The heart and soul of any business are human connections. Ultimately, you’re dealing with people — your company is solving business problems, alleviating issues and providing services for other people. In order to grow brand awareness, we need to connect, and storytelling provides us with an avenue to do so.
Think about what you do when you meet someone for the first time. You ask them questions, probe them in order to find out their story and connect with them. It’s the same in business. Storytelling is a powerful technique for building relationships. Stories make life interesting and give us a way to connect.
Good stories provide big opportunities for increased brand awareness and that’s why it’s important that companies take the time to develop a strategy to outline their approaches to storytelling.
What is a brand story?
A brand story communicates who you are and what you do, but the most powerful ones are those told from the customer’s perspective — what are the benefits they receive by engaging with your company?
Your brand story will include your company’s history, mission, personality, reason for being, goals etc. but all of this information should be customer centric — how does all of this information benefit them?
Brand storytelling is more than what is written on your website. It’s more than your blogs and social media posts. Your brand’s stories are values that permeate every piece of copy and content you create.
How to tell your brand story
Rule #1 — do not try and ‘sell’ your story. Brand stories are not advertisements.
Focus on making that human connection by sharing information and answering questions. Think about what your existing and potential customers want to know, not what you want to tell them.
Allow your brand personality to be heard by writing in a conversational style. Keep it short and keep it real.
Agent99 PR’s name, for example, came from the classic 60s show Get Smart. Agent99 was a spy character, who was very elegant, intelligent and always made her partner (Maxwell Smart… who was not very smart) look like a genius. And in essence, this reflects our brand values and how our passion is to make the brands we work with stand out from the crowd. This is an example of a brand story that we love to tell, and resonates with many of the decision makers we deal with daily.
Be consistent
The brand story you share with the world should be an authentic and transparent view into your company. Make sure that wherever you are sharing your story or elements of it, it is always consistent. Whether it is your website, a blog or a media release — the story needs to be a unified one.
The outcome
By sharing your stories, you are capturing your audience’s attention and encouraging them to engage with you and your brand. Your stories let them into your world and if your customers see what they like, they will share your stories with others, increasing your brand awareness.
