anchor your audience’s attention for a bit longer? Want to unravel the why behind over 90% of B2B marketers holding tight to content strategy as a trustworthy ally in the digital battlefield? It’s the golden ticket for their voice to echo far and wide. Execute it with finesse, and behold – a whopping 90% of customers will discern the unparalleled value, as clear as day.
Hence, interweaving brand stories into your content game tactics? Genius. Brand narratives are your secret weapon in content – setting you apart in this crowded marketplace. They’re like siren songs, entrancing readers and making them hang on to every word. Through these stories, you not only engage but brilliantly package the unmatched value your products or services bring to the table.
Having said that, people want to comprehend what you’re selling and will gladly become repeat clients if you make it easy for them to grasp your company’s value proposition. By doing so, you will increase your customer base and keep your current clients. So it would be beneficial if you gave brand narrative top priority in your content marketing strategy. There is more!
Visual Brand Storytelling’s Influence
Using visual storytelling to engage your audiences is one of the most fun and powerful methods to do so. For a number of key reasons, images are a crucial part of successful brand storytelling.
First, the processing time for an image by the human brain is only 13 milliseconds. We all process an incredible amount of images each day as a result of this, which is, to put it bluntly, extraordinarily quickly. Supporting the narrative of your brand can be greatly enhanced by strong, distinctive pictures.
Second, visuals have a considerably higher chance of fostering a bond with the audiences. Consumers are 60 times more likely to contact a brand that has images in search results than one that doesn’t, according to one study. Among the 50 data provided by Hubspot that demonstrate the impact of visuals are:
- The number of social media shares for articles with images spaced out every 75–100 words is twice as high as for publications without as many photographs.
- Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more interaction than posts without images.
- When people hear information, their likelihood of remembering it three days later is only 10%; however, when that knowledge is linked with a pertinent image, that likelihood rises to 65%.
Finally, using visual storytelling can help people understand difficult concepts, stories, or products. Consumers who may have struggled to understand something in writing may be helped by a straightforward infographic, a picture of a product in use, or a brief film. Good visuals hold viewers’ attention for a long time and capture it fast. Outstanding visuals may narrate stories, provide wisdom, and win over a potential client.
Best Brand Storytelling Examples
A powerful brand is more than just a catchphrase, a logo, or even its finest product. A strong brand has a backstory that appeals to the audience’s emotions and corporate values. Or, it may be grounded in data that, when combined with an interesting story, raises brand-awareness by appealing to the audience’s values or emotions.
1. LEGO
LEGO doesn’t merely entice customers to buy their cherished blocks through their “Rebuild the World” marketing campaign. Instead, they glorify kids and provide stories of original problem-solving. The videos are lighthearted, inventive, and upbeat. They remind adults of all ages how amazing it feels to use creativity to solve issues and create a better world, connecting to how kids feel while playing with LEGOs.
The campaign demonstrates the impact that relevant brand storytelling can have. In the middle of a pandemic, societal changes, and cultural turmoil, LEGO saw a chance to engage people in a narrative that exemplified how to face difficulties head-on with innovation and resiliency.
2. Huggies: No baby unhugged
Huggies, a brand of diapers owned by Kimberly Klark, provides one of the best brand storytelling examples. They were aware that they could not compete with Pampers, who once held 100 percent of the hospital contracts in Canada.
How did they act? They used data to tell a story. The “No baby unhugged” study, which was based on actual facts, was produced by their marketing firm.
Based on the study’s findings, they began educating mothers on the value of skin-to-skin contact with their infants while also making sure that volunteer huggers were on hand in Canadian hospitals for infants who required hugs. Global WebIndex reports that the campaign raised interaction by 300% and sales by up to 30%.
3. Mouth Foods Website
Mouth is a comprehensive collection of artisanal and independent foods and drinks in North America.
Guess what’s cooking at Mouth.com? A league of fervent food makers, spilling their names, emblems, and delights to hawk their masterpieces. It’s like the dreamland to set sail into the universe of the most inventive and effective episodes of brand storytelling.
But hey, it doesn’t stop there. Mouth is reshaping the contours of digital marketing, unfurling the personal sagas of creators right on its platform.
4. Nike’s Equality campaign
In terms of storytelling marketing, appealing to the audience’s shared values is another effective brand storytelling strategy. The greatest options are those that are shared by a larger audience, such as social ideals.
What does Nike have to say about this?
