What Story Can Do for Your Brand

Whether your brand is a B2B or B2C business, your customers have choices. So how do you begin the process of convincing them to choose your brand over your competitors? The answer is simple. You tell your story, and you tell it effectively, generously and consistently to the right audience (customer set) at the right time.

Here in the Silicon Valley I’ve run into many engineering focused companies who think because their product is currently superior to others on the market, and they have spent 10 years and millions of dollars developing it, they don’t need to tell their story to their customer set. After all, their sales force has been interacting with their customer base for years. This thinking takes you out of the competition. No matter how superior your product is, your customers still have choices, and they have to trust your brand in order to trust your now superior product. So, again we go back to the original question, how do you convince them to choose your product? (See the last sentence of the first paragraph.)

Your customers and the new ones you wish to attract will make an emotional connection to your brand through story. All the data, spec sheets, feature sets and power point presentations your sales team can generate will not do this unless it is part of a well-crafted story told in different ways across various media.

Here is what story will do for your brand, product and sales team:

Increase engagement with your target audience, key customers and new targets. You will gain deeper insights into their business, buying cycles, needs and goals.

Build affinity, community and loyalty. Is it not easier to sell to those who already trust your brand and talk about it? Show me a sales person who doesn’t want this environment to sell in and I will buy you lunch.

Create competitive advantage. If your customers have a choice, story gives you an edge on the competition by engaging with them before your salesperson calls. Your target customer will have a positive perception of your brand and most likely questions that can lead to a meaningful sales dialogue.

Differentiate your company from others. Story allows you to position yourself before others do. It allows for unique and defensible positioning that you control. How long do you think you will last if you let your competitors control your story?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, half of B2C and B2B marketers planned to increase spending on content in 2017, with blogs and videos as the most popular format. So we can assume that your competitors are ramping up their brand storytelling engine, shouldn’t you be as well?

To read more about the technology that will enable you to share your brand story, visit https://brandcomgroup.tradepub.com and download Tech That Enables Storytelling from Brightspot.