7 Storytelling Strategies in Building Brand Connection

Do you remember Dove's Real Beauty campaign, Warby Parker's "Buy a Pair, Give a Pair," or Nike's "Just Do It"? All these and hundreds of other successful campaigns have one thing in common: efficient brand storytelling that builds a strong emotional connection with the audience.

Brand storytelling is a powerful marketing strategy if done correctly. By leveraging it, you can cultivate an emotional connection with prospects, inspire customer loyalty, avoid exorbitant client acquisition costs, increase sales, and much more.

With this comprehensive guide, we will attempt to unmask everything you need to know about brand storytelling (plus seven strategies for building brand connections).

Understanding Brand Storytelling

Brand storytelling is all about creating an array of plot points to build a narrative for your brand that customers can connect with. It gives your business an opportunity to promote your values and beliefs–without being overtly sales-driven.

At its core, brand storytelling evokes deep, emotional responses–thus building personal connections. Innovative brand stories that transcend individual campaigns and leave lasting impact convey empathy, create experiences, and demand urgency.

A successful brand story humanizes your brand. That's why it impacts every aspect of your business strategy–from how to build your social media presence and content creation to internal communication and long-term brand equity.

Why Does Brand Storytelling Matter to You?

Stories have the unique potential to outlive ideas and transcend individual products or campaigns. When you keep brand storytelling at the center of your marketing efforts, you basically personalize your brand and create the opportunity for it to become an intimate part of your potential clients' lives. This intrigues customers to learn more about your company's products, mission, and purpose.

Take, for example, how Airbnb keeps 'belonging' at the core of its brand story. The brand doesn't promote its marketplace by ranting about the technology and filters that help travelers find the perfect homestay.

Instead, they leverage authentic stories of hosts and travelers. The stories help the brand communicate its visions–a world where people can 'belong anywhere.'

Airbnb is a prime example of how leveraging brand storytelling can help you:

• Improve brand awareness
• Create a memorable brand
• Foster brand loyalty
• Build trust
• Inspire actions from your targeted audience

Therefore, when you prioritize brand storytelling, you encourage customers to be part of your brand's journey. You are no longer just selling products or services; you are asking them to join a larger story that reflects the audience's values, identities, and aspirations.

7 Storytelling Strategies for Building Genuine Brand Connections

Much is said about storytelling and how crucial it is to get your brand to deliver it in just the right way. But the question remains: How?

Here are our seven favorite strategies:

Know Your Audience: Inside-Out

Every brand marketing strategy is tailored to a specific audience, and brand storytelling is no different. To craft a story that compels and inspires your audience, you'll need to know precisely who you are appealing to (your target audience).

The first step, therefore, is creating a detailed buyer persona or archetype. Think of them as the protagonists of your story. What are their problems? What drives them–needs, dreams, and wants? What are their interests?

Use surveys and research to understand your target market. For this, you can leverage social media, especially LinkedIn outreaches, to gather crucial data and shape your buyer persona. Automation tools can help you identify your ideal audience based on factors like industry, job title, and location. The messages you'll send will be more likely to resonate with your target market. However, remember that automation should always complement personalization, not replace it.

Search for thought leaders and professionals in relevant roles, industries, and companies that fit your ideal customer profile and ask them for their genuine input. LinkedIn features like polls, direct messages, and group discussions can also be used.

Keep your Audience's Challenge at the Center

At their heart, stories are about overcoming challenges. However, a lack of struggle or conflict means there's no emotional journey your audience can relate to. The result: a story that won't hold attention or resonate.

That's why you shouldn't hesitate to rip the band-aid off. Empathize with your audience's struggle and acknowledge their challenges.

Start by answering:

• What challenges does your audience encounter on their journey to success?
• How can your brand solve it?
• What solutions are you offering?
• How will your customers learn about your brand and the solution?
• What does their transformational success or better futures look like?

Make this the central theme of your story. This will make them feel understood, thus building trust and connection with your brand.

What's your Brand's Personality?

Now, let's focus on your brand by defining its personality. It's the set of human characters attributed to your brand. The personality humanizes your brand, outlining how your brand speaks, behaves, and interacts with the audience.

Carl Jung's Brand Archetype Framework is the best way to recognize and establish your brand personality. The 12 archetypes represent key personality types amongst the target market.

Analyze each archetype in the wheel below and pick the one that mostly closely matches your buyer's persona.

Aligning the brand archetype to embody the personality of your customers will help you connect with the right audience, thus strengthening brand storytelling.

