A business providing a service to customers is not just about making sure the product or service is top quality or that sales levels are high. Although these factors are key to a successful business, what is essential is the connection that customers, both potential and current, have with the brand or business. That connection is often built through relatable events or stories that capture the essence of the brand and create an emotional attachment with the viewer or reader.
What is Brand Storytelling?
Capturing the essence of a business’ beliefs, standards, and why the organization came to be through relatable narratives is the foundation of brand storytelling. In order to get potential consumers to be compelled to buy from a business or to have current consumers coming back after the first purchase, they must feel connected to the brand. The brand is basically the “image” of the business.
The image tells consumers what a business is all about, besides what they offer in services. A business’ image can be based on a family-friendly, legacy-based, environmentally conscious, plant-based, Black-owned, or another foundation that is meant to appeal to certain segments of an intended audience.
Creating a narrative around that image, like showing how the owner of a plant-based company created their product because they went through a medical crisis and could not find anything on drug store shelves to alleviate their ailments, is brand storytelling that is meant to connect to an audience on an emotional level.
Steps To Use Brand Storytelling to Grow Your Audience
Brand storytelling can have a profound effect on your target audience and can also help to bring in new customers and clients. Using your brand’s story to tug on emotions or to empower people toward taking some kind of action can push your business further to where it wants to go. Here are some ways brand storytelling can help to grow your audience:
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Ensure that the brand narrative checks all of the boxes:
Is the backstory relative to the services that your business is providing? Is it appealing? Does it help form a connection to consumers that you want to reach out to?
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Create a one-of-a-kind narrative that is productive and inspirational:
Make sure that the brand story can both help to sell the product at a faster rate and that it is emotionally grabbing to potential and current customers.
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Ensure that the marketing strategies for both well-established and online platforms are cohesive:
Marketing campaigns tailored to television, radio, and print will be different from the campaigns geared toward social media and email marketing. But those strategies must be cohesive and easy to understand to the audience on all platforms because interaction with a brand does not just happen on one media platform.
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Connect with consumers by being able to relate to them:
It is easier to grab an audience with a down-to-earth and humble beginning narrative than a.
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Focus on potential consumers that connect with the brand:
Pay the most attention to the need that your products satisfy, then target the audience most likely to have that particular need.
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Select the modes of your business marketing strategies wisely:
A family-friendly business might have more success advertising on a social media platform like Facebook, where the age of users skews older, than another social media platform like Instagram. Not only must you know your audience, but you must also know their stomping grounds as well.
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Analyze the important factors:
Monitor and analyze the metrics of leads, interactions, the number of sales before and after enacting storytelling to your company brand, and how consumers responded to the changes implemented.
( Also Read: Best Storytelling Techniques for Content Marketing )
Importance of Brand Storytelling
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Capture the attention of an audience and maintain it:
Once a business successfully appeals to a segment of a targeted audience through brand storytelling, the organization must then maintain its grasp through reiterating the foundation of the brand and how it came to be (the story).
The owner of a plant-based company created from their own medical crisis may partner with different non-profit health organizations to reach out to communities that lack access to affordable healthcare, to show customers that health through clean products is a top priority.
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Establish a connection:
Emotional appeals and making moves outside of the organization that solidifies a business’ message helps an audience believe in and invest in the brand.
If a small company tailors its brand around the image of being “a Black-owned business that wants to help its surrounding community”, then potential customers will be reeled in by the moral appeal of supporting a minority-owned business in a racially charged climate and through that investing in the Black community as a whole. Showing customers that their purchases are changing the world for the better keeps them coming back again and again.
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Create an emotional attachment:
When buying a product, customers want to feel good while interacting with the environment (whether physical or digital) of the brand. While a family-friendly restaurant’s main goal is to provide good food, the experience of having a safe playing space for the kids and an area where parents can kick back and relax makes customers emotionally attached to that “feeling.”
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Demonstrate the ability to sway and persuade:
New and smaller businesses may need help in trying to convince potential consumers that their products and services are top-notch and can hold steady against the bigger competition in the market.
By displaying customer testimonials from people who have tried and are satisfied with the product, leads and lurkers will be more willing to give it a try themselves. Also, send demo packages to well-known experts and influencers in the market to raise a business’ profile and reach out to more people.
Final Thoughts
Brand storytelling is just creating a narrative for the image of your business in order to engage an audience on an emotional, moral, and even experience-seeking level. The goal is to entice potential customers to try out a product for the first time and for current customers to keep coming back after the first purchase.
The art of storytelling can trigger something in the human psyche to feel, act, and to engage. This process helps an audience to view a business on a more intimate level instead of an “I sell, you buy” corporate entity.
Brand storytelling is especially important for bigger and more established businesses to implement into their marketing strategies so that they do not lose touch with what their main audience needs and the core of the brand.
