HOW TO TELL YOUR BRAND STORY
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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.
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When I left my marketing gig, I started talking about more marketing tips and tricks on construction2style which then led 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 that is on social media, our website, or through the press... we're very intentional about why we're sharing it. Sooner or later, it will lead to a bigger picture.
WHAT IS A BRAND STORY
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WHAT IS A BRAND STORY
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, more and more people are wanting 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 was sponsored by Krylon. 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.
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WHAT IS A BRAND STORY
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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!
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WHAT'S YOUR STORY
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EXPAND ON THE STORY
Let’s now expand on that list! Our end goal is all about making money so take those top categories of how you generate income and dial down on each to create bigger storylines. Also, think about the things that you are spending valuable time on that make 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 5 ways we generate income and dive deeper into each of those: 1.
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EXPAND ON THE STORY
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, 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 are able to make revenue within one simple blog post, all while sharing with our readers how to make a delicious recipe.
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CREATE SEARCHED FOR CONTENT
And 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 home selling" ... nobody is typing that into a search engine so there is no point to create content with only those keywords. Make sense?
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CREATE SEARCHED FOR CONTENT
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ALTER STORY LINES 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.”
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UTILIZE FREE ANALYTICS
– Use your FREE Google Analytics – Use your FREE Social Media Analytic – Search top hashtag post – Pay close attention to “Behavior” in your Google Analytic 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.
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UTILIZE FREE ANALYTICS
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!
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UTILIZE FREE ANALYTICS
Here is a screenshot of our top-performing Google Analytics. I'm constantly watching our top-performing pages and blog posts to dive in deeper as to not only why but making more content just like that. All of which, are making 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!
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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 Platform – Through Publications – Through Pre – Feature – Guest Post – Collaboration All of the things, we will continue to talk about through Monday's ahead! But for now, this week, I just 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.
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LEVERAGE SOCIAL MEDIA