STORYTELLING—it seems irrelevant to running a business, but it might be what your business lacks to reach success. Other successful businesses heavily credit their brand marketing’s success to it, even calling it crucial when it comes to communicating brand image.
But what are brand storytelling and image? Brand image is the perception that the customers have of your brand. It’s the emotions that your customers associate with your brand besides the beliefs and impressions they have of your brand. Of course, this shouldn’t be confused with a brand identity which is the visible elements associated with your brand as color scheme, logo, etc. Finally, brand storytelling, the use of narrative techniques to shape your brand’s identity, is often used as a marketing technique.
There are certain specific skills when it comes to brand storytelling. To further illustrate, these are some of the brand storytelling skills often used today:
- Market knowledge
It means understanding what your target market needs along with the current trends.
- Timing and relevance
Consumers love nothing more than relevant and well-time stories to be told that allow them to relate better to the narrative that you’re informing.
- Empathy
This skill means making your audience trust your brand, encouraging them to buy from you.
- Humor
This means appropriately including humorous elements in your narratives, helping make them more memorable.
- Observation
Similar to market knowledge, observing the stories that revolve around the world around you right now will allow you to craft better stories. Consequently, this will help your audience relate better to your brand’s narrative.
By utilizing brand storytelling, you’ll find that it holds numerous benefits for your business. Some of these include:
- Capturing attention effectively
- Improving sales by using pathos to sell
- Uniquely setting your brand apart
Of course, it’s worth noting that this must have finished right to attain those benefits. While it’s worth considering using tools as social story templates, it’s also significant to improve your storytelling skills to guarantee efficient brand storytelling.
Now having established the importance of brand storytelling skills, here’s how you can improve your brand storytelling skills for better marketing outcomes.
- Keep It Simple And Sweet
“My attention span, the length of a TikTok,” has become a saying that can be understood by most now. With the length of TikTok videos being a minute on average, most users recently are accustomed to viewing content that doesn’t span longer in duration.
By keeping your stories short, you’ll draw more audiences to view them in the first place because a minute isn’t that long. It will mostly be useful for the various versions of ‘stories’ features in social media platforms today. Furthermore, keeping it short will also keep your audience from getting bored stated that consumers’ attention can be drawn away easily. Meanwhile, you can focus on producing quality content instead of quantity and communicating the intended message.
- Know The Stories That Matter To Your Audience
It’s indeed critical that your stories remain relevant and emotionally provoking. To achieve this, you’ll want to make sure that your stories also matter to your audience. Furthermore, utilizing market research will help accomplish this, allowing you to understand your target market.
By following this tip, you’ll find that they’ll be able to relate to it and even be emotionally impacted by the stories you tell. Moreover, it’ll hook your audience along with the rest of your target audience to the story and your brand since they relate to the story. Ultimately, this will help you build a meaningful connection to your audience as they’ll see that you share a similar story.
- Be Unique And Original
Having stories that are likely unique and showcase your brand’s unique identity will only help your brand stand out. It will tell your audience what’s different about your brand compared to your competitors and why yours is better. As such, your stories must be unique. Besides this, it will also capture the attention of potential customers and current ones alike as it’s different. You can compare this to a movie or book where you’re only intrigued and impressed by unique stories.
- Make It Memorable
There is no point in telling a story or selling a brand that won’t be remembered after someone sees it. You want your audience to remember it and associate the stories you mention with your brand. Moreover, by making your stories memorable having that “wow” factor, they might even consider sharing it with others like loved ones. Along with this, it might even be the topic of conversations after they see your stories. Consequently, this allows your brand to circulate by word of mouth.
With this, you can also make your stories inspirational to leave your audience feeling positive and associate this feeling with your brand. Additionally, stories must highlight your central message. When you combine this with positive emotion, you’ll leave your audience inspired by your brand and convinced to buy your products.
- Be Authentic
Finally, be authentic in both your stories and the stories you tell. In the age of social media and cancel, it’s so easy for a brand’s image to be tarnished. The second your brand is associated with anything disingenuous, others, especially your competitors, can use it against you. Having an authentic story and image will increase the trust hence, you’re your audience has in your brand. It helps with their purchasing decisions. As such, when telling stories, make sure you are being authentic.
Conclusion
With this said, it is worth reiterating that to reap the benefits of brand storytelling skills. They must complete it right. As businesses race to find ways to improve their techniques every day, it is essential that your business also keeps up.
With the tips provided above, now, hopefully, you can improve your brand storytelling skills to market your brand better and increase sales. In addition, in doing this, you will find that you may easily retain your customers as you attain more. Through it, you will be forming more meaningful connections with them. Ultimately, you may find that this will improve your brand’s image and identity.
