Brand storytelling is essential for creating awareness about a business or organization. It makes it memorable and gives people the opportunity to know, like and trust you.
Here’s an easy-to-use guide for people getting started or who need to pivot on their brand storytelling journey. We’ll dive into how to tell a great story that sells and makes an impact.
I’ll go over these five points and provide insight into how to create a successful story for your brand:
- Why Storytelling?
- Setting Goals and Intentions
- Developing the story structure
- The hook, detail, and emotion
- Being consistent and showing up
I’ll share a couple of my own personal stories to give you an idea of how we can make your story more personable and engaging for the right audience.
1. Why Storytelling?
First, let’s answer why we should use storytelling in the first place to help promote and create awareness for your brand.
Storytelling can be more time consuming than more traditional forms of marketing. It’s more valuable though because instead of just communicating information to people, it can make an emotional connection to the audience that makes your brand memorable to them.
For instance, let’s compare two different sets of sentences side by side:
Sentence 1: I saw a bird out walking today
Sentence 2: I was alone in the swamp when a Great Blue Heron as tall as I am came swooping onto the path around Lake Martin.
Sentence 1: I pet a dalmatian.
Sentence 2: I pet a happy dalmatian whose spots shined in the beautiful 90s, San Diego sun on a fire truck as we rode around the block, waving on my fifth birthday.
All of these sentences communicate a person’s interaction with an animal. The second sentence though in each pairing communicates more than just the interaction. It includes the emotion of the person, where they were, what they were doing, and adjectives to describe the motion or perceived emotion of the animal.
Details that give context, recalling a memory of hiking along a lake with pretty birds or a birthday riding on a fire truck with a dalmatian. Creating a scene with multiple layers for emotional appeal and providing detail to create a real character allows people to access your brand in the same way they want to keep reading their favorite book series or watch a good TV show.
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2. Setting Goals and Intentions
Before we go ahead and create a story for our brand, the first step is knowing
- Why are we creating the story in the first place?
- Who’s it for?
The first step towards crafting a story that sells is knowing its purpose. For instance, is the story trying to bring more awareness to the company’s values and mission? Is the story trying to sell a product or a service? Is the story trying to share the great customer satisfaction, or amazing employee benefits. If we know what we’re trying to feature in our Call to Action (CTA) for the story, then we can mold and tailor the story with that in mind.
Second, by knowing the audience we’re trying to connect with, we can provide better context in the story for developing a creative scene or clever solution that fits the vibe of current customers, or for those yet to discover you. If a business or brand has a specific demographic, or cultural slang that will be recognized by customers, that can be a key way to connect.
Our goal before writing the story is knowing the premise and the characters. What’s the topic, who’s going to be featured, and what’s the general storyline? Brainstorm. Think of a few different story ideas, write them down no matter how ridiculous. Narrow it down till there’s that gut feeling of, “Yes, this is just right.”
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3. Developing a Structure
The second part of creating that successful story is knowing the ins and outs of a basic story structure. Then creating a skeleton, or rough outline of the story.
The obvious answer to people is stories have three parts: a beginning, a middle and end. What most people don’t know though is we have to have a conflict that the main character, the protagonist needs to overcome and grow from.
In brand storytelling, the main character will overcome a problem that the business or organization solves through their work. In the beginning, we will be introduced to the main character and their conflict. The middle of the story can also be defined as “rising action.” This is where the story moves forward through the main character overcoming obstacles to achieve their goal. Think of a mystery novel where a detective picks up different clues to solve the crime, or a romance, where different events happen to bring the couple with true love together. The end features the climax, the lightbulb moment where a brand’s product, services, or cause become the solution for them. After the climax is the resolution. That’s where everything is resolved for the audience, and your CTA is echoed once again, wrapped in an elegant, memorable tale.
Audiences in 2024 don’t remember traditional marketing messages, but they do remember messages packed into intriguing stories. Telling a story about a brand, whatever its purpose, will take people out of that traditional, transactional mindset and make them more receptive to listening, Even if it’s just you in front of the camera doing something basic like talking about inventory or what a day in the life is like, people gravitate towards that type of content because it’s real, and authentic.
People want to help other people, and if they see an authentic story with passion, it gives audiences an opportunity to support your brand.
4. The Hook and Emotional Connection
One of the keys to telling an engaging story that an audience pays attention to is having a good hook. A hook is the first frames of a video or the first sentence of a story that instantly captures the audience’s attention. There’s no tried and true formula for making sure a hook is 100% amazing, but there are ways to make sure the audience is following along.
