Branding - Small Business Know How

"Everyone loves a good story" was the remark from my friend who runs a corporate training company that does coaching for leadership in corporates. He has found success in using story telling to get people to change their behaviours. "Everyone likes to think of themselves as the protagonist in a good story" was the insight that he shared with me. "Everyone wants to associate themselves with the Hero or the 'goodness' in a story". He went further into human psychology to share that almost always, people think of themselves and try to associate themselves with the best that is around them If someone drives up to a public place in a supercar, people don't really think much about who is driving the supercar, but they tend to visualise themselves in the supercar or somehow be positively associated with it. The Late Charlie Munger has also remarked "Its not greed that drives the world, its envy". This passive 'envy' is what gets people hooked to stories and the protagonist in them. The objective of this short sermon was to shake you business owners to understand that you need to be good story tellers. You need to let the customer play the role of the hero in your story. Once you do that, you are putting your brand in a powerful influential position with your customer and build solid brand loyalty. The unfortunate issue is that many small business owners struggle with a structured approach to story telling that ties into a unique selling proposition for their business. Small business owners need to acknowledge that story telling also is a form of content marketing. Lets explore how everyone can learn this process. What are the essential elements of brand storytelling that small business owners must adopt in their marketing strategy? Story telling is an art that all small business owners must learn. Small business owners don't think about branding and marketing as a story that customers need to immerse themselves in. A good story is necessary for small businesses to reach more potential customers. A good story helps connecting to audiences on an emotional level. Lets look at the playbook a small business owner can adopt to build a story for their situation. There are 5 elements that form a great story. The raw emotion to be tapped The context Tension Tension and Struggle to overcome Triumph and on to the next challenge Lets go deeper into each of these elements Identify the raw emotion that resonates strongly with your target customer Brand storytelling is essentially tugging at the raw emotion of potential customers. Small businesses should understand that as much as we think we are rational beings, humans always make decisions based on emotions and feelings. In his book 'Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion', Cialdini looks at studies where test subjects took decisions based on the context and the emotional rollercoaster they have been through. Those decisions were exactly opposite to what they should have taken given the data and proof provided during the same setting. Mixing emotion, imagination and the dream of 'utopia' creates a powerful concoction of emotions that people will find it hard to step away from. Small business owners must tap into the emotional feeling they want to evoke from customers. Set the context to ease the customer into the role of the protagonist You have now start laying the background of the story. Vividly describe situations that the customer is likely to find himself in related to the problem that they face in their day to day life. Once you have the emotion that strongly connects your brand to the customer, weave the situation around that emotion. As an example, lets consider a small business owner who runs a home remodelling company. Lets assume that the biggest problem he faces is hiring and retaining good skilled employees who do a good job. The strong emotions that tie into the problem can be frustration, anger, a sense of being let down in-front of his clients. Now if you look at a staffing agency that is looking to serve this business owner, the story that will get the business owner would probably be around stories where they as an agency faced such situations with respect to hiring good talent for their operations. The story could go deeper into how that led to a few screw ups with clients leading to embarrassment. The story can go into further detail about that led to loss in business revenue. No this is the situation where the story has put the potential customer right in the middle of the story, with the problems being portrayed the exact manner in which the customer's life is getting impacted. The key point here is to identify the antagonist (the problem) and put the listener in the protagonist's shoes (the listener should relate strongly). The stage has to be set to present the confrontation of the problem and the customer. Build tension in the brand story to make the emotional connection strong The next element of a great story is to build tension. Tension is basically what made the movie 'Dark Knight' such a great story. This quote perfectly describes what tension is. "When an unstoppable force meets an immovable object" When you can build the scenario to depict the struggle and conflict against hardships and have an imagery of the phoenix rising from ashes, this creates a feeling and fuels the emotions that your customers actually go through. You must make your customers live the emotion and give them hope that the problems they are facing can be solved. While this makes it sound very dramatic, as an independent business owner, you need to create the same feeling even if the problem you are solving is 'boring' from a narrative perspective. For your customer, it matters and creates value if you solve that problem. Marry the tension and desire of the protagonist to overcome struggle This is the crucial element that helps you seal the deal with your customer. You need to demonstrate how you as a small business owner can help the customer deal with his struggle and come out triumphant. This is the proverbial "battle" after the tension that you have built up. In this part of the story, you will have to generate a strong desire in the customer's mind to solve the problem that he is facing. Most people are so conditioned to live with a problem that they dont actively seek a solution. Desire is what initiates this action from the target customer, this 'affirmative action' is what you want the customer to take. Conclude with the triumph and how the protagonist is stronger than before to face new challenges In this conclusion phase, you have to make the customer feel a sense of triumph. This triumph has to be associated with how you made the customer feel like the one who 'won'. Remember, its not your product which won, but your product helped the customer win. From a brand management perspective, small business owners should always look at positioning themselves as the all-weather ally that helps customers win. You are not the hero, but you help the hero, is the feeling that you want to evoke in your customer's minds. An often left out element in a good story is that, its not 'happily ever after', but the customer has a whole new set of challenges to solve and overcome. Your product makes the customer stronger and will help them prepare and overcome all new challenges that come their way. Why brand storytelling is important to build a narrative about your company? Now that you have learnt the key elements of what makes a good story, you need to know why its important to incorporate brand storytelling as a part of your marketing strategy. Brand Story Telling is a crucial element of content marketing Small Business owners need to make story telling a part of their content marketing strategy. You can look at my article on the importance of content marketing as a small business owner for all the details. But to summarise the key factors here, content is important for Building trust Having a low cost lead generation engine To build long term customer engagement To build thought leadership for your brand To build brand trust and loyalty Now with so many critical benefits that can be attributed to content, its important that you weave in story telling aspects to highlight all critical benefits of your product. As I said earlier, story telling is a great way to get your customers to immerse themselves in your body of work. Brand Storytelling build a great hook for email marketing campaigns Storytelling marketing over emails works wonders. Sharing emails with a good short story in it hilighting benefits that customers experienced is often a great way to build a subconscious association with your brand. Coca-Cola used this strategy, where they associated themselves with all stories that celebrated happiness. As recipients read your emails that narrate successive stories that evoke an emotion, over a period of time, customers often associate your brand subconsciously with that emotion. Your brand becomes the emotion. Once you have achieved that, you have built a successful brand since its almost impossible to replace a brand from your mind once its associated with an emotion. I repeat again, that using this story telling approach in a narrative is important and you need to do it consistently. How can businesses effectively use their brand story in marketing to demonstrate that storytelling motivates customers? By now you would have read enough to understand why brand storytelling is important in all parts of your marketing strategy. The following points will give you practical ways in which you can make sure that your brand story is reflected in your marketing efforts to motivate customers. Think about the narrative you want to build about your business Be consistent with the narrative, you don't want to have more than one or two emotions to be triggered Use multiple touch-points to build your narrative Keep up a consistent frequency Build enough social proofs using testimonials and customer feedback If you have resources, indulge in a bit of PR In order to make use of these channels to make your story telling effective, you need to build a repository of a collection of impactful stories to be used across channels. Brand storytelling should build an emotional connection with your customers through a captivating brand story The objective of brand storytelling is to build an emotional connection with your target audience with a captivating brand story. The essence of your brand must get into your customer's head and evoke the right emotion in your customer's head.