Contrary to the current climate, facts do matter, but getting people to remember them is the struggle. By incorporating them within a story, helps make them memorable and easily digestible for your audience. That’s why big brands spend millions building a great brand story around their brand.
Today’s consumers are buying your story as much as your product or service.
Startups need to learn and adopt this method of building their brand in order to compete. We constantly get questions on how to build your brand and we came up with these 5 simple tips on how brands can up their storytelling game:
Understand and answer your customer’s challenge
Ask yourself questions from the perspective of your customer.
- Why did you feel the need to start your business?
- What are the industry gaps?
- What challenges do you face getting customers?
The answers are your story and form the basis for your brand story. Success stories of your customers are your way to showcase your brand ethos and services while showing potential customers exactly how they can succeed if they use your services.
Find out Content Marketing tips for startups
Find your personal obstacle and overcome it
We all love a good ‘hero overcomes obstacle’ story in the movies. Why not for a brand story. If you’ve faced major obstacles in setting up your company, your brand story can revolve around that and show adversity in the face of challenge.
These challenges can be many things, such as:
- Bootstrapping your startup
- Competing against industry giants
- Personal struggles with illness
This allows the readers or potential customers the opportunity to build a rapport with you and feel like their coming along with you on your journey.
Use data to build your brand story
Here’s one for you performance marketers and numbers-driven founders. Identify your customer purchase habits and build consumer profiles. Your brand story and content can be informed by your customer habits.
Look at data points to identify the following:
- Basic customer demographics
- Purchase history
- Device usage to identify how content should be delivered
- Social media interaction
If you’re local, be local and proud
Our culture has a story and often our brand reflects that. Are you a Singaporean or Malaysian brand? Then use localisms and the lingo that appeals to your audience. Don’t be afraid to mix it up.
We worked on a project where the client wanted to run a promotion on durians during peak durian season. With so much noise around durians, we had to stick out, so we developed a tagline that would appeal to the ‘kiasu’ nature of consumers. ‘Don’t say we bojio‘ was a smashing success and helped our client stand out from the rest.
Empathy can be your friend
Take time to really understand your audience and truly empathise with their issues and situations. By doing this, your content becomes relatable and truly personal to their needs.
Take some time, sit down with potential customers, your staff and whomever you can, to understand how they work, their thought process and what they really need. It helps you build your brand and create a real brand story.
This article originally appeared here and is republished with their permission.