Leanne Hanafin, Author at All Good Tales

4 storytelling strategies to build your brand

In any good marketing plan, customer engagement should be one of your top priorities in terms of goals for your brand.

However, there is a fine line between telling your brand’s story and actually connecting with your audience on an engaging level. But what is it that makes the difference between these two?

Storytelling is a fool-proof way of achieving this, a point that we cannot stress enough here at All Good Tales. Customers love a good story.

To find out how we can help with your storytelling strategy, request a consultation here.

It is very important to define your brand’s content marketing and know what you want to achieve. Then, there are certain storytelling strategies that can help you to stand out from the rest and ensure your brand is on its way to achieving that desired receptivity and launching your brand towards bigger and greater things.

“Story-living”

Storytelling, but in a more powerful and impactful way.

This strategy does exactly what is says on the tin and brings your stories to life. Customers desire a personal connection, especially when you are trying to build yourself up as a reputable brand for them. Inspire engagement with your audience by ensuring customers experience your brand’s story first-hand.

Immerse your customers is the story you’re telling to the point where they feel like they are living the story first-hand and being brought on your brand’s journey. Just make sure the conversation is two-way. It should be a personal and immersive experience for them, based on your brand’s core principles. Don’t tell the story – show it

Emotion & language

Customers love to feel like there are talking with a friend when dealing with brands. It creates a more personal connection.

When storytelling, add personal details. Whether it be talking about how the particular story or scenario made you feel and how it made the people involved feel. Customers tend to favour emotion over factual information. It also creates a more impactful connection between your brand and your audience.

Tone is important is helping to shape this personal connection. Customers need to relate to what you have to say. You should not just know your brand, but also know your audience to speak their language and understand what they want. They need to know that you are a brand that they can trust and that they can put their time and values into.

Visuals

Visuals speak louder than words. Pictures, videos, gifs, info-graphs help and animations, to name a few, bring your brand to life and can captivate your audience’s attention faster than text.

A study confirmed that a human brain can also process images 60,000 times faster too. I bet you skipped over that number?! But I bet you looked at the gif before you started reading this text! That just proves this point.

Visuals are more attractive than facts and figures and leaves a more lasting impression on the audience – every time. Show your values and boost readability with brand-appropriate imagery.

Distribution by blogs/webinars/roundtables/media

So, you’ve created your great content, what next?

You might have the greatest story about your brand to tell, but without good distribution, you may as well be talking to a wall. Sharing of your story is a straight-forward, but highly effective skill when carried out correctly. There are a variety of ways in which you can spread the word about your brand, but it is important to identify which methods are best suited to your brand.

To give you a flavour, here are a few examples of how you can best distribute your story to build your brand:

Blogs – focus specifically on your brand’s subject matter and post regularly. Let your audience get to know you before they buy into your brand.
Webinars – share and start the conversation about your brand’s story verbally.
Roundtables – a great way to experience first-hand the impact of your brand’s story. Get instant feedback about your brand from your audience.
Media: traditional & social – one of the most effective distribution channels if used to its full potential. This should be a go-to one for all brands and requires consistency in your delivery. Social media is a good way to get to know what your customers are looking for in your brand. Traditional media is more difficult to get your brand into, but when you find content that resonates with their values, it is a fantastic platform to expose and build your brand.

A combination of these four storytelling strategies can create a winning recipe for building your brand. Tailor the strategies to your particular brand and its values and you could be launching into something great!

Here at All Good Tales, we strive to help your brand achieve that same customer engagement that we have just talked about. We work with brands such as Kingspan, Glandore, Ancestry.com and DAA to tell stories and build brands. For more information on our services and how to avail of them, click here or ring Gaye on (01) 2541845.

5 Simple Rules for Data Storytelling

“People hear statistics, but they feel stories” – Brent Dykes, Forbes.com.

Conveying information and data is easy. However, to ensure your audience processes and engages with what you’re presenting can be difficult. One surefire way that can effectively engage your audience is through data storytelling.

There are now a number of tools available to brand storytellers to collect valuable data, so it is now easy to access and examine your own company’s data.

People see numbers, charts and figures, but what they don’t see is the potential of this data that can be translated which could lead to a worthwhile follow-up result. You can use all the bar charts, info-graphics and dashboards your heart desires, but without communication of the underlying message, nothing can come of your data. The aim of data storytelling is for your audience to extract value from your facts and figures and put your ideas into action. However, you must first learn how to communicate that effectively.

Here at All Good Tales, we recognise the importance of storytelling for individuals and companies aiming to tell their story and make a difference in their company. That is why we have devised a list of five rules that storytellers should follow when communicating data to an audience and to make that data have the greatest possible impact over that audience.

1) Use a convincing voice

Data always has a story to tell. They just depend on you to deliver that message in a clear and concise voice to the audience. Explain what is happening in the data and why it is of importance to them and their business. It is like giving a step-by-step rundown of the figures, how they came about, comparisons with past figures, what they mean now and what they mean for the future.

2) Communicate your data visually

Visual storytelling is a boon. With easy-to-use tools to collect and visualise your data, it is now easier than ever to analyse and draw an expected outcome from your figures. Find out what data visualisation tool works best for the data you want to convey to your audience. Some examples can include treemaps, bar charts, pie charts etc. Making the figures eye-catching and large is always a great help and much appreciated by your audience. You shouldn’t have so much information in a visual as to overwhelm people to the point where they do not know what they should be looking at or be reading. Clear and minimal information is good – that is where your storytelling comes in!

