Ruan Gormley, Author at All Good Tales

How to tell a powerful brand story

Storytelling is an integral part of advertising. Here at All Good Tales, we promote storytelling as a creative and effective way of shaping how your customers see and connect with your brand.

We encourage all businesses to infuse the magic of storytelling into their marketing or public relation campaigns in order to increase brand awareness in today’s highly competitive markets.

While some brands have been highly successful in forming compelling and memorable brand stories, others have not been as fortunate in this domain. Designing a powerful brand story can be challenging at times, but we’re here to help. Here are four ways to tell a powerful brand story.

Focus on your uniquity

Storytelling is more than throwing a few words together. In a highly competitive market, brands need to be creative, innovative and inventive when it comes to crafting their brand story, in order to stand out and promote themselves over the competition. Therefore, your story needs to communicate what makes your brand unique. Focus on your company’s distinctive strengths and the benefits that you can have on the life of your potential consumers.

Express the company values

Powerful brand stories that resonate with consumers are often those that match the values, beliefs and lifestyle that a brand has aligned themselves to. Consequently, brands that are consistently supporting the same values in their storytelling tend to be more popular than those that don’t.

Barry’s Tea has created noteworthy brand stories over the years. They emphasise the importance of familial relationships and the comfort of home life, which has not only made their brand stories more powerful but has increased their brand’s popularity in the process.

Know your audience

Before your marketing team can begin crafting a brand story or a PR campaign, you need to identify a clear target audience and understand not only the demographics but their attitudes, beliefs and interests. Knowing your audience can be a real game-changer for brand storytelling, enabling your brand to connect with them on a more personal level and heightening your chances of producing a story that will have an impact on them.

Include a human element

At All Good Tales, we have found that the most compelling and powerful stories are the ones told about people. Generally, the people who are in the best position to help brands tell stories are those who have an emotional connection to the story being told. This allows the audience to see an authentic connection between the person featured, the story being told, and the brand telling it.

While many brands opt to use celebrities for this purpose, others such as Dove and VHI Healthcare have been using compelling inputs from their customers to craft their brand stories. Another example is Airbnb, whose intricate understanding of their customers and their creative use of consumer data has provided customers with a better sense of authenticity and relatability.

Here at All Good Tales, our CEO delivers inspirational keynote addresses to audiences, teaching them how to tell powerful stories. To find out more or to arrange a consultation you can call us on (01) 454 0090. For more information click here.

Tell stories that your customers want to hear

In a market that is more competitive than ever before, brands need to be innovative, interesting and inventive when it comes to crafting their PR strategy.

Here at All Good Tales, we know that storytelling is a creative and effective way of shaping how your customers view and connect with your brand. We encourage all businesses to infuse the magic of storytelling into their marketing or public relations campaigns, as it provides big prospects for increased brand awareness.

But how do you ensure you are telling the stories that your customers want to hear?

Get to know your audience

Not knowing your target market is a huge downfall and can be detrimental to your company. Before your marketing team can begin crafting content, your target market needs to be clearly defined and understood. Once this has been established, your brand will be able to get more personal with your storytelling and set a tone of voice that relates best to your potential customers. Research your audience by listening to the main points you hear in sales conversations, or interview current customers to understand what a typical day is like for them. This heightens your chances of producing a story that both your customers want to hear and that resonates with them.

Appeal to their emotions

At All Good Tales, we know that telling a story is more than stringing words together. We have found that there is a science behind storytelling. Storytelling has the power to stimulate the audience and evoke emotions among consumers. Rather than trying to make your audience upset, tell stories that make your audience laugh or that brightens up their day. Everyone loves to feel good. If your brand story manages to make your potential customers feel this way, your company has an advantage over the competition.

Relevance is key

This is another reasons why studying your target market is essential. Potential customers want to be able to see themselves in the story that your brand is telling. If they do not, it is highly unlikely that your story will resonate with them at all. Incorporating user generated content has been very successful in making brands more relevant and relatable to consumers. Your story becomes more authentic and appealing to potential customers.

Here at All Good Tales, we are doing great work for brands like Ancestry.com, Entekra and DAA, to name just a few. We are building brand newsrooms, executing exciting PR strategies, and training key staff how to craft emotional brand stories. For a free consultation, please click here or call us (01) 4540090.

How to encourage your team to become better storytellers

In any good marketing plan, customer engagement should be one of the top priorities for your brand. Here at All Good Tales, we have found that storytelling offers an effective and innovative way to grab your audience’s attention.

To produce excellence externally, you need to focus your energy on how to do work internally within the business. One important thing to remember is that brand storytelling is not simply the transferring of information and mundane facts to the consumer. Instead, your team must be motivated, imaginative and should aim to create a customer experience through storytelling. The more engaging the customer experience, the easier it is to compel your audience to connect positively with your brand.

Here are some tips on how to encourage your team to tell better stories.

Innovative strategies

In this fast-paced digital world, presentations laced with boring bullet points are all too common.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has been highly successful in introducing innovative strategies that encourage both engagement and creativity among his team. One well known example of this was the banning of Powerpoint during team meetings. He believes that logic and facts need to be merged with a narrative to be successfully retained in our brains. So, instead of reading bullet points from a slide, the team take time at the beginning of each meeting to read a six-page story.

Bullet points don’t inspire, but stories do. Reading and writing stories require strategic thinking, deeper analysis and encourage more engagement than powerpoints, which will be very beneficial to your team’s storytelling techniques.

The “yes, and” method

Nothing kills creativity and effort more than being constantly denied. So, when a team member puts forward an idea, it is important to encourage it. If you need to offer a further suggestion on top of their idea.

One way of doing this is to employ the “yes, and” method, where ideas are not ignored, but acknowledged, advanced and allowed to gather steam. Of course, coming up with the perfect story can be difficult and time-consuming, and not all ideas put forward are going to be of use.

That said, by exploring the ideas put forward, you’re bound to raise your team’s motivation and ignite the spark of creativity that is key to successful storytelling.

Anecdotes over data

A good brand story is both understandable and relatable to its audience.

In order to increase relatability, encourage your team to gather stories that they hear on a day to day basis. This may include emails or calls from customers, conversations between team members or noteworthy personal experiences both in and outside of work.

Anecdotes are often much more insightful and valuable than data when it comes to forming a successful story. Your team will be able to incorporate information and scenarios that are relevant to your customers in their stories. This should make your brand story relatable and popular among your target market.

Story guide

Writing the perfect story may be frustrating for some, and your team members may need guidance. Give your team a simple story guide to follow, which ensures success while also allowing enough room for originality and inventiveness.

Here at All Good Tales, we use our Storyteller’s Manifesto. The little red book is a simple guide to storytelling for business. It provides users with storytelling structures and tips on how to tell an engaging story. You can request your free copy here.

Here at All Good Tales, we are doing great work for brands like Ancestry.com, Entekra and DAA, to name just a few. We are building brand newsrooms, executing exciting PR strategies, and training key staff how to craft emotional brand stories. For a free consultation, please click here or call us on (01) 454 0090.

Ruan Gormley