It’s the New Year and your team has set goals and intentions for the company. I’m sure there are wonderful things in there like improving the communications strategy, refreshing the blog and working on the social media presence. However, I’d like to add one more thing to your list:
Improve brand storytelling.
This one of those often overlooked goals of companies and organizations. My guess is that there’s either strong resistance to hiring outside writing help or that people are overwhelmed by the thought of having to revisit something that somewhat worked before.
Clarify the brand storytelling ‘why’
Amongst your team, be clear about why you are telling a story in the first place. Are you trying to increase audience engagement? Are you trying to position your brand in a particular way for your customers? When you are clear about the why, you are also clear about the how – how you are going to achieve your goals specifically.
Revisit customer needs
While your target audience may not have changed drastically in the last few months, it has probably changed enough for some things to be a bit different. For example, you may have noticed that your target audience is not interested in something they were before or maybe, they are now using a particular technology. Understanding these changes can help you position your brand in such a way that invites your customers in. Additionally, it can influence the kinds of keywords and headlines you craft for any brand storytelling you do. So as they say in class, pay attention!
Improve your story headlines
Speaking of headlines, make sure to write ones that are engaging and interesting. Long gone are the days of clickbait titles that are not only misleading, but are now generally frowned upon. Effective brand storytelling doesn’t need tricks or deceit to work. People are interested in content that actually delivers whatever it’s supposed to deliver. So make sure that your titles make sense for your audience, align with your goals and our share-worthy.
Consult your data
If you aren’t already tracking your data, you should start right away (with Google Analytics, no less). Data will tell you precisely what your target audience is interested in on your social media pages, websites and other online channels. Furthermore, data will also provide you with insight about what’s working with your marketing strategy and what isn’t. Website metrics like page views, click-through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, impressions and more make this very clear.
Effective brand stories are based on strong data and lead to impact and traffic. If content marketing seems overwhelming for your business, consider updating old content to be fresh, new and evergreen. The return on investment (ROI) for evergreen content is well-proven to be very lucrative.
BONUS: Make your brand story shareable!
There’s nothing like reading a good story, wanting to share it with your friends and not being able to. Make it easy for your target audience to share your stories. Make sure those buttons work, the links are functioning and that there are as many options to share as possible. But beyond that, consider what your brand story represents. Is it an inspiring story? Is there any point in the story that you connect with emotionally? Does the story further position your brand in some way? Answering these questions can I help you clarify how to make your story shareable and accessible online.
Over to you
It may seem daunting to take a closer look at your brand’s storytelling. Usually, when we do one thing, we want to stick with only doing that one thing. The same goes for brand stories – when we tell stories in a particular way and they sometimes work, we want to tell stories like that all the time. However, the people who we tell these stories to change even if the stories themselves do not. So, it’s necessary for us to revise and improve the way we ultimately connect with people. Happy brand storytelling!