3) Combine both narratives and visuals with your data

Stories can fill in the blanks for the audience. They tell the stories that data cannot. By using both a detailed explanation as well as eye-catching visual elements to your data, this is the most important and effective way that you can engage your audience. You create a story that can influence action and drive your desired change for yourself and your company.

Remember to use visuals as a back-up, rather than the actual main focus of your talk. These figures are serving to inspire your storytelling, not to be the only thing you talk about!

4) Make stories the backbone of your content

A Stanford professor, Chip Heath, conducted a study where he found 63% of an audience could remember stories told during talks, whereas just 5% could remember a single statistic. Context is often needed to fully understand a piece of data. Insights do not stand alone well without stories to reiterate their meaning. It is often a good idea to focus on emotion, rather than logic sometimes. We are all storytellers, so this is something that should come naturally to us!

5) Aim for action

This should be your ultimate goal in data storytelling. At the end of the day, every business wants to change a mindset, make a sale or promote a service. Data storytelling can help you to achieve this. Once you achieve the above steps, engagement will follow, which inevitably results in action. Be clear on what you want your business to achieve or what change you want to make from the very beginning.

Now that you have your five simple rules for data storytelling, it’s time for you to ‘figure’ it out!

Here at All Good Tales, we are passionate about stories and love to showcase brands and individuals who we think are great at telling their story. We are currently doing great work for brands like Kingspan, Ancestry.com, and daa, to name just a few. We are building brand newsrooms, executing exciting PR strategies, and training key staff on how to source, structure and tell great stories. For more information, please click here or call Gaye on (01) 254 1845.

Improve your story telling with these five TED Talks

We are all storytellers.

Here at All Good Tales, we understand the importance of how you tell your story and how it can impact your audience. Storytelling itself is a craft.

Find out how you can improve your storytelling skills with a consultation.

We’ve put together our top five TED Talks to help you to improve your storytelling.

“The Danger of a Single Story” – Chimamanda Adichie

“When we reject the single story, when we realise that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”

Chimamanda Adichie started writing when she was just seven years old. The turning point of storytelling career happened when she began to write about things that she recognised from her own life. Here she found her own authentic voice. She says “it saved me from having a single story of what books are.”

Adichie stresses the importance of stories throughout the talk. “Stories have been used to dispossess and malign. But stories have also been used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of the people but they can also repair that broken dignity.”

She draws on her own experience involving her culture to explain why having a single perception of people, places or an idea in a story can be detrimental to the process of storytelling.

“What Great Storytellers Know” – Matt Chan, TEDxSeattle

“I would say if you’re trying to capture an audience, start with what they know, what your audience knows. But what if you don’t know your audience?”

Matt Chan has shared stories through the medium of television for over 40 years. He pinpoints having a strong awareness and knowledge of your audience as to why his non-fiction television programmes have worked for so long. This is an aspect often overlooked by storytellers.

You must “capture your audience first. Engaging them at a deeper level right off the top.”

Chan suggests falling back on life experiences. Share familiar stories as a backup if you do not know your audience, stories that everyone has been through. Once hooked in this way, you can take your audience wherever you want, “with twists, turns and cliffhangers”.

“The mystery of storytelling” – Julian Friedmann, TEDxEaling

“Why is it (storytelling) so difficult, and the answer is partly because you’ve got to remember that the story is much more about the audience than it is about the characters or the plot, and it’s much more about the audience, than it is about the storyteller.”

Julian Friedmann is an experienced agent, having undertaken many different roles in his time and working with a variety of storytellers over 40 years. He describes storytelling as “mysterious”. His “Holy Trinity” of storytelling involves the writer, the character and the audience. Friedmann emphasizes relationships in the storytelling industry. He emphasizes that “your primary relationship has to be with your audience, not your characters”.

In this talk, Friedmann attempts to explain that it is essential to understand how audiences use stories. But also why we need stories in order to make a story work. He addresses many aspects in his talks, including characters, dialogue and rejection in the storytelling industry.

“One Word Storyteller” – Strother Gaines, TEDxMidAtlantic

“By moving from a passive observer to an active participant, you’ll take ownership of that story, and it elevates both of our experiences.”

In an interesting talk, both verbally and visually, Strother Gaines describes the power of engaging storytelling and the effects that it can have on an audience.

He draws on his memory at a public speaking conference, playing the game “one word storyteller” with hundreds of other delegates. The story goes on to prove that engaging in the storytelling process, if it is with one word or one thousand words, you can be immersed and transformed like never before. Storytelling becomes a part of you.

Gaines focuses on his three main bullet points of any story. They are “critic, creator and connection”. “You can increase your retention, deepen your connection and broaden your impact by creating something. Anything new.”

One aspect of his TEDx talk that backs up his points made is the audience participation towards the end of the talk.

“The Science of Storytelling” – Will Storr, TedxManchester

“Story is what brain does. Story emerges from human brains as natural as breath emerges from human lips.”

Will Storr is a journalist and a novelist, but overall, he is storyteller. In this TEDx Talk, takes a more technical approach to the process of storytelling than previous talks. However, it is just are interesting and informative.

He teaches writers how to use science to make themselves better storytellers. Will interrogates the human brain in order to develop our storytelling techniques. He shares six in-depth scientific principles, directly relating to storytelling.

While his talk helps us in improving our story and sharing your message, it also helps to understand ourselves as storytellers in a new way.

Here at All Good Tales we are passionate about stories and love to showcase brands and individual who we think are great at telling their story. We are currently doing great work for brands like Kingspan, Ancestry.com, and daa, to name just a few. We are building brand newsrooms, executing exciting PR strategies, and training key staff how to source, structure and tell great stories. For more information please click here or call Gaye on (01) 254 1845.

Leanne Hanafin