Everything You Need to Know About Creating a Brand Story
Your brand is your business. How you communicate it is your story. Creating a brand story is an effective, low-cost way to increase hype around your business, ensure consistency across multiple marketing channels, and solidify your mission for yourself, your team, and your customers.
The Brand is the Story: How to Craft a Brand Story that Works
Start with Your Why
In his Ted Talk, management theorist Simon Sinek explores his idea of the Golden Circle, “a naturally occurring pattern, grounded in the biology of human decision making, that explains why we are inspired by some people, leaders, messages, and organizations over others.” According to Sinek, there are two ways that brands can communicate: when we communicate from the outside in, we give our audience an opportunity to understand vast amounts of complicated information. This type of communication certainly has its place.
When we communicate from the inside out–when we start with our end goal in mind, with our why (why did we start this business? Why are we working so hard to see it succeed? Why haven’t we given up yet? Why are we so sure that it’s going to benefit our audience?) we speak directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then the audience has an opportunity to rationalize our brand story through tangible actions.
In other words, starting with your why is key to creating a brand story because it is the most effective way to influence consumer decision making and inspire them to take action.
Compel Connection
No matter what industry you are in, you can evolve your brand experience to meet your customers’ changing expectations by connecting with their emotions. You do this by being authentic, being accessible, by being human. You connect with your audience by establishing an expectation for your target audience and then following through on it. Your brand story should help you set that expectation.
How do you do this? Think about your brand’s personality and your positioning in the market. Consider the following:
- What makes you the business to sell this product or offer this service? What makes your business credible?
- How are you different from the competition?
- What is the purpose of your business?
- What makes you worth listening to? What is your appeal, and how can you infuse that in everything that you do?
Captivate Your Audience
Research indicates that the human brain responds to the power of story in deeply affecting ways. It can impact our sensory and motor cortex, allowing us to feel and experience and to synchronize our minds with the story we are being presented. In other words: a good story can captivate us and hold us at attention.
But how do you create that kind of story? Here is everything you must achieve in order to captivate an audience:
- Your brand story must be personal–it’s not an ad or a pitch, it’s inspired by a personality. It’s real.
- Your brand story must be simple to understand–it should have a problem, a solution, and a success. A beginning, a middle, and an end.
- Your brand story shapes your business’s reason for existence.
- Your brand story connects your business with your customer. It says to them, “we get you, we are here for you.”
Radiant is committed to helping your small business thrive. We want to see you succeed! Check our our Marketing Guide for more advice, thoughts, and (of course) inspiration to get you going and keep you glowing!
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