It’s human nature for us to wax lyrical about our individual and business successes. Whether you’re an employee or business owner, you want to talk about accomplishments and what you/your business has done. To the receiving party, there has to be some value in reading this.
The key to good storytelling is to identify an audience who will be interested in listening to what you have to say and building relationships with them. 90% of the time a customer won’t purchase a good or service from a company without knowledge of what they do and value, so it’s a crucial part of not just the marketing process, but sales as well.
Building up relationships, in particular, through content marketing is a process that requires effort and patience, but when done correctly the long-term pay-off is huge. The big focus shift has to go to your story and brand values rather than your products.
Let’s start off with common challenges when it comes to brand storytelling:
- Expanding your reach across channels and increasing your audience base
- Actually creating valuable content in the first place
- Maintaining your brands profile and wider ‘identity’ throughout the process
What ‘is’ Content Marketing?
One of the biggest advancements in the marketing world has stemmed from the mass amount of channels you can now market a product or service on. Long gone are the days of being restricted to TV, Print and Radio; now we’re well into the Digital Age where Social and Online is king. One of the big game changers is that anyone can advertise for free, providing they have an Internet connection, this has been good and bad for the industry for obvious reasons.
How to tell a great story
“Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemes, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and define and teach social values”
-Walt Disney
Stories don’t have to be complicated, you can start with a simple, easy-to-recite narrative that’s about what you do and why people should buy and work for you. You want to relate to them and almost write content from their perspective, versus common self-serving material.
You need a version that will convince people to purchase your product/service, another to persuade star talent to join your team, another for those first customers taking a chance on you. These stories live in different places and have different purposes. One may never be written down, one may only be emailed to select people, one may live at the top of your website in the form of a video. But they should all stem from the same core. As a Founder/Leader/CEO you need to live and breathe your brands values and story.
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