How Your Brand Can Create a Compelling Identity & Narrative
Ensuring your business can connect with people properly is a big part of making a business successful these days. People are looking for relatable companies and ones that seem to understand them, their lifestyles and perspectives. It’s a lot easier to present your business in those ways if you have a compelling brand identity that people can truly relate to and feel connected to.
As well as requiring the right kind of brand identity, you need a compelling narrative around your business that people can buy into. Again, this helps with cementing those customer connections as well as the long-term sustainability of the brand. Find out more about creating a compelling identity and narrative below.
Tell Your Origin Story
The best place to start with all this is by telling your origin story. If your business’s website doesn’t have an ‘About Us’ page on its website, it’s about time you added one. This is where people will learn about your business and how it came to be.
And rather than writing a bland and generic ‘About Us’ page, you should make it real, raw and honest because those are the kinds of principles that people can really connect with. So tell people the story of your business, including the struggles you’ve had and how you overcame them.
Don’t be Afraid to be the Face of Your Brand
As well as telling people about your business, you should make yourself a part of that story too. It’s more and more common for business owners to become the faces of their businesses, and that's no coincidence. It attaches a human face to a previously faceless brand.
People connect with other people, so provide a bit of detail about your staff, as well as the key staff members who are working for your business, on its website. It makes the whole thing feel more real rather than just another corporate entity.
Use Video Content to Convey Your Message
When you’re trying to structure a narrative in order to market or advertise your brand and what it sells, you should use video content. The simple reason for this is that it’s the easiest kind of content for people to connect with in a direct way.
Videographers can help you achieve the video content you want to create, so it doesn’t even matter if you personally don’t know one end of a digital camera from the other. Trust in the experts and create video content that really has an impact.
Be Consistent
Once your branding and all of that good stuff is in place, you need to remember the importance of keeping it consistent. If your branding is not consistent, people will not buy into it because it won’t seem slick and professional like branding should be.
So, if you have one type of font or colour scheme, try to stick with it. Or at least ensure there’s a through line that people can pick up on and recognise. If it’s all over the place, it will just come across as far too messy and inconsistent.
Use a Blog on Your Website
If your business is having trouble conveying its brand identity properly, it could be a good idea to use blog content to develop your tone of voice and get people really engaging with what you’re saying. So, if your website doesn’t have a blog section yet, think about adding one.
As long as you keep the blog populated with good and regular content, it will act as a good entry point for people as well. They might come to read the content and stick around to buy something from you.
Listen to What People Say About Your Brand
It’s always a good idea to really listen to what people are saying about your brand because there’s a wide range of opinions out there. But if you start hearing the same criticisms over and over again, it might be the case that those criticisms are valid.
Stubborn single-mindedness can sometimes be a virtue when you’re running a business, but you should try not to take it too far. When you’re willing to listen to your customers, you’ll only get better at providing them with what they’re looking for.
Set Trends
There’s nothing wrong with being a trendsetter; in fact, that’s what you should what your brand to be. If your part of your brand identity is setting trends and being at the forefront of changes in your industry, that can become a major long-term advantage for your business.
It’s a good characteristic to have as part of your wider brand identity, so don’t dismiss it. It can mean having to take more risks and invest in your business in ways that you haven’t done up to now, but it could be worth it.
Don’t Try to Satisfy Everyone All the Time
Part of running a successful business is about understanding that your business can’t please everyone. Instead, you should focus on your core audience and form your identity around their needs. But even then, you won’t get it right every time.
Instead of being down or frustrated about that fact, you should try to focus on learning from bad experiences and mistakes. That’s what matters most of all.
Link Branding to Performance
Your branding is only worth so much by itself. As we all know, what really matters in business is how you perform and the results you achieve.
If you want to make sure that your business finds long-term success, you need to ensure there’s a link between your carefully planned out branding and the way in which that translates into positive outcomes for the business.
With a compelling narrative and a brand identity that works for the business, you’ll have a much better chance of achieving long-term and lasting success. Of course, refining your narrative and your brand identity is never easy and it’ll take a lot of effort and work to get there, but it’ll be more than worth it in the end.