Content strategy: developing your brand story

Storytelling used to be the domain of big brands and big advertising campaigns. Companies proudly advertised how their ideal customers used their products and services to make their lives better. Shorter was better. Snappy tag-lines, memorable one-liners and punchy scripts. Staff were left to fill in the gaps when it came to less formal communications. However, as many advertising pundits will confirm, you can’t bet the shop on disruptive advertising in a social media-centric world. Your brand’s story now needs, not only to support the myriad of conversations that take place about your brand online and offline, but also needs to be supported and endorsed by those conversations.

Fortunately, although developing your brand story for today’s communications environment does mean some extra work, it can be relatively straight-forward. Over the next few weeks we’re going to be looking at how to develop your brand story for the social media age, how to develop a content strategy and how, as a brand, you can create, curate and share content to support your story

So, what’s a brand story anyway? Your brand story is simply telling the story of your brand’s past, present and future in a way that positions your brand appropriately with your key audiences and positively influences consumers’ brand preference. Practically, this could take the form of a number of statements, a few hundred words of text or something more elaborate. It’s the introduction to, summary for and guidance for all the great stories that your brand has to tell. And it’s square one for any content strategy.

Here are six tips to developing a great brand story.

1. Define your brand promise – The purpose of most brand communication is to communicate the brand’s core proposition and the promise it makes customers. However, today’s consumers demand an increasing level of transparency, honesty and corporate social responsibility in communications, so your vision, mission and brand values are also important to take into account.

2. Be true to your brand values – Brand values are something that are often created by a minority of stakeholders, stuck on the wall (or on a website or in a Power Point) and seldom reviewed or taken into account during day-to-day business. Brand values should really be the values by which your brand lives and if you’re not sure, or you think that they might have changed, you should review and revise them. Today’s social communications should not only demonstrate your brand values, but your brand values may actually inform your content strategy (what you say, why and where you say it).

3. Choose your persona(s) – You’ll need to define what tone-of-voice your brand communications have, given that, these days, your needs might range from broadcast media advertising to a 140 character message on Twitter. Also, what your brand says and doesn’t say, what it comments on, how it reacts to questions, praise, endorsements, criticism, bad-mouthing. And, given that so much of communications crosses social media these days, you’ll also want to define the personas of sub-brands or departments, plus agree how your spokespeople, online and offline, will communicate on the brand’s behalf.

4. Seek permission to be part of the bigger story – Your brand doesn’t exist in isolation and, most likely, the only people that think that your brand is one of the most important things in the world today are those that are paid to say things like that. However, your brand is probably relevant to a great many other ongoing stories that people really do believe are quite important indeed. Once your brand is accepted as a legitimate voice in the bigger story, your brand gets listened to by a whole new audience.

5. Tell your story through every little thing that you do – Advertising, PR and marketing agencies around the world consume themselves with coming up with the big idea. The big breakthrough concept to run an impactful campaign on. And big ideas remain important. However, the big campaign only means something if all those little communications make sense too, because those little communications help your key audiences decide whether they like you. A brand story isn’t just for Christmas, you have to feed it all year round.

6. Listen, review, adjust – All your storytelling efforts are pointless if your words fall on deaf ears and, as any communicator should already know, it’s wise to listen twice as much as you speak. Your brand story should be given the space to develop as you listen to the wants, needs and cares of your key audiences. By listening you quickly learn what resonates and what doesn’t, what delights and what get’s sneers and what content your audiences are hungry for. If you’ve done your groundwork, this feedback is unlikely to change your top-line brand promise, but it invariably impacts content creation, key messages and the weighting that different messages have in your communications.

Spot On’s Alexander McNabb will be speaking about Facing The Content Crunch at the ArabNet Digital Summit in Dubai (24-26 June 2013).

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If you would like help with your content strategy or would like to meet up with us at ArabNet contact us now.

Read more about content

Are you being genuine? (May 2013)

Flipboard and the future of content (April 2013)