Brand storytelling centers content and messaging around the customer and their emotions. This is achieved by telling meaningful, authentic stories that consistently convey your brand's core values through real and interesting narratives.

When implemented effectively, brand storytelling leads to highly shareable marketing assets that significantly improve overall brand awareness, increase customer loyalty, and generate more sales. Brands such as Nike and AirBnB have gone viral, telling simple yet deeply relatable stories focusing on core human values and linking them to their overall company mission rather than pushing any specific product.

This can be achieved without using tactics that pressure customers to buy immediately by inciting a false sense of scarcity or other deliberate sales tactics, thus allowing your brand to enjoy long-term success rather than quick and sporadic sales spikes. In a world where everything is a sales pitch, story marketing is often seen as a welcomed approach by audiences.

In today’s article, we are going to take a deep dive into the idea of a brand story and explore how to effectively incorporate an authentic human touch into your brand’s overall tone and voice in three simple steps.

What is a Brand Story?

A brand story involves incorporating common storytelling techniques, such as narrative structure, into marketing efforts to create an emotional connection between brands and their target audiences. This connection humanizes corporate brands and makes potential customers associate positive emotions with them, and thus, they are more likely to become loyal, long-term customers.

Being remembered is the first and most important part of the marketing cycle, as it is impossible to convert a customer who doesn’t remember who you are or what your business is offering. According to a recent study conducted by Stanford, stories are 22 times more likely to be remembered than facts alone. If your story marketing makes your target audience feel something positive, they are much more likely to associate those positive emotions with your brand in the future.

Brand storytelling helps brands stick in potential customers' minds long-term and makes them more likely to become loyal customers after their initial purchase. Harvard Business Review research confirms this idea, stating emotional factors are among the largest drivers of customer loyalty and help increase lifetime customer value. In other words, the more connected customers feel to your brand, the more likely they are to stick around and continue purchasing.

3 Steps to Begin Implementing Story Marketing Today

Understanding a brand’s story and implementing story marketing into your regular business practices can feel intimidating or even impossible at first. This is normal. Don’t be discouraged or talk yourself out of it because you don’t consider yourself a natural storyteller. While mastering the art of brand storytelling might take time, you can begin integrating its core ideas into your business today with the following three steps.

1. Articulate Your Core Brand Mission and Values

The first step in brand storytelling is being able to articulate exactly what your brand is, as well as its core mission and values. Your mission extends beyond what you hope to achieve as a company. Alan and Co. Marketing is a digital marketing agency in the US, for example, but at our core, we’re much more than that. Our primary mission is to help business owners build stronger businesses with loyal clientele through authentic digital marketing techniques.

While this may sound easy, it’s something many business owners struggle with as the inner details and core purpose of their brand are obvious to them. Having built their business from the ground up, this all comes to them intuitively. On the other hand, potential customers are coming into the conversation blind. All they know about you and your brand are the things that you tell them, so it’s important to make the most out of every piece of marketing content.

2. Identify Your Brand’s Ideal Customer 

Next, think about who, in a perfect world, you would like to work with. Who is your ideal customer? Think about the individual or organization that would benefit most from your products or services–and there you have it. That’s your ideal customer.

For example, here at Alan and Company, we are a full-service marketing agency that could help any business, but our ideal customers are rehabilitation facilities looking to improve their digital presence, SEO, and reach. Knowing who you are trying to target with your campaign makes creating the messaging for the campaign much easier.

3. Craft an Authentic Narrative That Links Them Together

Now it’s time for the final step: creating a narrative that links these two ideas together in a way that feels natural and authentic to outside audiences.  This process looks different for every company, depending on countless factors. What’s most important here is keeping things as simple as possible and consistent.

Once you find a message that works, stick with it. New iterations of the same core sentiment help reinforce it in potential customers' minds without boring them. Over time, the results will compound, and your business will become synonymous with its message.

If you’re struggling to figure out where to begin when creating an initial story marketing narrative, consider using a template or guide and tweaking it to fit your specific business goals. This is much easier than trying to do everything blindly, especially if it’s your first time attempting to create a story marketing campaign.

Begin Brand Storytelling Today with Alan and Co.

Alan and Co. is a full-service marketing agency with decades of experience in digital marketing for drug rehabs. If you are looking for a digital marketing agency in the US that can help you introduce story marketing into your campaigns, reach out today and schedule a free 45-minute consultation with Alan and Co. Marketing.