The Brand Storytelling Guide
I’m glad you dropped in to my brand storytelling guide. You must want to get the most out of your marketing efforts if you landed here. I will answer your questions about brand storytelling, plus give you actionable ideas and tasks to get you started. By the end you will be telling your brand story like a pro.
What is the Brand Storytelling Guide?
This is like a contents page of everything I’ve written about Brand Storytelling. I add to it as I write more so make sure you bookmark it to come back to.
Better yet — Become a MaketAPeel Community Member to stay on top of what I write about and connect with other experts, participate in task based challenges and meet like minded people, who like you, want to dive deeper than a tweet into topics.
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Become a CreateAPeel Community Member to receive all the benefits of MarketAPeel with a deeper dive into brand storytelling topics, group coaching, and workbooks.
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Hire the MarketAPeel Brand Storytelling Agency to help you define your brand story and build out your digital footprint to guide people from awareness to advocacy
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Book one on one coaching with brand storyteller Shannon Peel
Let’s get started:
What is Brand Storytelling
Definition of a Brand
One of the things many brand specialists tell me is people come to the to get a logo because they don’t understand what a branding is or what the definition of the word brand is. This article is a deep dive into what branding is and what business owners need to know about creating a brand. With quotes from experts, professionals, and business owners.
Definition of Brand Storytelling
I’ve searched out the Internet, asked business owners, marketers, and professionals what brand storytelling is and how a brand can make an impact on their audience. There is more than you think to telling a brand story, this article will give you a general idea of what it is and what you need to do to tell your brand’s story.
Why Brand Storytelling is the Future of Marketing
Why Tell Brand Stories
Brands need to tell stories to draw people in and captivate them. Studies show that our attention span is less than a goldfish, but this isn’t true. We have an attention span and can focus on things for longer than a New York minute. We just take a fraction of a second to determine if we want to pay attention to the thing in front of us, before moving onto the next interesting thing vying for our attention.
With so many brands competing for eyeballs on a small screen, audiences have an infinite amount of content to cast aside when looking for something interesting. Due to marketers and advertisers using the same data to create their content and copying each other, it’s easy for people to swipe for the “NEXT” because we’ve seen it all before.
What to Know Before You Start Creating Content
When the wrong people show up on your website, their behaviours could adversely affect your sites search engine ranking (SEO) by increasing bounce rates and decreasing the average time on your site.
It is more advantageous to have less traffic that will stick around, explore, and convert by completing the transaction. To determine the best way to get the right people to your website, I asked people who actively work on improving website metrics and create content for their companies, here’s what they said.
With advice, ideas, and tips from business owners, content marketing experts, and professionals.
Book Review: The Storytelling Animal
The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall. I’m interested in discovering what story says about the human species.
Stories tell us the values of people throughout history. I was a bit concerned about what the preschool children of this book had been exposed to considering the dark stories they were playing out at school. Then Jonathan reminds me about the stories parents used to tell their children back when fairy tales and nursery rhymes were first told. Protecting children’s innocence from the horrors of the world they live in is how contemporary parents raise children not how children were raised even just 60 years ago.
This book has barely started, and my mind is already filling with ideas, thoughts, and insights about what stories say about our society and culture.
Create a Personal Brand to Get Hired
I got a J O B and I wasn’t even looking. In fact, if all interviews I’d gone through during my time searching for work were this easy, my anxiety around job searches wouldn’t exist. So, If I wasn’t looking for work, how did I end up with a J O B?
Thanks to my personal brand.
It didn’t work out for reasons unrelated to my brand or my abilities, but it was a job offer.
Where to Tell Your Brand Story
Before You Start
Your brand story funnel needs to lead people to the close section of the funnel, which is usually on your website. When your audience gets to this point in your funnel the goal is conversions. You want visitors to take the next step and open their wallets.
The best way to increase your conversion rate is to ensure the people who are landing on your website are the right people
The Power of Reviews for Realtors
Positive ratings and reviews are extremely valuable in the real estate industry. Home buyers are online looking for available properties and guess how they begin their research? Reviews.
A home is the largest financial decision a person makes in their lifetime and reviews are the perfect way to build that trust and credibility that aspiring home buyers are looking for.
Reviews are a powerful force when it comes to driving new business. Do you have processes in place to collect reviews on a regular basis within your real estate business?
How to tell Your Brand Story
Know Your Audience
You don’t want every person who walks through the door because most will cause you more headaches than they are worth. That is the great thing about being self employed — It’s your business, you get to work with the clients you want. Yes, money is part of the equation, but you only have so much time to work, don’t fill it up with the wrong thing. Take what you have to in order to pay the bills and leave enough time to tell your story to the optimal clientele.
Understand your business, product, and service
To determine your ideal market, you will need to completely understand your product, service, and business.
How to Write Your Brand Story
Here’s what you do to attract customers by telling a brand story — You grab a pot of coffee, sit down at your computer, and write.
Every brand story writer starts with a blank page and only succeeds by typing. Telling a story doesn’t take a lot of time. Now editing, revising, and polishing a story — That takes time, a whole lotta time. I love what Hemmingway said about the first draft, — it’s sh*^! When you sit down to write your brand story, don’t sweat it because your keyboard has a delete button. Let the words flow on the screen and then worry about what you will say.
How to use Quotes in YOUR Brand Story
Quotes make good filler for content calendars to fill the gaps between telling your brand story and the story of your customers. Look for quotes that are statements for what you do and how you help people. As a storyteller and content creator, quotes about why brand storytelling is important fits perfectly with my brand story message.
Ideas for Realtors & Other Professionals
As a real estate professional, crafting a strategic personal brand starts by knowing who you are and how others see you. A scary exercise for you, ask people whom you know and trust to describe what you stand for. If the story they tell you is different from the one you tell yourself, you’re not alone.
Search Engine Optimisation for YOUR Key Words
Search engine optimisation is a tough nut to crack because there are 200 factors in Google’s algorithm, which it keeps secret, and you are constantly competing with other websites, many of which have teams of hundreds of people. How was I, one person, going to be able to rank for keywords potential customers?
This is a problem all solopreneurs face in every aspect of their business.
The answer is…
The Conclusion and the Next Step for YOU
The biggest difference between most stories and a brand story is how the story ends. In a movie or novel the author brings all the threads together ties them into a nice resolution and the story ends.
In brand storytelling the stories are sound bites and they lead to other stories to guide audiences from awareness to advocacy where they are writing their own fan non-fiction about their interaction with your brand. There are lots of threads going all over the Internet with multiple storytellers adding to the story.
What happens is your brand story becomes fractured and soon audiences aren’t sure about where to go and how to get there.
If your story is spread out over the internet and you aren’t sure audiences are able to go from awareness to advocacy, you need to take the next step and become a MarketAPeel Community Member. There you will learn more about organizing your brand story and talk to Shannon Peel about how to ensure your story is impacting your audience the way you want it to.
Did I mention, MarketAPeel Community Membership is Free. Join right now.
MarketAPeel Brand Storytelling Agency helps business owners and professionals define their brand story and build out their digital footprint to build brand authority and gain brand credibility.