M&M's is an excellent example of how a brand's personality helps deliver a memorable story. The brand uses colors and characters, each representing a different type of M&M's candy with unique and relatable personalities:

• Red: confident and slightly sarcastic
• Yellow: Kind-hearted and somewhat naive
• Green: Alluring and sophisticated
• Orange: Anxious and caution
• Blue: Cool, calm, and collected
• Brown: Intelligent and serious 

Thus, through personality-driven storytelling, M&M's creates a solid emotional connection.

Align Your Brand Narrative to Your Brand's Value and Purpose

Customers value brands with strong purposes and values. More importantly, these elements should be aligned with your brand narrative to present a consistent and authentic story.

To create an appealing narrative, you must know your brand's purpose and values.

Brand purpose is one sentence that communicates the value you create in the customer's life. Here are some examples:

• IKEA: To create a better everyday life for many people
• Unilver: To make sustainable living commonplace
• TOMS: To improve lives through business

On the other hand, brand value is the set of values that matter most to your company. It's a key differentiation that sets you apart from other brands. However, it should be concise and clear, similar to:

• IKEA: Simplicity, cost-consciousness, togetherness
• Unilever: Responsibility, respect, sustainability
• TOMS: Giving, integrity, compassion

Therefore, clearly define, document, and communicate your brand purpose and value. Get your stakeholders involved in the discussion to ensure they align well with the brand narrative.

Leverage internal and external stakeholder interviews to understand their brand perception, personal values, and experience. These interviews can help you create authentic and compelling brand narratives–the backbone of successful storytelling.

Communicate a Clear and Consistent Brand Story

Consistency is the key to effective brand storytelling. The secret is to keep things clear and straightforward. In your brand story, focus on highlighting what your brand is about, what makes it unique, and what you want people to remember about it.

Brand guidelines are a sure-shot way to ensure you are telling a consistent story across channels. Even better, tools can be incorporated with digital asset management and content management systems to support the brand guidelines and assets.

Put together, this will help ensure that all your marketing efforts share a consistent, on-brand brand story. Plus, it'll allow easy access for the internal departments.

Integrate Visuals

Humans are visual beings, which makes images and visuals a vital part of your brand storytelling. Employing visual elements makes your brand more memorable and story-compelling. Moreover, images can powerfully add emotional relevance to the brand story.

For example, if you are a travel brand, you can use visuals of picturesque destinations, cozy accommodations, and happy travelers experiencing local culture, similar to Radisson Hotels and Airbnb.

Several visual storytelling elements exist, including videos, images, infographics, and illustrations, with videos being the most effective. If you rely on video content for your storytelling, remember that subtitling and captioning in multilingual media is a must in the global market. Especially now that short-format content is experiencing a significant increase in popularity. Subtitle every video in your audiences' preferred languages to convey your brand story across borders.

Caution: Choose visual elements that complement your brand story and not overpower it.

Inspire Action with Your Brand Story

Stories are not just for capturing your audience's attention and building connections. They should also inspire them to take desired actions, such as buying a product, signing up for a service, or promoting a particular cause.

Make your brand story actionable. Communicate your call to action. Highlight the benefits of taking action, like how it will improve their lives, solve their challenges, or allow them to experience something new.

Also, keep the actions simple. Provide instruction, such as links and resources. Leverage social media platforms, like LinkedIn lead generation, to inspire action amongst your target audience. Share your brand story on the platform in posts with relevant hashtags to encourage interaction. Use features like LinkedIn ads and lead generation forms to inspire action.

Traits of a Compelling Brand Story

Every good brand story comes down to five essential elements. When you tell a story that ticks all five boxes, you are setting your brand up for success. Thus, create your brand story that's:

• Meaningful: People are overloaded with content. To stand out from the tsunami, tell a good story that they will actually care about–it must be interesting and relevant to your target audience.
• Personal: Your audience must feel personally connected. Allow people to picture themselves as the protagonists of the story–something worth their time and investment.
• Emotional: A story with an emotional hook that triggers empathy.
• Simple: Trying to narrate everything that leaves the audience confused and distracted. Therefore, focus on one problem at a time.
• Authentic: Tell them your story. Be open, honest, and transparent–let your personality shine through the brand story.

Over to You

To quote Taryan Lanister, 'There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it.' And your audience deserves to know their favorite brand's story. Make it worth their investment by employing the above-mentioned seven expert strategies.