- HoneyHat

What is Brand Storytelling?

Brand storytelling is simply the act of telling your brand’s story through content. You can build a community of loyal fans by authentically communicating your brand.

What are the elements of brand storytelling?

You can tell many stories about your brand. Each one represents a unique aspect of your identity. You can tell stories about the beginning of your business or about how you have helped customers. Any story you share about your brand adds to its larger story.

There are some general categories that can be used to represent the pillars of your brand’s story.

Who are you? Tell us about your company, including your mission, values and culture.
What do you do? Your product or service:
The people that you wish to help:
Why do you do it? What is your larger goal, beyond your product/service–what you can offer your customers (e.g. your app makes it easy to book vacations for your customers so they can relax).
How to do it: Visibility of your product, production or people.

Depending on your marketing strategies, the way you tell your story can vary. Brand storytelling can be done with almost any content format, including but certainly not limited to the following:

It doesn’t really matter how you tell the story. It’s important that your story is honest, authentic, and resonant with the right people. What’s the good news? The good news is that if you are able to tell a great story about your brand, this will happen.

Why is Brand Storytelling Important to Brands?

Interruption marketing (aka traditional advertising) was the dominant form of advertising for many years. Brands would interrupt people and talk to them instead of with them. The people are sick of this dynamic because it makes them feel as if they’re a faceless dollar sign being targeted by an anonymous corporation. We are now in the era of Engagement Marketing where people seek honest and authentic brand relationships based on mutual respect and trust. People want to engage with brands on a personal basis, like a trusted resource or friend. Brand storytelling is the best way to compete on the market.

Brands who master content marketing through social media platforms and other channels have an advantage in many ways. Storytelling has wide-ranging benefits, both within and outside of your company.

Brand storytelling is a great way to stand out among your competitors.

What makes you different? There’s a good reason why you are different, whether it’s in your product design or services. People want to know. It may seem self-indulgent to you, but your brand’s story — how you started, grew, learned to do great work and chose what you believe in — is more interesting than you realize. You can easily stand out from your competition if you use your content to highlight the unique aspects of your brand.

Humanize your brand.

Humans are drawn to human interaction. Your brand is comprised of many unique, engaging, and interesting people. You can make people feel more connected and trusting by sharing this part of your story. Brands who focus their corporate stories on product features are missing a great opportunity to create a personal connection.

It helps you to attract the right people.

Customers and employees alike expect brands to demonstrate their values and be open and honest. Brand storytelling allows you to communicate more than just what you do. It helps you demonstrate what you believe. By articulating your values, customers can more easily align with you. You also have a better chance of attracting talent to work for you.

Brand storytelling is another way to make your brand more competitive. Not only are you attracting customers, but also employees who will help you innovate and succeed. In many ways, telling a brand story to attract those gem candidates will fuel the future success of your brand.

It helps you to communicate your value.

The conventional wisdom says that there are only two ways for a business to compete: by price or value. It’s not just that competing on price sounds bad, but it’s also a race many brands cannot run for as long, even if their hearts desired. In many industries, someone else younger, more nimble, and with a smaller team can charge less than you for similar products. What if the product they offer isn’t as good as yours? Nope. It’s a race towards the bottom unless you scale like Amazon.

Competing on value, however, can keep you competitive. Consider the value that you offer. What are the experiences of customers? What “gets” them when they purchase from you? Brand storytelling allows you to reinforce this value throughout the buyer’s journey.

It gives you greater agency.

You don’t always have control of your brand story. Your brand story is a combination of what you say and how others perceive it. It’s important, despite the frustration that this may cause you to own what you can. You will be ignored if you do not promote your brand’s story.

“Authority doesn’t go to the entrepreneur who has the best message, but to the one most willing to share it.”

Dan Martell, founder of SaaS Academy

Our world is becoming more transparent. For better or for worse, this is a result of the Internet age. It’s better to create your brand’s narrative by design, rather than by default.

Brand Storytelling

How do you tell your brand’s story? Content is the answer for marketers. Content is the answer for marketers. You can maximize your reach by creating a content infrastructure to provide a constant stream of brand stories across multiple platforms. How do you achieve this? We have some tips for you to help you tell your story.

What is one of the main reasons why brands find it difficult to tell a compelling or clear story? They don’t know who they really are. You should start by defining your brand’s heart. The heart of your brand is comprised of purpose, vision and mission. These core principles form the basis of your brand’s story. These principles will drive your decisions about your business and how you present yourself to the world. They also influence the way that you communicate with your audience. You can use them to inspire future stories, but they need to be written down to make sure your brand is consistent and tells an authentic story.

Use our free Brand Heart Workbook to document the purpose, vision, values, and mission of your brand.

