Separating Your Brand from Competitors Through Storytelling
Because consumers are provided a litany of options when making purchase decisions, it is important to separate your brand from the bunch. This can be achieved by carving out your brands presence through creating a brand identity. Brand identities are formed through the art of storytelling. Read below to find out why it is important to separate your brand from competitors through storytelling and how to do it right.
In an era where we have dozens of options to choose from when making purchase decisions, brands must fight even harder to make their presence known and to separate themselves from the competition. One effective method to achieve brand recognition is producing marketing strategies that at their core tell a story.
Per the Brand Storytelling Report 2015, conducted by the UK based content marketing agency Headstream, consumers that connect with your brand story are 55% more likely to purchase your product or service and 44% more likely to share your story with others.
With the stakes that high, your business cannot afford to not share its story. Let’s look at how to shape your brands story in a manner that will ensure you connect with your audience.
1 – Keep it Unique with User Generated Content
For some business types, separating your products or services from competitors can seem impossible. After all, comparison charts can’t do it alone. Telling your story however will help to establish your place in the market.
One way to differentiate yourself is to create unique narratives within your marketing campaigns. For example, instead of soliciting written user feedback, request customers to send in video that can be embedded into future marketing materials. Create exclusive content that encourages customer engagement. Remember, your customer base is who will boost your brand to the next level, helping to encourage other consumers to consider your business for their next purchase based on positive feedback they’ve received from others.
Try to incorporate this user-generated content in multiple forms of marketing from blogs, to websites, social media posts, and off-line marketing materials.
2 – Elevate Your Audience Connection by Touching Their Emotions
When it comes to evoking the emotions of your audience through marketing, keep in mind during the development process that you want to elevate the story with surprise elements that ignite delight.
To achieve this, your story arc must be developed with a clear beginning, middle, and end. You can frame this by first introducing the problem, describing attempts to solve the issue, and finally how success was achieved.
Make the stories you tell descriptive and the images you share thought-provoking. Incorporate real-world stories to help build your brand voice and aid in creating an emotional connection.
Creating these emotional connections will help your audience notice, remember, spread the word, and purchase. By shaping your marketing efforts around evoking emotion, you can make lasting first impressions, encourage purchases with emotional connections, and inspire your audience to act.
3 – Personalize Your Market Position with Personality
True in any marketing situation, creating a brand voice is vital to connecting with your target audience. Create a tone of voice through your writing style that resonates with your audience. Be sure to monitor how your target audience communicates online and implement marketing strategies based off this.
Developing a consistent tone or brand voice will help you to design your marketing materials in a manner that essentially gives your brand a personality. This is a great way to establish your brand identity and do things differently than the competition.
4 – Secure Those Coveted Conversions
Storytelling done right creates emotional connections to your brand and helps to establish your brand identity. This will help to create brand trustworthiness and aids in carving out your corner of the market.
Ultimately, the emotional connections you create by including storytelling in your marketing campaign leads to a higher percentage of your audience making purchases (aka being converted to customers.)
By building these relationships and generating positive reviews you will elevate your brand from being just another option to becoming the industry standard, by which all of your competitors will be compared to.
by Isaiah Bradford
