What’s Your Story?
We humans are born storytellers. Our personal stories help us connect with one another and deepen our relationships. Storytelling evokes powerful emotions and provides us with new insights. Those emotions and insights are why we often go back to a book or a poem that’s had an impact on us.
Storytelling is the vivid description of ideas, beliefs, personal experiences, and life-lessons through stories or narratives that evoke powerful emotions and insights.
Brand storytelling uses narratives to create connections between your customers and your brand. The new age of commerce is no longer focused exclusively on selling to consumers, but about helping them discover. That’s why 9/10 top brands use storytelling. Brand stories help consumers discover why their customers love their brand. In other words, show me, don’t tell me.
Brand storytelling uses narratives to create an emotional, value-driven connection between your customers and your brand.
Here are four best practices of brand storytelling.
- Align your brand stories with your brand’s values. Start by getting clear on who you are as a brand—define your why. Plant your flag in that space and your stories will flow from there.
- Create an emotional connection with images. Stories evoke powerful emotions. Images help us connect emotionally much faster than words. The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Language is decoded in a linear, sequential manner, taking more time to process. In other words, a picture is worth 1,000 words.
- Show how you improve the lives of your clients. Everyone will not value your superpower. Get clear on the person that will, and what problem(s) they struggle with that you are uniquely qualified to solve. Your brand stories should help them see that you “get them” and have a solution to help them sleep better at night.
- Communicate a clear and consistent message. Social media is a powerful platform for getting your story out, in bite-sized increments. The clearer and more consistent your message, the easier it will be for your ideal prospects to engage with your content. Just remember that engagement is a marathon not a sprint. When done right, engagement leads to purchasing decisions.
Patagonia aligns their core value as a climate activist with a deep understanding of their ideal customers—active outdoor sports enthusiasts and environmentally conscious men and women (under 35). They don’t sell their products. Their customers do by showing their products at play—whether it’s mountain climbing or rappelling down rock faces. The company encourages their community of avid sports enthusiasts to share their outdoor adventures, environmental activism, and experiences using the hashtag #MyPatagonia on social media.
The results speak for themselves. Patagonia has 5.2M followers on Instagram and their website gets an average of 7M visitors every month.
What’s your brand story?
