Six months ago, your marketing team created a new corporate purpose that was really ambitious. Your sales team is still using a five-year-old pitch deck because there is no physical data to support the message of the company. Companies with good quality messaging will not survive in complex selling environments based on emotion alone. These companies need to have quantifiable evidence and use strict internal regulations in order to sell their products or services.
This guide provides a step-by-step process to develop and evaluate brand storytelling to create real sales velocity rather than simply generating creativity.
The Truth About Brand Storytelling
There is a significant amount of confusion between clever marketing and corporate truths. A lot of companies develop a nice story about their history and place it on the corporate "About" page, but they believe this story will generate interest from potential customers.
It does not.
The expectation for authentic content among buyers today has never been more important. A Nielsen study found that 88 percent of buyers across the globe are more likely to trust a product based on a personal recommendation than based on either product or price. A great story can generate up to eight times more visits and sales, but only if it is connected to actual business processes within the organization.
This guide addresses the greatest weakness in contemporary messaging architecture. It will provide you with a structure to appropriately stop writing general statements and begin to develop a platform that can be utilized by all parts of the organization.
To move forward successfully, here is what truly generates results:
Shift from brand-as-hero to customer-as-hero.
Support emotional appeals with an unbreakable credibility ladder.
Develop a policy that supports strict governance so the message can pass through internal review.
Track pipeline support rather than surface-level social media likes.
How Real Brand Storytelling Works
You need to first determine what you will develop. Mixing up terms is one of the reasons teams fail. While campaigns and customer stories may serve similar purposes, they are distinct entities. A campaign is a short-term effort to promote a particular product; customer stories are case studies that tell the story of an individual's success using a specific product.
The brand story serves as the foundation for your entire company. A brand story is your company's reason for existing; it defines your purpose, the enemy you fight against and the change that you create in the marketplace. Your brand story should stay the same throughout the year and should be stable, yet flexible enough to support product design efforts across multiple channels.
Effective narratives connect what you sell and how your buyer feels about it. However, B2B buyers require more than just feelings. They want structured content that aligns with how they discover products, how they buy products and how they establish credibility with their superiors regarding their choice.
Most companies fail by publishing poorly written corporate messaging. You can easily identify these types of communications; they often begin with a very broad statement about making the world a better place, but do not provide evidence to support the statement. Here are the main mistakes that should be avoided.
The Highlight Reel Syndrome
Many businesses want to appear flawless. They create narratives that position them as the hero, swooping down in their time of crisis to save the day. This approach will turn off your prospects.
The real hero is the buyer, not your company. The buyer is the one who is experiencing the threat or danger. Your brand is simply a mentor to the buyer, providing them with a roadmap or the tools to succeed. If your messaging makes your company the focal point of the story, you will lose the attention of your audience.
Missing Proof
If your software takes 6 months to install, how can you say it’s simple? If your company does not measure waste, then how can you say it cares about the environment? An unverified story is a lie. You must have alignment between your internal actions and your external actions. If you are going to make a change in your story, then on every occasion your product must produce results.
Generic Copy Trap
B2B messaging is typically boring. So many companies use the same words as their competitors, calling themselves the leading provider of solutions. This is not a story; it is a template. If you can take my logo off my website and replace it with my competitor's logo, and the story remains the same, I have failed in my narrative. I have no differentiation.
Choosing Your Story Framework
You don’t need to create a new method of storytelling; you just need to select the correct narrative frame for the job. Different stages of buying require different models.
StoryBrand Conversion Path
When converting a visitor into a lead, use the StoryBrand model. It’s direct. The hero has a problem, meets a guide (you), receives a plan from the guide, and is called to act. That action results in success or avoiding failure. This model can be used for landing pages, home pages, and direct email sequences. It gives you clarity on your customer’s exact tension and forces you to use clear communication.
How to Build Your Story
Discovering the Core Tension
All great stories are built around some kind of conflict. Without struggle there is no story - no drama - just bland repetition of circumstance.
To identify your company's core tension, you cannot guess it in a conference room while you have the members of your leadership team present. It needs to be identified through real-world observation; specifically, through the review of sales calls and (preferably) through listening to the frustrations expressed by customers of your competitors.
The best places to begin creating your corporate story are where the tension between the customer and the product she purchased, or is considering purchasing, occurred, and end where resolution was attained.
Each salesperson on your team is equipped with a wealth of knowledge concerning how well they understand your customer, how frustrated she may be, and what her expectations are for her experience with your product. Take the time to discover and document her responses.
Build Your Company's Story
When building your company's story, you need to use a proven method for constructing compelling stories, namely; using a three part structure. Your goal is to create an emotionally compelling story that tells potential employees why you do what you do. It also provides an opportunity for potential investors to visualize the opportunity to achieve financial growth.
In order to develop your company's compelling story, you will need to first determine the audience for your corporate message. Two types of audiences exist for a company's message; internal and external. Internal audiences are primarily made up of your employees and team members. External audiences include potential investors and customers.
After defining your audience, you will need to determine your company's core beliefs, vision, and mission. Your belief and vision will be what you stand for and what you are about, while your mission statement will serve as your guiding principle.
During your company's brand storytelling process, try to think of how you would describe your personal family history or even the history of your company. You will want to ensure that the same principles are applied in each scenario. In addition to these principles, you will also want to create an anchor or starting point for your company's "why". Your "why" will become the base for your company's story when it is shared with prospective employees, as well as with potential financial partners.
Once you have defined your "why" as the "core" of your company's story, you will need to find ways to make it more relatable to different audiences. By establishing a more relatable story, you will be able to increase the chances that your story will be read by more people and be used as a way to connect with your potential audience prior to their buying decisions.
