When you’re growing your business, you want to ensure that you can communicate your company’s mission, build trust, and engage with your customers. By showcasing your journey in a compelling, inspiring way, you’re able to build stronger relationships with your customers and strengthen your community.
Why Build a Brand Story?
Branding in marketing is extremely powerful to help keep your business unique. Building a brand story will help your customers, new and old, understand your business more. By showcasing the journey, from how you started, to where you are now and where you’re aiming to go, you’re able to bring people along with you on your journey and engage in a personal way. By building these personal relationships, businesses often find that customers with similar values will gravitate towards them, meaning that they’re able to build a larger audience base with those who share similar goals and values.
How Does a Brand Story Work?
A brand story helps create a narrative that customers can connect with. A compelling brand story will help connect to them emotionally and functionally. This leads to action being taken, usually by buying your product or service, ultimately meaning that your visibility increases and you increase your revenue. If your customers have a problem which they’re looking to resolve, hearing your brand story can help them see how you can solve their problem with your values and experiences as they feel that you truly understand their struggles.
Creating a compelling brand story also helps differentiate you from your competitors. Many markets are now oversaturated, and it’s hard to really ensure that your business stands out, but by crafting a brand story, customers will be able to identify the differences with ease, and those who relate to your story, will likely choose you over someone else.
How To Build Your Brand Story
Your brand story is not something which can be created overnight, as you’ll need to consider many perspectives. Various people may have helped you shape your business or brand, from the founder to your staff, suppliers, customers and any other key stakeholders, so it’s important to ensure that you consider all viewpoints. You also need to dig deeply into your business’s mission. Why does your business exist? What makes you different to other companies? What are your business’s values and how do you take action which reflects this? Who does your business aim to help?
Once you deeply understand everyone involved with your business and you’re able to answer all of these questions, you’re able to start telling your story to your target audience. By following these steps, you’ll be able to start writing your story and engaging your readers across various platforms -
Deeply Detail Your Target Audience
By understanding the key details of your target audience, you can craft a story that resonates. Using the terminology they would use, speaking to them in a way they understand, and leverage the experiences they may have had, as this will help you ensure your brand story resonates. You may want to consider attributes such as:
- Age range
- Backgrounds
- Locations
- Values
- Occupations
- Gender
- Hobbies
- Social class
If you’re looking for more examples to consider, check out this blog from Hubspot and discover how you can get to understand your target audience in more detail.
Understand Your Target Audience’s Needs
Now you understand your target audience, you can begin to dig deeper into your business’s mission and solutions, based on what you’ve learnt. What problems do they have and what drives them to making the decisions which they make? When you’re thinking about these things, you will want to ask yourself questions such as:
- What’s their biggest struggle?
- How can my product or service help?
- What’s important to them?
- What changes do they need to see?
- What makes them happy?
Deliberate Story Ideas
To ensure that you can build your brand story effectively, it’s important to think about how you’re going to structure your story. By following a timeline to outline where you started and how you got to where you are, you’re able to document the changes along the way clearly to your readers. If you’ve recently started your business, you could consider looking at what your aims are and giving a bit of insight into how you plan to achieve your goals.
A good way to think about creating your brand story is by building a persona. Give the target customer a name, and imagine what they look like to make this easier for you to envision, then you’ll be able to visualise your story with ease. How would your product or service come to light for your persona? How will it meet their needs? It’s worth taking time to deeply understand these things, so you can understand how the majority of customers will find you. You could look to build your story by thinking about:
- How your business started
- How your business has grown
- Where and when your business was founded
- What your company does
- What changes your business has made along the way in terms of USP’s and products or services offered
- Why your business started
- What are your values and culture like?
Writing and Reviewing Your Brand Story
Once you’ve deliberated your ideas, you’ll find it easier to start writing your brand story. You must ensure that your tone of voice is consistent with your brand guidelines and how you wish to portray your brand. If you tend to write formally, your brand story should follow this, remaining objective, using third person language. Alternatively, if your brand tends to be casual, you can write your story in a way that fits your writing style, using first person language and using more informal terminology.
You could consider asking other key stakeholders to look at your brand story with fresh eyes. This will help you ensure that your brand story remains exciting and high quality so that your readers will feel compelled throughout and resonate closely with your vision and aims.
A great way to ensure that your story is written well is by asking people you can trust to read your story and give you honest feedback. Ask them to give you the answers to questions such as:
- Where did you feel the most compelled?
- Did you find anything underwhelming?
- Do you feel like it follows the writing style associated with the business?
- Does it end positively?
- Does it highlight resolutions?
- Does it connect with customer needs?
- Is the company mission clear?
- How do you feel the company is going to make a difference?
- What parts do you think are necessary?
Sharing Your Brand Story
Your brand story can be strategically shared through multiple channels. From official documentation which people can download, to dedicated areas of your website, make sure that customers can easily access your brand story, it could be part of an “About Us” page or a key part of your homepage.
Many businesses find great success sharing their brand story as part of a social media campaign, using captivating imagery and videos to support, as highlighted in this article by Forbes. Whether you or your business decides to make short form videos or carousels, your brand story can be shared with the masses as a great way to introduce people to your brand and help them understand your mission and build relatability.
As your brand story is shared, you could consider taking on any feedback which you get to incrementally tweak your story, to meet your customers' needs. You might find that you’ve missed a key aspect of your customers' demographic which needs to be clear in your brand story, so this is something which you can continuously improve as time goes on.
In Conclusion
Crafting a compelling brand story is a great way for you to ensure that you know your business inside and out, along with your customers. You’ll find that you’re able to build deeper connections, leading to further opportunities. As time goes by, you’ll most likely tweak your story, which is great as it shows the development of your business and the changes which you go through over time.
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