The concept of brand storytelling is to create a connection with consumers through marketing, by linking personality and emotion with a brand. With social media becoming an evermore-prevalent form of contact with online consumers, it’s the ideal channel to build the story behind the brand, with targeted content and consistent advertising.
By developing visual narratives with impact, combined with live experiences, brands can efficiently deliver their story through social media, which helps to grow an engaged online community. To assist you with socialising your brand to connect with your consumer audience, here are tips on what to do, as well as what to avoid, when building your narrative.
Promote images that are powerful and personalise your brand
As the famous English idiom highlights, “a picture is worth a thousand words” is exactly what makes images so important on social media. Images are the first thing that capture your online consumers’ attention, so use powerful images to take them on a visual journey that identifies your brand’s story.
Some tips for choosing images for you social platforms:
• Try to source original images to personalise your brand’s narrative
• Ensure your images are the right specifications and resolution for the social media platforms these will be published on
• While hashtags are a great way to link visual content, don’t add one unless it connects your brand with consumers
Try to empower your online community to deliver your brand’s story as they see it
Often the best content you can publish on your social media platforms is user-generated. If you leave your brand’s story open ended, you can engage your online consumers so they finish the story, using their own words and images.
There are two main ways to source user generated content which are crowd sourced content, where you find consumer images that identify your brand through their lens, or social listening, which involves using social tools to communicate with brand advocates who publicise your brand’s story.
Make sure your brand’s story is relatable to online consumers
To create an emotional link between your brand and your online consumers your story needs to be relatable to a broader audience. Stories that transcend culture and connect with a universal audience have the most consumer impact. When you are developing your narrative it’s important to think, “is this story attainable for the average social media user” and, if so, you’re on the right track.
Always source words that have impact
While images have a vital role with storytelling on social media, it is the words that link the captions together or define the real meaning behind your brand.
The words you use in your storytelling help you to create a deeper brand connection with your audience. Try to only use original content and incorporate words that will engage your audience emotionally, whether you want to make them feel motivated, inspired or even convince them to take a specific course of action. A great example of this is Nike with their brand slogan “Just Do It”, which typifies their story and is relatable to a broad audience. The slogan is not directed to elite athletes, instead it was developed to connect with everyday people, which is also portrayed in their television commercials which combine simple and powerful words with strong images.
All great brands use stories to build an emotional connection with their consumers. By creating a brand story that’s authentic, unique and has broad consumer appeal you will earn the respect of your online audience which then translates to a more personal relationship and a higher rate of conversion for your products or services.
