How to tell your Brand Story

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Happy Monday, friends! We’re back to kick off your week with more marketing motivation. 

Do you know what your brand story is?
What are you talking about in your online marketing?
What story are you telling?
What services or products are you selling?
How are you capturing your audience? 

Knowing your full brand story is the first thing you need to know when thinking up an overall digital marketing strategy. And I’m hoping today we can help you dive deeper into finding out what your brand story is and how to create more compelling storylines in your marketing, all of which can help to increase additional revenue. 

What is a Brand Story?

Marketing is all about storytelling, telling your story.

When we started construction2style in 2012, we were focused on telling the story of renovating our first investment property. Then readers started contacting us to remodel their homes, and our brand expanded into a design and build residential remodeling company, which led to another storyline. When I left my marketing gig, I started talking about more marketing tips and tricks on construction2style, leading to in-house workshops and online courses. Yet again, leading to another storyline within our brand. We also talk about our family lifestyle, share recipes, do brand partnerships…all things that lead to making money. Every story we tell on c2s, whether on social media, our website, or through the press, we’re intentional about why we’re sharing it. Sooner or later, it will lead to a bigger picture. 

Whatever you are trying to sell, you want to share the entire journey. Not just the pretty after or what’s for sale. You need to bring them along on the entire process before you ask them to buy. 

Now, more than ever, people want to know the full story behind the brand before they buy. YOU ARE THE BRAND. They want to make sure it all fully aligns with who they are and what they stand for before they trust and buy from you.

For example, here’s a picture of Greyson’s room, which Krylon sponsored. For months we talked about how Greyson was getting older and how we needed to take his room from a baby’s room to a toddler’s room. We also talked about how he loved motocross, drawing, crafting, coloring, our passion for wallpaper, created tutorials, talked about how we got this chair and table from my Grandpa’s shop. We probably shared 50 touchpoints with our audience, taking them on the full journey to bring this final story altogether.

So what is your story? 

What are the different ways you produce revenue? 

What’s your Story?

What are you selling? What are you talking about? What does your brand fully encompass? Create a quick bullet point list of all the top categories that come to mind. 

For example, for us at c2s, ways we produce revenue is through: 

1. Construction
2. Interior Design
3. Creative Development
4. Marketing 
5. Shop, Products for Sale

What are your top 3-5 categories of how you generate income?

Then, we’re going to dive deeper and create storylines from them! 

 

Expand on the Story

Let’s now expand on that list!

Our end goal is to make money, so take those top categories of how you generate income and drill down on each to create bigger storylines.

Also, think about what you are spending valuable time on that makes you no money and stop doing them if they lead you back to that main bullet point list. 

For example, we’ll take our top five ways we generate income and dive deeper into each of those:

1. Construction
   1. Clients
      1. Location
         1. Parks
            1. The best 10 parks in Minnetonka, MN 
            2. …etc… 
         2. Schools
   2. Tutorials
      1. Brand Partnerships
         1. How to hang trim
         2. How to patch a hole in the wall
         3. How to lay tile
         4. Five best meals to make while undergoing a kitchen remodel
      2. Affiliate Links
         1. Every recipe, tutorial, any link on the post ensure has an affiliate link 
      3. Ads
         1. Targeted ads
2. Interior Design
   1. Clients
      1. Location
         1. Things to do…
      2. How did the client find you?
   2. Tutorials
      1. Best interior design software to use
      2. Five best design apps 
   3. Downloadable Templates, Shop Page 
3. Creative Development
   1. Affiliate Links
   2. Ads
   3. Brand Sponsorships
4. Marketing 
   1. Consulting
   2. Courses
   3. Workshops
5. Shop, Products for Sale

I could go on and on, but I hope you see where I’m going from this list above.

From there, keep peeling back the layers and diving back more and more…this is creating your sales funnel that ultimately leads them to the bottom line goal, to make money. This exercise will create your brand storyline to be able to come up with content ideas! 

We share recipes on c2s and created a storyline about how I was raised in the restaurant industry, and share most of my family secrets. We pitch brands and charge them a rate to talk about their product in the blog post, like we did here –> 4 Important Reasons to Cook with your Kids.

We then ensure we have affiliate links within these blog posts, and lastly, we make sure there are ads within the post.

These are three different ways we can make revenue within one simple blog post, all while sharing with our readers how to make a delicious recipe.

Create Searched for Content

Then you take those points and dive even deeper! With Google.

You want to create content people are already searching for, whether that is on social media, websites, in the press, publications, etc.

Google will tell you what people are searching for. Use it for all channels. Think about things you’ve Googled or looked up on social media to find an answer. I bet they were pretty specific, weren’t they? 

This is how I come up with half of my blog posts. Here’s an example via Google and Pinterest. Start typing in your idea, and Google will finish your thought for you. This is what people are searching for! Create content to answer the question.

No point in creating content that nobody is searching for. “Are homes selling” … nobody is typing that into a search engine, so there is no point in creating content with only those keywords. 

Make sense? 

 

 

 

Alter Storylines Based on Search

I’m Googling if I “should paint my kitchen cabinets white,” and it starts to autocomplete…this tells you what people have already searched for. 

Use this to your advantage. Name your blog post or talk about this topic in a social media post. This is how you’ll start to come up in search engines. 

An example – I was going to title a blog post:
“Maximizing your Social Media Presence”

But after searching, Google told me the top
searched keywords that people are already
Googling, so I changed the title to:
“How to Improve Social Media for your Business.”

Utilize Free Analytics

• Use your FREE Google Analytics 
• Use your FREE Social Media Analytics
• Search top hashtag posts
• Pay close attention to “Behavior” in your Google Analytics

Stop becoming obsessed with your likes and follower numbers… get obsessed with all of your analytics that is completely free to you. Then you’ll want to create similar, well-performing content!

Here’s a screenshot of our Instagram analytics. Our two top-performing posts were of Jamie doing construction. Why? Because he was telling a story! Explaining to our readers how and why he was making that post, which we had been talking about for months on end. And how and why he was doing the trim in our main level living room, again a storyline that we had been talking about for months on end. Taking our readers on the full journey! 

Here is a screenshot of our top-performing Google Analytics. I’m constantly watching our top-performing pages and blog posts to dive deeper into why and make more content just like that. All of these make us money through either affiliate links, paid brand sponsorships, or ad placements. And also, these topic ideas help me pitch brands for new opportunities and content ideas. And then I have these data to show them! 

Leverage Social Media

Now that you are a content-creating machine, it’s time to get that information in front of people. And this is through social media. I cannot stress this enough to you. Do not let your content simply live on social media. You should be utilizing social media for your marketing to drive traffic back to your website, the place they buy! 

Easy ways to do that is: 

• Utilizing Social Platforms
• Through Publications 
• Through Press
• Features
• Guest Posts
• Collaborations

All of the things we will continue to talk about through the Mondays ahead! But for now, this week, I want you to focus on what your brand story is. And then, we’ll get cruising on getting that story in front of your potential clients and buyers. 

I hope you all have a great week, and if you have any questions, I’m sure others have the same too, drop a comment below, and I’ll be sure to answer! 

How to Tell Your Brand Story