We all love to hear stories. And it’s true: Inspirational stories often capture attention and impact the human brain much more than fragmented, dry words of encouragement.
Marketers realize that: Brand Story – conveying marketing messages through storytelling is the fastest way for customers to remember the brand and build a close relationship with them.
However, under pressure to respond to the constant change of algorithms (from Facebook, Google, TikTok, …), building a brand story that is attractive and interesting seems to be an article. difficult math.
Therefore, with the goal of raising the level of Marketing content for your brand, Malu would like to introduce a detailed step-by-step guide to telling a brand story – Brand Story is inspiring, engaging and engaging, can be ingrained in your target audience’s mind.
What is Brand Story?
Brand Story is simply the story of your brand: from the wild days, the new business was born, the process of you pursuing your goal, until it developed successfully and brilliantly like today. .
Just like in books and movies, when you tell compelling, engaging, self-directed stories, customers will remember who you are and recognize your brand . More importantly, they really empathize and care about the brand like close friends.
For example:
Do you know the story of a man and his best friend who built a fortune from a garage at his home. Experiencing so many challenges, fighting the giants in the technology industry on their own, being kicked out of the company they worked so hard to build, and then coming back, completely changing the way people use their devices. mobile devices today.
Yes, that is the story of Apple and its owner – Steve Jobs.
Yes, the story of Apple and Steve Jobs is certainly inspirational and makes you more sympathetic to that brand.
Steps to build a compelling brand story
Now that you have a concrete image of Brand Story , it’s time to learn the steps to build a compelling brand story :
Highlight the knots
Listen to one of the following stories, see if it leaves you with something worth noting:
The story is about a little girl with a red scarf wandering in the woods.
The girl’s task is to bring food to her grandmother in the back of the forest. On the way, she meets wolves. But instead of being attacked by it, she just saw them running back and forth, sometimes for an hour or two.
After 30 minutes through the forest, she also reached her grandmother’s house. She was very grateful to the girl and rewarded her with a delicious meal. She was very happy, because she did a good deed today. End of story!
It’s true that it’s a fully structured open-body-ending story, but do you feel like there’s something wrong with it?
That’s because the plot twists are not pushed to the climax. It is true that Little Red Riding Hood had to go through a forest, but nothing happened, because she did not have to deal with wolves and be saved by the hunter. That’s not to mention the most expensive part of the story: The wolf’s visit to the grandmother’s house is also underutilized here.
A story without a climax, drama is a superficial story, easy to listen to easy to forget. Using the above example, you can completely make your Brand Story more dramatic. For example, businesses have to face many challenges: heavy competitors, difficult markets, failures, etc.
Don’t make the mistake of telling the story of difficulties and failures that will make readers have a negative view of you. Because of hardships and challenges, the more sincere you are, the more customers will empathize and appreciate you.
How you overcome the challenge
It’s not enough to create a knot, you need to come up with a solution to solve the dilemma you’ve overcome. Let’s take an example with the story of Little Red Riding Hood above:
Situation: Little Red Riding Hood goes into the forest to bring food to her sick grandmother.
The knot: The evil wolf knew, and immediately approached the girl. He pretended to be a good person and asked where the girl was going. The girl answered honestly that she was giving food to her grandmother and pointed to where her grandmother was. Wolves are very wise. He lured the little girl to pick some flowers for her grandmother, while sneaking into her grandmother’s house to eat her.
After eating the grandmother, the evil wolf pretends to be the grandmother to eat the little girl. The little girl finally arrived at her grandmother’s house. Although she realized that there was something different about her appearance, she still ignored it and ignored it. Because of her gullibility, she was also eaten by the wolf. After being full, the wolf fell asleep.
Solution: A loud noise from outside grandma’s house. It turned out that the hunter had heard the news. He broke down the door and engaged the evil wolf. After a long struggle, the hunter killed the wolf and rescued the two grandchildren. Because the wound was too severe, the wolf did not survive and died.
Obviously, the story becomes much more coherent and engaging, doesn’t it? Your problem here is to balance the emotional factor (through bottlenecks and solutions ) with your brand identity.
> Emotional Branding – How to build an emotional brand
5 secrets to telling a compelling brand story
If you want your Brand Story to be more engaging, keep these 5 brand story secrets in mind from Malu:
Must make sense
In a world where billions of brands are vying for customers’ attention little by little, it can be overwhelming to tell a truly compelling brand story. What’s the excuse for that? Because your brand is focused on telling a meaningless story, no one cares.
