Is your brand a hero or a zero? Businesses are always on the lookout for ways to get people to notice their brand. Some make it, others don’t. One of today’s most effective ways is to turn your brand into a hero. To do that you need to understand how to tell your brand’s story well.
Last week, I talked to you about the four most important keys to telling a great story. All these are lessons we’ve taken from Muse Storytelling. They are namely people, place, purpose, and plot. The next few weeks we want to break these four keys down and really dig deeper into what these four components are. This week we want to dive deeper into people.
Maybe you’re a business owner here saying that you’ve tried storytelling, but it doesn’t work. You make videos but people don’t watch them. Maybe you have a website with a long about page, but hardly anyone ever reads it. You have a social media account with no more than a hundred followers. The first thing you might want to check is whether you’re highlighting people in your storytelling.
People are the personalities that you want to highlight. More than just the product or services, people want to see people. They are the heroes behind your brand. Every story needs a hero. (Cue Bonnie Tyler Soundtrack).
Heroes are always interesting. They catch people’s attention.
- They’re knights in shining armor.
- Rugged tattooed soldiers with battle scars.
- Model-like self-made corporate women in designer shoes.
- Or even underdogs with quirks and weaknesses that come out as strengths in the end.
Sometimes your brand feels far from that. But it doesn’t automatically mean that your brand is boring. Sometimes you’re just not highlighting the right facets of your brand. Here are three aspects that will turn your brand into an unnoticeable zero to an attention-grabbing hero.
Distinction
What makes a character stand out is first and foremost his or her distinctions. You look at any story ever written and you’ll find that your hero is always out of the ordinary. In the same way, your brand has a unique value that you can show as well.
Businesses are so concerned about being the best or being the first. Those are great things, but you don’t have to be the best all the time. You just have to be different. When you show the distinctions of your business through great storytelling in various media forms, your brand will become a hero to a captured audience.
Direction
Behind every hero is a direction that steers them- a mission or goal to achieve. Your brand needs the same thing too. What drives your business to do what you do? Author and Business Expert Simon Sinek shares, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
Your direction is sort of like having your own North Star, an immovable goal that you look to every time you lose your way. People are hungry to know your destination, and you need to tell them where you want to go. A hero’s direction is the first thing that makes him or her noticeable. Does your brand have a “why” and do you communicate it?
Drive
If the direction of your hero is the destination, the drive is the fuel that gets you there. In the same way, audiences are interested in knowing what keeps you going. Why is your mission so important to you personally? What made that connection to your mission happen?
Communicate to people your inner drive. Others might call it passion. Whatever you want to call it, you need to tell the world about it. And when you do, people will take notice.
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