Document your brand messages

Consistently telling a coherent, clear story is the key to a powerful brand story. It is important for several reasons.

You want to be remembered. You want to be remembered.
You want to create an experience that is seamless. You want people to be able to make a purchase as quickly and smoothly as possible. Messages that are not consistent can cause speed bumps. This is something we often see in our B2B clients. If your sales and marketing messages don’t match or tell the same story, your brand will be questioned at critical stages.
It’s easier to understand your story, and it will have a greater impact. Clarity is crucial. It’s important to avoid confusing your audience by using contradictory messages, or boring them to death with endless repetition. Clarity in brand messaging allows you to tell your story more concisely.

What is your description of the product/service you offer? What sets you apart from your competitors? What are your main selling points? How can you make sure that the brand creators are confident in their ability to speak about this? You will be able to provide compelling answers for any question a customer may have by documenting your brand message.

Use our brand messaging framework for free to identify your key messages and the language that you will use. You can use this as a foundation for later brainstorming content ideas.

3) Identify your audience.

You need to know your audience to be a great storyteller. Understand who they are, their interests, and the way they prefer to listen. You aren’t speaking to a homogeneous group, especially in B2B. You might be talking to different people from different industries, or even different generations.

Create personas and ideal customer profiles. You would create only marketing personas in B2C. In B2B you must identify the type of company you are targeting (also known as Ideal Customer Profiles) as well as individual personas within that company. This is a tedious task, but it’s worth it. Personas are a great way to help you brainstorm ideas for stories. They can also help you identify the best stories at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Brand storytelling is not the same as selling. If you are too aggressive, people will be turned off. You need to know what your customers are thinking at each stage of their journey to determine which parts of your story they will want to hear. This exercise is a great way to determine the best messaging at the right time.

Use our buyer journey template and guide to help you identify the messages that your customers need to hear and at what stage.

4) Establish your branding.

Brand storytelling often overlooks the brand element. Brand voice, personality and visual identity tell a story about your company. It’s therefore important to be consistent and authentic in all content.

Decide on your brand’s voice and personality. In B2B marketing, it is easy to fall back on boring marketing language. Why do so many brand sound alike? They haven’t defined (or know how to use their brand voice).
Create visual identity guidelines. Your visual language is an aesthetic experience for your brand and communicates much about you. Your logo and color palettes will affect the way you present yourself. So, just like your brand messaging, it is important to create a visual language that is consistent.

You can use our templates and guides to create a brand identity and to identify your voice. Once you’ve done this, it is important to create brand guidelines that will help the content creators to stay true to the brand.

5) Brainstorm around the story pillars.

After you have laid the foundation for your brand, you can now get creative and brainstorm new ways to tell the story of your brand. You can do this in many ways, but one of the easiest is to brainstorm around each of the pillars of your brand identity: who you are, what do you, for whom do you do it, how do you do?

Want to make your content more engaging?

You can educate, entertain or inspire.

We’ll show you how to tell a brand story in a variety of ways. You’ll also see examples of each.

PILLAR 2: WHO ARE YOU

Share stories that reflect your values. You know who you are, and what you stand for. It’s a great idea to turn your values into content and show the world what you believe in. This will help create a relationship based on shared values. Check out examples of smart brands that have turned their values into content.
Not just your customers, but also your employees and future workers. Pew Research found that 57% of those who quit their jobs during the Great Resignation were motivated by a feeling of disrespect at work. You can create a feeling of belonging by telling stories about your brand’s people (and celebrating them). This will also help your customers to feel more connected with your employees. Here are seven easy ways to show off your culture and people on social media.

Dropbox’s talent brand was built through storytelling and creative branding that demonstrated to potential employees the #LifeInsideDropbox.

PILLAR 2. What you do

Your brand messaging will come in handy here. After you have created clear, concise messaging that explains what you do and how you are different, you can think of story ideas to support each point.

We created a campaign to help small businesses learn about Unbabel and their work. It was bold and different from the competition. This story was told in a variety of formats including a hero-video, eBook, blog posts, social media content and the interactive game Unbabel It.

PILLAR 4: Who You Do It For

Empathy is a great way to determine what your audience wants to hear. Consider your audience’s perspective and provide them with content that is relevant for their lives. Empathy is the best storytelling tool, whether it’s to solve a problem or give them a new perspective. Use these tips to transform your audience’s problems into content and learn how brands use empathy.
Share strong customer success stories. You will need to show that you have helped others succeed if you want people interested in your brand. Our best tips for turning customer success stories into captivating narratives.
Share your stories with your audience. Giving them the microphone can be powerful. Learn how to generate user-generated content which builds community.