Every piece of your content is meant to grab the reader’s attention. First of all, it should be the issue that the reader is interested in already. Answering the following questions is essential to help you build a compelling Brand Story:
- Why am I telling this story?
- From my point of view, what’s so special about the story?
- What message do I want to convey to the audience?
- What value can listeners get from hearing my story?
Close to each individual
Your brand story can be funny, inspirational, or informative. But if you want it to get into the hearts of your readers, you need to tie the story content to themselves.
How can brands change the lives of readers who use them? Why should your audience stop to listen to your story? This is only possible when the story you tell is close to the listeners themselves.
Must be touched
To go into the hearts of listeners, that story must definitely move strong emotions from listeners.
Example: Your business is providing email automation software. It sounds dry and mechanical. But why not incorporate the emotional aspect of your narrative? “Our tools make your work easier, less stress, and more time for your family and loved ones”
Must be simple
One of the mistakes when telling Brand Story, is talking too much, integrating unnecessary details.
Simplicity at best, readers can’t wait to read a story longer than an A4 sheet of paper. Complicated stories also give readers headaches, because they have to take care of billions of things in this life.
In short, your Brand Story should focus on 1 issue, explain it simply and succinctly. You should remember: Readers are just ordinary people, not experts.
Must be honest
A compelling, compelling brand story means nothing if it’s based on fabrications. Like humans, do you give your trust to sincere friends, or give it to liars and deceitful people? You will be the one to answer that question.
Make sure that, every detail, every evidence in the story must be true.
Example of Brand Story
Now it’s time to look at the best examples of building a compelling, engaging brand story. Let’s find out with Malu 3 typical cases below:
Unthinkable Media
Unthinkable Media is an agency that specializes in producing podcast content for B2B businesses in the United States. The goal of this business is to create highly entertaining content that attracts customers’ attention.
Let’s listen to Unthinkable Media’s brand story:
Scenario: As a marketing and sales person, we want to get all the attention from your customers. To achieve that, we strive to do our best.
Knot:
Today, with the development of technology, customers have a lot of choices. In this era, the business is no longer the most powerful person in the commercial relationship, but the customer . Customers have the right (and ability) to choose for themselves the experiences they feel most satisfied and excited about. It’s not easy for us to attract their attention.
Solution:
We need a new approach. Instead of focusing on traffic growth and content reach, we focus on growing subscribers and content audience. Our constant effort is to create unique content. It is not enough for customers to stop by, they also have to listen and love our creative content.
Lab Grade
Grado Labs is a family business specializing in providing famous headphones and audio equipment in the US. The business is well known for its long tradition of manufacturing audio equipment, which is entirely handcrafted. Why don’t they choose to promote the brand like the way Beats, Sony or Bose often do?
Situation: Music is an inevitable part of life. Without music, life seems to lose its vibrant colors and inherent excitement. We believe that with the quality of the products we provide, you will have a pleasant, comfortable and emotional musical experience.
The bottleneck: In a market where businesses spend huge money on advertising, or design products with modern shapes and designs, why don’t we follow those trends? ?
Solution: Sound is the number one priority. With skilled workers, and products made entirely by hand, we give priority to producing the best quality products for our customers. With affordable audio equipment products, we can provide you with quality service, and infuse the endless inspiration of music into our products.
Preserving core values and providing the best customer experience is what Grado Labs wants to convey in their Brand Story.
Drift
Drift is a marketing platform that helps businesses connect with customers in need. Through interactive tools designed by the company itself, Drift surprises the world by demonstrating: Direct interaction and dialogue with customers for higher conversion rates using pre-built forms to collect revenue. collect information.
Here is the brand story that Drift wants to convey to customers:
Situation: The goal of Marketing is to convey a message to customers with the same qualities and personality as a real person. And we stick to that motto: create useful content and educate customers. Of course, in return, our customers give us their trust by purchasing.
The bottleneck: But before we realized what was right, we followed the old routine: With a valuable source of contact from our customers, we emailed them and asked them to fill out a form. No one wants to fill out a form, and so the audience never becomes interested, and the conversion never happens.
Solution: We removed all forms. The only thing we do right now, is to connect customers, care about them as people, with the most authentic Marketing experiences .
>>> Market Research – 6 Steps of Effective Market Research
Hopefully, the above information will be of great help to you in building an attractive and engaging Brand Story for your business.
