How To Find Your Brand Story...
Are you struggling to make sense of your brand's story? Or maybe you just don't even know where to start or quite simply you have no idea what a brand story even is. Well not to worry because in this article we'll be sharing the storytelling techniques that you can use in your social media pages right now, complete with business examples to help you leverage your social media brand story and communicate effectively to your customers.
Alright, let's get into it. So telling stories is a powerful tool in human communication and research even shows that the brain responds to stories in some deeply affecting ways. It's got the power of creating a connection and a feeling from the communication that you're presenting to your customers. So let's look at some great reasons why you should be telling a story with your personal brand.
Showcase Something...
1. Doing so is showing your human side - so you've probably heard this before but sharing your human side behind your brand is going to help engage your audience further and get them to become more loyal and engaged with what you're up to. So a few ways you can do this is by you showcasing yourself as the founder of your brand as well as showcasing stuff that's happening behind the scenes, work in progress or your offices or team. A company that does this really well is Stay Trendy a fast-fashion company that showcases what Kimberly Lang the founder is up to on pretty much a daily basis so they're really great at leveraging what their audience is engaging with and the audience really understand what they interact with.
So this is what you can be doing right now, start showcasing something that's happening behind the scenes with your brand whether it be you as a founder or your team or something that you're creating from scratch.
Share your brand's backstory...
2. This is a great way to show insight into your brand and create a story for your customers to follow about including where you've come from and where you are now and while you may be new or may not have a long history you can still showcase things that you as a founder have been up to.
So think... as a business owner what did you do 10 years ago that really was that pivotal moment for you starting your own business? A really great example of this is a Landrover who made this tweet about their vehicles being used in the army so not only is this a throwback to their earlier years but it also showcases how great quality they are as a company because the army even used them. Maybe something you can be doing right now this week is to use the hashtag #throwbacktuesday or TBT against one of your posts and talk about something that happened at the start of your journey whether that was a year ago ten years ago or yesterday something that shows progress and strategy.
Try Experimenting With Long Caption...
3. Yes experimenting with narratives in your posts. So while images are really important on social media especially with the likes of Instagram, creating a story that goes with that image is really important, so making sure you spend enough time on creating captions that tell something more than what the image ever could.
A great example of this is Samantha Wills. Her brand Samantha Wills which is her jewelry brand is directly associated to her so really this is a branded account where she tells stories on her social media about different things that have been happening in her life. I love this story about wanting to knit her a scarf because she saw this photo on her Instagram account and was like hey I can do that... but that's so relatable right, I'm sure everybody has had their mum say to them oh why'd you buy that I could have made that for you!
So yeah it's creating that relatability and also a great story because we could have just looked at this photo and go hey she looks pretty nice in that photo... but it's actually told a lot more about her story so something to do right now is to start experimenting with longer captions and try three to five sentences and see how you go. This will not only show more insight into what the photo is about but also draw the audience closer to you.
Get in Touch With Your Feelings...
4. This would involve sharing something from the point of view of a feeling or an emotion that's associated with your mood for today or that means something more to you and triggered you to actually post about it. This will give so much more insight into you as a brand and we'll have your followers engaged with you a lot more. A good strategy for this is sharing inspirational messages.
As you would have seen on Instagram these inspirational quotes are really a great way to engage your audience but the trick here is to make sure that they're super relevant to who your audience is and the challenges and struggles that they're going through. A really good example of this is Honest Company - a natural soap and beauty baby care brand. They create these quirky quotes which are directed at mums and it's because they really understand their audience that they've been able to get such awesome engagement.
So again something that you can be doing right now is to leverage what your customers are saying and then work out what their challenges are and create quotes for yourself, use other brands as inspiration but come up with something unique to your brand strategy too.
Learn How To Leverage Content...
5. Leverage your customer's content. Not only is this a great way for you to have more content that you don't actually have to create yourself but it's also social proof, and it's showing prospective customers that other customers love your stuff and it's a great way to engage with the people that are already using your products. A really good example of this is Frank Body who are a body scrub brand. Their coffee body scrub is a product that customers have absolutely loved and they love posting about.
So their customers use their content on their own social channels to boost Frank's business and this is also able to create that social proof which indicates that they're actually a really cool brand to be a part of and a lot of people love buying their stuff. That's right you do this now by just creating a unique hashtag as Frank Body did and then get the Frank effect to your audience to get them to a post about your product or service with this hashtag and start sharing those photos.
This will create a behavior that then more people will get on board with. However, if you're really small and don't have a big following yet then engage your friends and family to do this for you and once you start creating that social share mentality you will create way more user-generated content and be able to leverage your users' stories instead.
so if you're excited to test out these brand storytelling strategies in your social media comment below with the strategy that you're most excited to test out if you're still a bit confused about what your brand story is and how to leverage it check out our courses and training videos on how to find and develop your brand story which goes through this really clever activity called the five why's which will really help you nut it out if you'd like some more help with building your brand story then get involved with this masterclass which goes through the steps to building your brand story.
Hopefully, you found this article helpful and as always our wer8 family is always available to help you on your branding journey. Thanks for Reading.
Thanks for Reading: What is Brand Storytelling? Here are 5 EXAMPLES!
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