Happy Money, for example, shares real success stories of clients through Member Money Moments — simple, bold and eye-catching graphics that are shared on Instagram. It’s an easy way to show how the brand can help clients, while letting them say it themselves.

PILLAR 4. WHY You Do It

Share your origin story. Share your origin story, including the good, bad, and embarrassing. If you are curious about how C5 was built, this is how it went. )
Share what you love about your profession. People are drawn to passionate people. Share your stories and tell people why you’re in this industry. Transparency is an excellent way to build authentic relationships with the community.

For example, we launched Best Story Wins in order to discuss B2B Marketing, ask industry leaders about their challenges and share our enthusiasm about brand-building. This is another way to share our knowledge and connect with our audience.

PILLAR 5. How to do it

You can share lessons learned and failures with others. You can connect more meaningfully with others if you have made a mistake (or learned an important lesson). This vulnerability and transparency will help you to avoid making the same mistakes. Find out, for example, how we changed our content strategy to increase sales by 160%. )
Share behind the scenes. People are always curious about how things work. There are many ways to give them an insight: live streams, Q&As, articles, etc. Your team is often the best resource for content. Check out our tips on how to make your employees brand storytellers.

Zendesk is known for its expert content. However, creating this content can be difficult. Flubs, bloopers and more. Zendesk’s charming personality is shown by sharing these bloopers on Instagram. This not only gives you a glimpse of the fun personality of Zendesk, but also helps people understand that even professionals make mistakes.

See this post on Instagram

Zendesk shared a post (@zendesk).

See how these brands have great stories to tell (even if the product/service they offer is not exciting). Try these 10 brainstorming prompts for your own brand story. Find out how we helped Happy Money tell their story and reach millions by using it.

We know that your creativity can be stifled at times, so we have created a brainstorming template for you to speed up your storytelling. You can create a whole month’s worth content in less than an hour by filling in the blanks.

6) Optimize Your Content.

Show your audience that you value their attention and time by packaging your content in a way that is easy to consume.

Select the right format. Every piece of content should aim to tell your brand’s story as effectively and efficiently as possible. Choosing the right format for your content is crucial. If you are trying to create the newest, flashiest content, this can be a disservice for your audience. Find out what format is best for your story by reading our guide on 13 types of B2B Content Marketing.
Customize your story to the channel. Great content has failed because it didn’t fit the platform. (For example, an infographic was too large on a blog or a long video was too much for Instagram.) Match your storytelling style to the platform. You can maximize your reach by marketing the same piece of content across different platforms.
Partner up with others. You can share your content through your own channels, but you should always consider extending your reach by partnering with other people, using syndication or creating cobranded material. Learn how to work with industry publications to produce custom content.
Shareable content is important because you don’t want your story to be the sole one told. Make it easy for your audience to spread your story. Consider all the things you can do to encourage engagement, including social buttons, correct dimensions, SEO optimization and hashtags. Find out more about how to optimize a blog for publishing, and how to optimize infographics for search engine optimization.

How To Make Your Story Land

If your story isn’t authentic, no matter how much money you spend on marketing, it will not resonate with the right audience. Here are some more tips to ensure that your story is heard and has the greatest impact.

Do you know 60% of B2B marketing professionals do not have a documented strategy for content? It’s difficult to tell a good story about your brand without a written strategy. Use our free toolkit for content strategy to put your goals down on paper, generate story ideas and achieve real results.
Close with logical, then start emotional. B2B marketing has a myth that it’s not emotional. Wrong. To connect with your audience, you need to use emotion to tell a great brand story. Focus on building an emotional connection up front with your audience, and then as the buyer journey progresses, you can add more sales content. Learn how to optimize the buyer journey so that it starts emotional and ends logical. Then, follow these tips for writing copy that will hook your audience.
Take the time to pay attention to details. Your confirmation message, your password-reset message, and your CTAs are all opportunities to tell people about your brand. Give them a new look and add personality. Our tips will help you optimize your CTAs, emails and other marketing materials.
Experiment frequently. Your story changes as you grow and expand your business, hire new employees, and enter new markets. Don’t be afraid of trying new things. A new initiative could lead to a new campaign that will help you tell your story.
Keep yourself informed. Keep up to date with the latest trends in marketing. Subscribe to the Best Story Wins Podcast to learn how B2B marketing is building winning brands. Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get tips. Or check out our resource archive to find templates and tools to help you work smarter.

This deep work requires a lot of brainpower and perspective, which you may not always have. You can also reach out to us if you want some extra help. Check out our FAQs on brand strategy or learn what to look out for when choosing a content marketing agency. We would love to tell you a brand story that will turn people into loyal fans.

The post Ultimate guide to B2B brand storytelling (plus FREE templates) first appeared on column five.

Author: Katy French

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