Flashback to 2017. Enter the Equality Campaign, ablaze with ambitions to spark a wholesome societal shift, all under the company’s banner. Why “Equality?” Because buddy, it’s been echoing as a battle cry across the sprawling chapters of social movements for over two centuries.
This was a fantastic illustration of a compelling story that links the brand with the audience and the other way around. The audience is encouraged to participate in a social movement by wearing Nike apparel or using social media in tandem with the company and its fans.
It benefits both parties. You increase social media engagement, which increases visibility and brand-awareness while also growing your consumer base.
5. Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble is a familiar name in everything from personal care items to home goods. Their singular method of brand storytelling—connecting with mothers—is one of the ways they have so successfully advertised themselves and spread like wildfire. Mothers typically make daily purchases that have an impact on a number of people due to their enormous spending power.
The company Procter & Gamble created the phrase “P&G, proud sponsor of moms,” which acknowledges and embraces the daily experiences that moms have. These video clips show mothers and their kids going about their everyday routines rather than just asking them about their food budget.
We witness mothers waking up their kids, escorting them to sports practice, and cheering them on when they succeed. Moms are able to relate to these stories on an automatic basis, which strengthens their connection to Procter & Gamble as a brand.
6. Warby Parker
What about standard, rather generic, or uninteresting products? How might a pair of glasses be promoted? Can you incorporate a story? Is telling stories the answer? Yes, it certainly is. Warby Parker did it first, as well.
They begin by describing their corporate headquarters and the design process before telling the story of how their glasses are created.But hold on, the story thickens. They’re wooing the crowd’s social conscience, declaring that every purchase made, echoes as a gift, a pair offered for zilch to a soul in despair.
Now, isn’t this a storytelling marketing marvel? It’s a glaring beacon of how a straightforward narrative can catapult you into the limelight, leaving the rivals biting the dust, even without a groundbreaking product. It’s a loud shoutout about morphing a plain Jane product into a treasure trove with a compelling story and a resonant social messaging.
7. Burt’s Bees
Imagine steering the narrative towards a theme, pulsating with relevance for your audience. Picture this – a lens focusing on unblemished living, pristine products, and a lifestyle dancing in a harmonious waltz with nature.
I know, I know – it seems like a far-fetched dream in today’s fractured world, especially for the young blood. But hey, that doesn’t slam the doors on us striving for an idyllic world and scaling as many summits towards it as our legs can carry.
Let’s paint it with a real brush. Picture a humble setup, Burt’s Bees, crafting all-natural personal care goodies. Their storytelling marketing? Ah, it’s a path less trodden compared to the stories we’ve unfurled above. They’re humming a different tune in the storytelling realm, and buddy, it’s music to the ears.
The story is based on Burt, the company’s founder, and gives the spectator a brief glimpse of his natural way of living.
On the one hand, there is a documentary that chronicles Burt’s life, on the other side, the business published a YouTube series of videos called “Burtism“ that include tidbits of advice:
8. Alaska Airlines
Alaska Airlines is yet another excellent source for marketing materials that convey a story.
Instead of doing as the aforementioned businesses did, they choose a well-known person, Kevin Durant, to describe his travels across America.
It’s a terrific example since, in addition to the engaging story and the simple-to-follow video content, they employed a well-known voice and face to convey their message. As a result, they reached out to Kevin Durant’s followers as well as the rest of the target market’s avid travelers and online video viewers.
9. National Geographic
One of the oldest still-existing publications in the world, National Geographic, is another excellent illustration of storytelling. Simply follow them on Instagram to watch what happens.
Their regular publication of historical, social, natural, or wildlife photos does not, however, constitute their marketing strategies. How and why?
They do have a story for each and every image they post on social media, though. You can read the description and let their imagination amaze you with fantastic storylines and at the same time, excellent content based on true data and knowledge, or you can look at the picture and create a narrative on your own.
Conclusion
In the realm of marketing plans today, storytelling is a common tendency. All brands, big and small, decide to fabricate stories to promote their names and/or goods. People enjoy stories because they can relate to them and understand them readily, just as they have since the beginning of human society.
Since the story is one of the oldest and most well-known inventions of the human mind, we are dealing with a novel method. We’ve gone over some of the most crucial elements of this brand storytelling strategy and seen some fantastic instances of storytelling marketing.
How much, if at all, did you use storytelling in your marketing campaigns?