Are you looking to build more meaningful connections with customers to increase sales? One of the easiest ways to show the true value of your business is to create a brand story. This way, you can humanize your business, establish loyalty, and set your store apart from competitors.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at why it’s useful to create a brand story. Then, we’ll discuss five key tips to create a powerful narrative for your business. Let’s get started!
Why to Create a Brand Story
A brand story is essentially a narrative that explains the “how” and “why” behind your brand. Quite often, a business will use the story to convey details about the company’s origin, values, goals, and mission.
Of course, you can communicate these details on your website. However, by weaving this information together into a cohesive and convincing narrative, you’re able to create a more emotional connection with visitors.
This enables you to humanize your brand, which makes it easier to build trust with customers. In turn, it can help you boost sales and conversions:
A brand story is totally unique to your business and products. Therefore, it can help you differentiate yourself from your competitors and give customers a clear reason to shop with you.
Not only that, but if you’re clever about it, you can use your brand story to discuss the benefits of your product. While you might include this information in a list on your product page, it can appear more natural in your story and demonstrate the problems that your items solve.
What’s more, your brand story will form the foundation for your messaging. So, referring back to it is a great way to maintain consistency across all touch points, including your website, social media, and email campaigns.
How to Create a Brand Story for Your Ecommerce Site (5 Tips)
Now that you know the benefits of creating a brand story, let’s take a look at five quick tips to help you craft the right narrative for your business.
1. Be Clear and Concise
The best brand stories make their mission clear instantly. Ideally, within the first few lines of your narrative, a new customer should understand why you do what you do.
For example, clothing brand Lucy & Yak displays this message right at the top of its About page:
Here, the purpose and personality of the business is immediately obvious. Plus, visitors don’t need to spend hours on the website to understand the nature of the brand.
So, when crafting your narrative, it’s a good idea to prioritize the “why” of your company. Additionally, consider using clear, simple language to avoid confusion or ambiguity.
2. Lead with Emotion and Values
When it comes to your brand story it’s also best to lead with emotion and values. Evoking emotion is one of the easiest ways to build trust with customers, which can help you drive sales.
Beyond that, it’s important for creating meaningful connections. As such, you can encourage customers to view your brand as more than just a business.
There are different ways to weave emotion into your business narrative. First off, you might share your core business values, which might align with those of your visitors:
Alternatively, you can illustrate how your brand makes a difference. For instance, bakery House of Cinn shares its “passion for eating good with doing good”:
It uses the brand story to show customers how it provides social and financial support to communities in need.
Meanwhile, one of the easiest ways to get customers on your side is to share the origin story of your business. We discussed sharing the “why” behind your business in the previous section.
However, you can go one step further and share the history of your company, including the highs and lows you faced when getting started:
This is an effective way to humanize your brand and encourage customers to care and invest in your success.
3. Highlight the Benefits of Your Product
It’s important to focus on your mission, goals, and values in order to create an emotional connection with customers. But, it’s also essential to convey the features and benefits of your products.
To do this successfully, you’ll need to have a keen awareness of your customers’ problems. So it’s a good idea to create an audience persona. Then, once you’ve identified the clear pain points that your customers face, you can position your products as the solution.
For example, the Chilly’s brand story manages to communicate that its products are modern, stylish, made from high performance materials, and eco-friendly:
While you can simply tell your customers why they should use your product, it can be more persuasive to show customers what they can expect. For example, Fabletics includes testimonials from real customers on its About page:
You might also embed customer reviews on your site or share success stories and case studies.
4. Harness the Power of Storytelling
Despite its name, a brand story doesn’t necessarily rely on storytelling. However, storytelling is an excellent strategy that enables you to make a more memorable impression.
If you visit a website that simply lists statistics and features, it’s easy to forget this information once you leave the page. On the contrary, storytelling relies on emotion to make it more memorable.
Therefore, even if a customer forgets the content of your message, they can be more likely to remember the way your brand made them feel. The feeling that you conjure up in your brand story is a crucial element that can transcend across all platforms.
For instance, most businesses use a range of mediums to communicate with customers and share business updates. You might utilize videos, podcasts, infographics, blog content, emails, and more.
Additionally, if you run a brick-and-mortar store, you might also design posters, murals, and other visuals. Through the power of storytelling, you can maintain consistency across all these mediums and reinforce your brand narrative.
5. Maintain Authenticity
A large part of your brand story involves your core values and principles, which usually align with those of your customers. Therefore, it’s important to maintain authenticity throughout all stages of the customer journey (and your business’ evolution).
Otherwise, customers can disconnect from your brand and lose faith in your business. In fact, a recent survey found that over 40% of global millennials rated authenticity as a “most wanted” quality in brands.
It’s important to take this into consideration as your brand grows, since it can be tempting to shift your original values to keep up with the latest trends and technologies. While this can be a good way to attract new customers, you don’t want to compromise the reputation that you’ve built your brand upon.
Conclusion
While a great product is important, it’s easier for customers to connect with your business when you share a brand story. Through emotion, storytelling, and authenticity, you can establish trust with customers, and give your products a competitive edge.
Do you have any questions about how to create a brand story for your ecommerce site? Let us know in the comments below!
Image credit: Unsplash.
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