A large majority of executive teams see a brand story as a completely new approach to creating a traditional narrative for engaging customers in the corporate marketing efforts of their company. Due to the evolving nature of the digital marketplace, the types of corporate stories available now are very different from those of previous years. Corporate stories today need to be verifiable, easily digestible for use by both human consumers and search engines, as well as being expedient and straightforward.
This guide provides comprehensive direction on how to write a brand story by extracting the narrative of your company, converting the narrative into a technical format, and disseminating the narrative strategically as a means of converting your history into a measurable business asset.
The New Standard for Corporate Stories
Shifting from Inspiration to Proof
Modern day consumers are turning a blind eye to generic company claims. If it is written in the marketing collateral that your company offers a piece of software that saves customers time, then prospects will expect that there will be a source for that statement, as well as a date of when it was noted. Unsubstantiated claims create an automatic loss of trust and project an appearance of being a lack of substance.
In terms of authenticity, it is comprised of both an operational proof point and a cohesive narrative arc. The core narrative you are telling must be aligned to the actual experiences of the company’s prospects or customers in areas such as onboarding, support, and delivery.
A narrative that may be compelling or engaging on the company homepage could result in customer churn if the customer’s actual experience in the delivery of the product proves to be contrary to what was stated on the homepage.
How to Write a Brand Story That People Believe
Step One: Gathering Information and Founder Details
Do not attempt to write a core narrative by staring at a blank page. Instead, develop a structured worksheet that allows you to gather the raw factual content for your core narrative from your internal teams.
Step Two: Gathering Founder Information
Provide a paragraph that gives an overview of the reason the company was founded; this will be based on the evidence gathered above. Provide between two and three specific examples of customer successes that can support your founding reason. These examples may include dollar amounts, percentages, or other specific numerical references.
Step Three: Finding Evidence
Once you have gathered the information above, you will have some operational evidence to use to create your core narrative. Operational evidence includes metrics related to your operational function, such as average response times, years in business, security or compliance certificates, etc. Use this information to provide as much credibility as possible.
Getting Past Roadblocks
If you are in a corporate setting where there may be blocks to extracting information through any of the above means, you may face challenges as you gather material for the core narrative. Examples of blocks may include the founder's story being too boring, or a legal department block from publishing a complete case study.
The best way to navigate these blocks is to shift your messaging to a broader industry level pain point.
Focus your attention on observable market restrictions and the ability of your product or service to solve those problems. Redact any individual client names, but continue to use exact dates, metrics and quotes to maintain a high degree of trustworthiness.
The Four-Part Core Story
The four-part core arc structure for a good corporate story involves the following four parts:
The founding of the company and the central challenge to the buyer at the time of founding.
The tension that exists around the central challenge and the potential negative outcomes of ignoring the central challenge.
The major solutions provided by your product/service/method.
Providing sufficient evidence of your company's success based upon the above.
By following this structure, you ensure that the customer remains in the centre of your core narrative while your company simply acts as the guide that enables success.
Proven Story Shapes for Enterprise Businesses
StoryBrand SB7
The StoryBrand SB7 framework, widely used, helps firms illustrate their customer's journey and clearly shows a company how to be a guide for its customers and how to put customers first.
The ideal situation for the StoryBrand SB7 framework is when the problem the customer faces is easy to identify, easy to solve, and an immediate need. The SB7 framework may not be adequate for extremely complicated, very layered technical products. This framework is best suited to very clear cut service sectors, direct-to-consumer type brands, and simple software type solutions.
The Hero's Journey
The Hero's Journey story arc is a familiar plot structure that tells a longer, yet more emotional story to the customer. In particular, the Hero's Journey framework works well for consultants or individuals that have established a personal brand for public speaking events or engagements.
This approach focuses on the transformation the customer makes personally and professionally via use of your product or service offering. The Hero's Journey helps create an emotional connection with the end consumer and foster loyalty through a lengthy enterprise sales cycle in which trust will be the determining factor of success.
Sparklines vs. Freytag's Pyramid
Sparklines provide an excellent content format for communicating your product's positioning between the status quo broken solution called the market and your ideal vision of the application's capabilities most suited to your customer base. Sparklines provide an ideal framework for the marketing teams for enterprise applications that provide abstract visions and new models of how work is accomplished.