One of the most effective ways to create a more relatable corporate story is to provide clarity and understanding as to why you do what you do, or as to why parts of your product line exist. Through developing more clarity in your product line, you will increase the likelihood that you will reach the desired audience and achieve your desired results during your story-telling process.
If you're trying to sell data software, the urgency isn't, "I need to buy some software", it's "My boss wants this report by tomorrow and our data's a mess."
Establishing Your Proof Matrix
Until you provide proof, your claims are merely guesses. The proof matrix is where you build your proof ladder. Each part of your story must have a piece of evidence.
To build this proof matrix, you will want to start by creating the product proof. If you're claiming that you are fast, show evidence of how fast you are through the load time of your software. The next step is to prove your product with customer proof (quotes and stories from customers). The final proof will come from third-party testing.
You should create one internal guide that contains all of your core claims and the proof for each. If you cannot provide proof for a claim, that claim should not be released.
Protecting Your Story from Internal Conflict
Your greatest obstacles will generally come from within your company (your own legal or product team). They tend to try to complicate your words with excessive legal terms and to include every tiny feature. You have to be protective of your narrative. You need to have a strong approval structure in place and you should clearly define who owns the narrative that's being told.
When you're using AI tools to create your content, it is essential that you check for narrative slippage. Typically, AI will make use of average, boring language. As a result, you will lose your unique writing voice. Therefore, it's imperative that you get the AI tools trained on your exact brand guidelines and edit the output accordingly to ensure the tone stays sharp.
Adapting Content Across Channels
It is essential that you do not simply copy and paste the same paragraphs from one channel to another. For example, a technical blog post should contain rich information architecture and have detailed technical content. On the other hand, a LinkedIn post should have an emotional hook, be concise and to the point. A compelling sales pitch requires having good metrics and providing a well-defined follow-up.
There's a core message that remains consistent, however, the actual delivery will differ to suit the space being addressed as well as the specific target audience.
Brand Storytelling in Action: Winning Campaigns
Do not attempt to replicate the budgets spent on marketing by some of the largest companies in the world. Instead, replicate the underlying ideas that they utilised to create their marketing campaigns based on a single concept, developed into an actionable item.
Dove and the Trust Issue
Dove recognised a fundamental social change that has occurred in the way that most people view and assess images. AI-generated perfect faces will significantly decrease levels of trust in the media at large.
Dove has since adjusted their Real Beauty campaign message to confront the specific issue of trust in a digitally generated image. Dove opposed the creation of content based on algorithms for beauty. The outcome of this initiative for Dove resulted in more than 787 million impressions and an increase of 2.9 points in brand association. Identify a modern nemesis and publicly battle against them.
Patagonia and Actionable Solutions
Any individual can profess to be concerned about the environment, but Patagonia has taken that concern and constructed a support mechanism around it for their customers.
Patagonia’s Worn Wear programme encourages customers to repair their existing jackets rather than buying new jackets. They have shown through this programme that they have physically kept over 583,000 pieces of clothing out of the landfills.
They did not merely profess their commitment to a cause; they provided their customers with a tangible opportunity to contribute to that cause. Therefore, their story can be validated.
Salesforce and Peer Reference
The process of researching enterprise software can be boring and tedious. Salesforce found a way to engage potential customers by making their customers seem like stars.
Salesforce formed the Trailblazer Community. Currently, Salesforce has 19 million Trailblazers, across 100 countries. The company uses these individuals as an example of its story. When potential customers see thousands of people in the same situation building their careers on a single platform, they will trust the platform. Community validation beats any marketing message, every time.
Warby Parker and Social Mission
According to Acquia, approximately 1 billion people worldwide need but cannot get glasses. Warby Parker established the entirety of its brand's philosophy on addressing this issue.
Their Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is the central component of its business model; every product sold tells the story of Warby Parker. The Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is not an afterthought; it serves as the foundation of all Warby Parker's progress and development.
How to Calculate Return on Investment
Eventually, you will need to meet with your CFO to determine the financial worth of your company’s story. The concept of emotional connection will not aid in your financial estimates. Hard numbers will.
Establish the Baseline
Before introducing a new message, document where the organization stands at the time of launch. Review existing conversion rates, sales velocity (how quickly you can convert a lead into a customer), brand search volume, etc. To prove that your efforts improved anything, you need to have a point of reference for where you were. As a good objective, consider targeting an internal increase in engagement quality by 10-20% over your existing baseline.
Tracking Assisted Conversions
Effective brand storytelling typically does not lead to a sale on the first interaction. Rather, they help foster the necessary trust needed to facilitate the final step in closing a sale.
Analytics must be set up to measure assisted pipeline. For instance, if a prospective customer reads your brand's origin story today, and returns three weeks from now to request a demo, your story played a role in nurturing the decision-making process. Use first-party data to monitor user paths. Once you can demonstrate that leads who engaged with your core story close 20% faster than others, you will no longer have to defend your budget.
Align Your Story with Your Business
A great corporate narrative is a business tool and not an artistic endeavor. If your narrative does not help your sales representatives close sales, support your product developers in creating helpful, feature-rich products, and convince your target market that you are the best possible option, then it is not worth creating.
Companies that win do not just possess better copywriters; they have much better operational systems. They remove all internal jargon from their language, have a clearly defined evidentiary path for their statements, and ruthlessly adapt their messaging to fit the needs and motivations of their specific target market. Seek not just the highlight reel; seek to identify the central tension, prove that you can alleviate the tension, and monitor every step of the way.