Digital Insights
SHARES

Creating Content Which Will Tell the Story of Your Business’ Brand

Published: March 17, 2016

When recruiters work with job candidates to improve interviewing skills, strong emphasis is placed on each candidate’s ability to promote themselves to best advantage. After all, on paper, one candidate can look remarkably like another. But in person, the candidate has that precious rare chance to build a personal relationship – one strong enough to win them the job.

You can think of your business’s brand in much the same way. Why would a customer shop with you instead of a competitor? Why choose your products or services? Beyond price or even positive reviews, it all boils down to how well you tell your brand story. In this post, learn the steps to create content to tell your brand story in such a way that your employees, suppliers, distributors and (most importantly) customers want to shop with you and no one else.
 

Basics of a Compelling Brand Story

There is a reason storytelling has been around for millennia. Everyone loves a good story. In telling your brand story, you want to hit these highlights for maximum impact and memorability:

hit these highlights for your brand story

– How your company and brand were born.
– What motivates you to do what you do.
– Who is on your team and why you picked them.
– What a “day in the life” is like.
– An introduction to your happy customers.
– Your vision for your brand’s future.

Making it short and sweet will win you major bonus points in memorability, aka share ability with viral potential.

What to Avoid At All Costs

Just as there are certain key highlights to hit to tell the most effective brand story, there are certain key low points to avoid. In other words, knowing what not to do is just as critical as knowing what to do!
Avoid these content mistakes

  • “Commercial Breaks.”

There is a reason viewers are lining up to purchase memberships to video streaming clubs that minimize or eliminate advertising breaks. No one likes to be interrupted by an ad just as the story is getting good!

So you want to avoid any overt attempts to advertise or market your brand while sharing your story or you will absolutely alienate potential and even some current loyal customers.

  • Don’t Err on the Side of Being Too Serious.

Did you know people who smile and laugh more get better job offers and more frequent promotions and raises?
If you can find a way to tell even the most serious brand story with a smile and a warm laugh, your brand will be perceived as higher quality and more appealing.

  • Steer Clear of Over-complicating.

Of course your brand has a full and complex story behind its launch. It is not easy to bring a brand to life and you have probably had sleepless nights, empty pockets and a whole lot of very hard work before your success came!

But resist the temptation to over-complicate your brand’s story at the expense of simply telling your brand’s story. Keep it simple and they (your customers) will come.
 

Preparing to Tell Your Brand Story in 3 Seconds or Less

It is no secret that the average customer today is being pulled in two many directions. Attention span is down, to the point where Captivate them in 3 Secondssome customers “bounce” (depart) from a website in as little as 3 seconds if highly relevant content is not instantly detected (although the majority will allow you anywhere from 6 to 15 seconds to win them over before leaving).

No one can effectively tell a story in 3 seconds, but you can choose the next best thing, which is to follow best practices for online videos (still one of the all-time most popular types of shareable content) and tell your brand’s story in 3 minutes or less.

To do this, you will need to divide your brand story into three succinct parts, each with 60 seconds allotted to it. This will not be an easy discipline, especially if you are the company owner or founder and you have all the details of each and every day of your brand-building journey packed into your head! But this is precisely why it is necessary to do this exercise.

But First, Select Your Keywords.
You want to avoid commercial breaks for sure, but this doesn’t mean you can’t adopt strategic use of keywords. Your keywords are the words or short phrases that are predicted to deliver the highest rate of incoming traffic (organic or paid) to your website.

If you need help generating keywords, Google has a free Keyword Planner tool that can act as your brainstorming partner. You can then tuck your keywords strategically and naturally into your short brand story.

Now, On To the 3 Steps!
Here are your 3 brand storytelling steps. To keep the sentences short and conversational, it can help to write out each step in the form of a dialogue between two people or a YouTube video script.

Step 1: Present the Problem. Here, you can go as far back as “in the beginning,” so long as getting from problem discovery to the point of solution discovery lasts no more than 60 seconds.

Step 2: Present the Solution. Presenting the solution is EXCITING. You have set up the suspense and now you get to reveal its resolution. Just keep it to 60 seconds.

Step 3: Present the Success. In this final 60 second segment, you outline why life and everything is better because of your brand and its solution. Yay!

 

This process can take some time – sometimes a lot of time. But it is worth it. Once you have your 3 minute script in hand, you can absolutely expand on it in blog posts, shorten it for tweets, redraft it into a video screenplay, show-and-tell it with a slideshow. The key is paring the story down to its compelling foundations, and then you can rebuilt it any way you like!

 

Comments

logged in to post a comment.