Freytag's Pyramid delivers a higher emotional crescendo quicker, so it is ideal for advertising campaigns - particularly in video or quick social campaigns. Each of these frameworks are best employed based solely on the product's complexity and the primary distribution channel of the product.
The Short Story Model for Sharing
The Master Guide
Every company needs a master narrative guide to foster consistency across all departments in terms of their messaging development and also to prevent "messaging drift" occurring from its branches through poor communication.
The marketing copy will originate from the 'master guide' created by bringing together the information provided by the product team, sales team, and marketing team.
The 'master guide' contains a comprehensive outline of how to write a brand story for your company, detailing the core idea and all of the components that led to it. This includes the origin of the idea, the tension that created it, the solution that resolved it, and the promotional materials that will maximize the effectiveness of the concept.
The 30-Second Pitch
The '30 second pitch' represents a compressed version of the 'master guide' for both the sales team and the homepage of the website. The '30 second pitch' will only contain the most critical components of the core tension and solution because it does not require an in-depth understanding of the problem's history.
This informative format has been very effective for initial phone contacts with potential buyers, first contact emails, and as the primary landing page for the product.
The 10-Second Hook and One-Liner
Once the compressed version is created, there will then be a '10 second hook' and a 'one liner'. The '10 second hook' will emphasize the one most painful aspect of the buyer's problem. The 'one liner' will eventually culminate in the main header on the company's homepage.
It will be imperative that every compressed version of the material remain consistent and logically connected to the original master guide for maximum brand continuity.
Team Alignment and AI Search Optimization
Formatting for AI and Search Engines
To assist search engines in presenting your content in the best possible way, ensure to format your content to answer specific questions clearly with a complete narrative arc. Use "question" headings to ensure that your content is capturing AI Overview citations. To improve your understanding of how to build a strong narrative for your business, follow these guidelines.
Building a Story for Your Business
Ask search engine algorithms directly what you intend to accomplish with your narratives by using keywords in the form of questions. A narrative may have an about page, an organization page, or schema markup that validates the claims made by the business owner.
Tracking Story Impact
Do not measure the success of your narrative based on vanity metrics (e.g., how many "likes" a story has) or basic web traffic. Instead, utilize Google Analytics 4 and Semrush's AI Content Impact Report to monitor the behavior of actual people visiting your site as a result of the narrative.
As an enterprise narrative is built through real stories, track your site visitors' time spent on your narrative pages using these tools. People engaging in a structured story-based web page (with an average time spent of between 15 and 22%) can generate approximately 15% year-over-year increased visit by direct branded search traffic. This increase should tie into how your users are engaging with your site (e.g., positive sentiment) through the use of social listening (i.e., Sprinklr, Sprout Social).
Making Your Business Story a Real Asset
A successful and authentic narrative for your business serves as an essential function of your business and should be viewed as more than simply a method of generating awareness. The narrative delivers a cohesive representation of the value that your business delivers to its customers, regardless of the channel.
In order to maintain and grow this representation, the real-world data and layout of the narrative must align to give customers greater trust in your brand, resulting in accelerated sales growth. If your business has operationalized the extraction and refinement process for how to write a brand story as mentioned earlier, the business will see a high return on investment because of greater customer engagement, shorter sales cycles, and enhanced reputation.
Common Questions on Using Your Company Story
How can we collect information if founders are unwilling to be interviewed?
Instead of utilizing executives, utilize customer success and technical support employees. This will provide you with narratives directly from customer support logs or recorded conversations with customers and the sales team at the time of sale to inform how to write a brand story based on real experiences. Build your corporate narrative from the data you've gathered and continue building until you've compiled a detailed story of how your customer experience is satisfied and supported.
What is the best way to share the story with the sales team?
Don't just send a long master guide to the sales team and expect them to memorize the content. Provide them only with the abbreviated 10-30-second descriptions of your corporate narrative.
How can a tech company measure the financial impact of its story?
Track the average time it takes for new customers to create a new order after they receive their first communication, and track the amount of time it takes for the average new customer to complete an order from your company's website. Implement tools such as MarketMuse to identify the potential for a narrative page to rank for the specific search intent of your target customers, and anticipate that the narrative will effectively convert prospects into customers.