Brand Storytelling Strategies

We’re going to share nine brand storytelling strategies that you must leverage within your brand. So you can show your audience that you understand their story and align your brand with the idea of a successful journey.

There are countless ways that brands can use to tell their audience that they have a solution for their problem, and most brands go about this through push marketing. So they’ll pay Google or Facebook for the privilege to get in front of that audience, and when they do, they’ll talk about features or benefits. Now the problem with this approach is our tolerance for it. We have no tolerance for this kind of approach. So this kind of push marketing anymore, and there’s a term called banner blindness, essentially the term to describe how we scroll past ads without seeing them, without them registering or leaving any imprint.

If you want to engage with your audience today, you need to do it like a modern brands. Tell stories now; modern brands tell stories because neuroscience has said to us that storytelling is the most effective way to communicate because it’s ingrained in our DNA. It’s been passed on for millions and millions of years. It’s the way. We’ve transferred information from one generation to the next for millions of years, so our DNA makes us gravitate toward it. If your brand can tell a story of a journey of success that aligns with who your customer is, well, then they will gravitate toward that story.

If you want to engage with your audience today, you need to do it like a modern brands. Tell stories!

So in this article, We’re going to give you nine brand storytelling strategies that you can take into your own business.

Strategy #1 – Highlight Their Challenges

So while your competitors are pushing your audience away with their marketing, you’re pulling them in with your storytelling strategy, highlighting their challenges. So what are the most significant problems and the biggest mistakes that your audience comes across on their journey to success? What are their limiting beliefs? What is it that they don’t feel that they’re capable of doing and what is it?

This is exactly what stands in their way to achieving this success. What is holding you back from your success now? So highlight what those challenges are.

Strategy #2 – Show Understanding

Demonstrates understanding by highlighting the challenges. You have already come a long way to show that you understand. By simply doing so, you have shown that you know exactly what these disorders are. You have already built that understanding and empathy, and underestimating the power of empathy when the listener, or the public at large, feels understood when the other person believes they are being heard. You can not. And they know what they’re going through. When they understand those challenges, then they immediately feel that they trust that person or that brand. So if you’re able to show understanding, then you cannot underestimate the power of that empathy, and this will go a long way to earning that trust, and we tend to do business with people or brands that we know, like, and trust. And once you show that empathy and understanding, you’ll have gone a long way to earning that like.

Strategy #3 – Support Their Beliefs

So what is it that they believe?

What is it that they believe about themselves? What is it that they think about the industry or the wider world, and how can you show an alignment to those beliefs, so you might be able to create some content or share some content or raise a story, raise a point of view, and this will show that you have aligned beliefs with them. They will feel a connection if they feel that your beliefs and their beliefs align.

Strategy #4 – Honor Their Values

So what is it that they hold dear in the way they have themselves in the way they behave? What are their values, and can you align your brand with those values? You can take out characteristics here as well, so you will find brands that will put values on their websites like honesty, integrity, and respect, but when it comes to storytelling, really what you’re trying to Do is you’re trying to align your brand with values that your audience holds dear, and you can do this through characteristics.

You can do this by sharing content and articles about those values. So do they value resilience or determination, or kindness? What do they love, and how can you align yourself with those values strategy?

Strategy #5 – Turn Up The Emotions

Now remembers that your audience is on a journey themselves. That is the story really that you’re trying to tell they’re trying to achieve something, they’re trying to succeed, and they will come across many challenges.

They’ll have a picture in their head of what success and failure look like, which draws out their fears and desires, so focus on what they fear and what they desire and turn up the volume of those emotions. So you can use this through the stories of your clients. Maybe you have customers and clients that have gone through the whole journey, and they’ve come out the other side, and you have their story of success. You can talk about the trials and the tribulations and the challenges that they’ve gone through to draw out those emotions, draw those fears and draw those desires.

Strategy #6 – Use Detail Generously

So have you ever read a book and you’ve come across a passage. There feels like you’re there in the moment. The story feels tangible, and if you’ve experienced that before, that’s because the author has gone into a massive amount of detail, and they’ve set the stage there.

They’ve talked about the smells and the sounds, and they’ve given you a real, tangible feeling of what the environment is like, and if you’re able to do that within your stories, then you can do the same as those master authors. You can really draw in your audience. So when it comes to the journey that they’re on, the challenges that they go through and the fears and the emotions and the desires that they go through, if you’re able to really fill in that detail, well, then they will feel the same way as you do When you’re reading a really really engaging book.

Strategy #7 – Demonstrate Transitions

So the journey that your customer is on has a starting point, and it has an endpoint. Somewhere in the middle, there is a corner that they need to turn. They need to go from one state to the other, and turning that corner is a big part of that, and that is the transition. So what were they not able to do before that they’re able to do now or what epiphany did they have?

What transition did they go through? So really take the time to understand what your customers go through and talk to your customers talk to your existing customers, who have been through your full service or your entire product or who have experienced all of that and talk about The transition that they have gone on, what corner did they turn and if you’re able to put a sense of tangibility on that transformation, then that will hit home. It will feel that you’re talking about what they need to overcome. What that challenge is that they need to overcome, so really identify what that transition is that your audience goes through and talk to that transition.

Strategy #8 – Celebrate Successes

The only reason that your audience would engage in your brand is that they want to achieve some outcome now.

This outcome is different for every brand, but no matter who your audience is or what your solution is. Your audience wants to achieve some results. They want something at the end of this transaction with your brand, so really focus on that detail. What is the outcome that they want? What does it look like?

What does it feel like, sound like? What impact will it make in their overall lives? So really focus on the outcome they want to achieve and paint the picture of that outcome with great detail.

Strategy #9 – Story Sharing

So this is all about user-generated content, and you do have a lot of modern brands today leveraging this strategy and leveraging it to significant effect. You’ve got the likes of Coke. So you might remember Coke when they came out with all of the names on the cans and had that spread like wildfire through social media because it involved their product and it gave their customers and the wider public.

So how can you do the same? How can you go to your existing customers, those who have been through that success? How do you incentivize them to post user-generated content and share their own stories now? If you can pull this off, this is effective because this comes from a place of success. It comes from a place of authenticity.

If people want to share their stories, then it’s because they’ve achieved something. It’s because they’ve experienced that outcome, and your future customers are looking at that outcome, which is the outcome they want to achieve. If they see somebody else, somebody just like them, achieving that outcome, then that becomes tangible. So this is a potent strategy. If you can incentivize your existing customers to share user-generated content, now smaller brands tend to trip themselves up when it comes to storytelling. Now, although they are drawn towards storytelling, they love the idea of storytelling. They believe that it’s reserved for the more prominent brands like Nike or Coke, GoPro or Red Bull. Still, storytelling is not about having a massive budget and about being able to produce high-quality video or really highly produced video.

It’s not about that at all. It’s about the stories of the individuals, it’s about the stories of people achieving some kind of success, and there are countless ways that you can tell those stories, and if you could break the journey of those stories down into micro stories, then you have multiple opportunities that You can use to tell stories on different platforms to tell stories on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn, wherever it may be, on your blog or your youtube channel. So really take the time to understand the journey that your audience is on because that is the journey that your customers are interested in. They want to hear a story of success that aligns with their own journey, so really understand the journey of your audience.