Make sure the main character or your brand are featured in the first few seconds of the video, even if it isn’t the first frame. We have only a few seconds to capture the audience’s attention. Establish the energy of the video early. Let the personality and tone of the story come through right away. People feed off each other’s energy, and they go on social media to connect and to be entertained. They want to see your personality, they want to see an authentic, genuine version of a brand that they’ll be excited about hearing more from.
The other trick to telling a great story is fleshing out a character with detail. I mean something that makes a character feel real, like someone they might encounter and want to learn more about. Once the character feels real to someone, then we can draw the audience in to feel a little bit of that emotion the character lives with.
This will deepen the connection, and provide something memorable that will make your brand stand out in a fragmented media landscape. A lot of businesses or brands may write off storytelling as something only big brands can do, but that’s why I created my company.
Small businesses and nonprofits need help telling their brand stories too. At MP Storytelling, I can help someone tell an engaging story just by showing up . . . and that’s the hardest part.
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5. Being Consistent and Showing Up
The most challenging part now that we have a fabulous story is sharing it with the world. Some people, when they’re done with a project or story, shelve it and are finished with it. Have you heard of a movie star or a novelist that never watches their own movies or returns to their old books?
The power of brand storytelling is that it can be shared over and over again. We don’t want it to just sit on a webpage or be featured in a pinned post if someone happens to visit your profile.
We want that story, or snippets of that story to be shared over and over again, on social media, in a blog, on a podcast, in a video, in an ebook. Don’t just share it in one social media post and then forget about it. Share the story from another perspective or the same post again a month from now. Break the brand story up into a few different posts that share a different service or aspect of your organization that is important to feature.
More than the actual creating and posting though, is having the mindset that people want to see what we’re sharing. A lot of times, the people who buy or donate to a cause are silent lurkers on social media that just want to see and consume what other people are posting. And that’s okay. Even though we may not see engagement on a post, that doesn’t mean it isn’t helping or supporting our business in some way.
Our goal is to create impact, and how we create impact is by generating awareness, and staying top of mind, posting about our brand story, and sharing more about ourselves so people get to know us. We don’t have to be reality stars, but we want to give people a little slice of our lives that gives off a sense of genuineness people will trust.
The Mindset of Authenticity
Earlier in this post, I shared some example sentences of a boy petting a dalmatian, and someone seeing a Great Blue Heron at Lake Martin. You may have guessed it, but both those sentences earlier were about me.
On my 5th or 6th birthday (I don’t remember which), my parents threw a birthday party for me at the local clubhouse by the pool in our neighborhood. The big treat that day was a fire truck with a dalmatian came. I remember the fireman being very nice, and them having me stand between them with the dalmatian. What I remember most though is the dalmatian looking really happy, me petting its head back and forth. It was nice to see all the people who had come to my party, mostly family and friends waving at me as I rode the fire truck with the dalmatian. There was something majestic and very Americana about the whole experience.
The other story is a hike I did by myself at Lake Martin, a lake in Louisiana maybe 30 minutes outside of Lafayette, where I lived for 5 years and did my PhD in English there. I hiked here at least a dozen times when I lived in Louisiana. One time, when it was quiet with no other people in sight of me, a Great Blue Heron landed right in the middle of the hiking path, about 20-30 feet from me. It was mid-afternoon and I stood there, admiring a bird as tall as I was. The methodical plotting of their gait, the zen-like quiet of their motions taking in their surroundings. Another time here, I saw a Great Blue Heron, and this child got strangely excited and was screaming at it. But still, the bird ignored the child and kept wading, hunting fish in the water. I got to admire the subtle blue hue of its wings, the orange beak, the black markings of its eye. Then, I tried to step closer and it flew away.
These are moments from my life that I remember because they bring up feelings of happiness, awe and joy. In the stories you create to build your brand, we have to tap into just a little bit of that emotional power to make a connection with our audience.
There’s no magic trick to being relevant. The first key is creating a story about the passion for our work that connects with the audience. The second is showing up with our new mindset to be authentic and share our beautiful selves and genuine brands with the world.
Thanks for reading!
If you need help creating a story for your brand, get in touch with me at MP Storytelling. I offer my VIP Service, where we work on creating your brand story and mini-strategy in just one day. In addition, I offer full content strategy and writing services for your website and social media. Show up online telling your best story with a little help from me at MP Storytelling!
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