Most founders I work with skip over one of the most essential and fundamental aspects to their marketing and their effectiveness is suffering from it. Brand strategy goes beyond color palettes, logos, and even tagline. Being able to tell your brand story is a non-negotiable if you want to stand out and be remembered.

How do you want someone to describe your business when you’re not around? A brand story helps people relate your business to possible referrals, collaborators, and connections. But you need to stick in their memory.

We’re going to break down an essential aspect to brand storytelling— your core brand narrative.

Why does storytelling matter? Why should we as founders and leaders care?

Because simply, that’s how you get others to care. And not just care, but remember you marketing message long after the reel is over or the email has been archived.

The average person sees between 4,000 and 10,000 advertising messages a day.

People remember, on average, only 10 percent of the information they consume after 48 hours.

Our brains are hardwired to retain information through stories. Evoking emotion is what triggers someone’s long-term memory. Using brand storytelling gives people a way to share more about your business in a way that’s genuine and relatable.

If you want more visibility, consistent sales, and content that builds connection and trust, you need to learn how to nail the overarching narrative around your business.

Expressing the Core Values and Purpose of Your Brand

There was a reason why you started your business. And even more than that, this shit is rough. Entrepreneurship is often more setbacks and obstacles than there are wins. This is just the truth— It requires resilience and a lot of grit.

But what keeps us going is our core values and purpose. It’s the North Star that we keep looking toward because we know the impact we want to make for our customers, our community, and for ourselves.

It’s why we care.

And if you can’t explain to others (like funders or your customers) why you care, then why should they?

Sharing Your Personal Journey to Build Connection with Customers

Sharing your journey in public has become more of a given in online marketing circles, but as an avid fiction reader, I see this a bit differently than others.

There’s content around your journey, and there’s a brand narrative that shapes your marketing message, your positioning, and overarching strategy around your content. These are not the same.

I have a more flexible storytelling framework adapted from fiction that helps me to write copy, content, and develop content strategy that could honestly be its own video. Let me know if this interests you, but for now I’ll explain this from that brand strategy perspective.

There are key moments in your story that shape who you and the business you’re creating that will stay with people for months or years to come. I like to think of them as turning points. It could be a major illness. Leaving your corporate job. Coming out as LGBTQ+. Leaving an abusive relationship. Losing a beloved family member. These moments put your life into perspective and helped you to understand that core purpose we discussed earlier. It helps people feel like you did in that moment.

The first section helps people feel a part of something bigger than themselves but this section is about bringing it back into micro-moments that illustrate the impact in a way that feels visceral and real. Evoking emotion in your brand story is essential to making a last impression on people.

There are pitches I’ve been the crowd for I can practically recite word for word because of how they made you feel.

People would pay out the noise for that kind of brand awareness, and you can do it completely for free.

As you write through your journey, think through these three points:

• What was the crisis point? This is the darkest moment where you were forced to face things in your life you had been putting off. What brought you to that point? How did it feel?

• From that point, what helped you take that pain and decide to create something constructive from it?

• I call this the catalyst point, because discussing the crisis point makes your catalyst and the action you took afterward more meaningful. This isn’t to say that trauma makes us stronger and that whatever happened should have happened to you. I don’t subscribe to that.

• But I also don’t like to linger too long in the pain. We’re not obligated to turn that pain into purpose but choosing to do that…it’s powerful and has staying power.

• How did this lead you to starting your business? What lessons did you learn along the way? What feedback have you gotten? No one is ever ‘done,’ on the journey but it helps to describe how your transformation and journey has sparked a bigger movement.

Showcasing Your Background & Expertise is the Key to Repeatable Sales

People who don’t have their customer’s interests at heart, big names in online marketing, have used their vulnerability and trauma to manipulate people’s emotions and short circuit their decision making processes. Using tragedy to sell is bad look and I’m not suggesting that. It’s a balancing act but the best way to offset this is to back it up with your background and expertise.

We talked before about why is this problem worth solving, but going deeper: why are you the one to solve it?

This could be your unique mix of strengths, your education or certifications, the brands you’ve worked with, the industries you’ve worked in, the results people have gotten from you, and the unique identities that shape the work you do.

Sometimes, I’ll get pushback on the last point. No one wants to be tokenized and be called “the non-binary copywriter” or “the Black Occupational Therapist Founder.” It’s not about the identity itself or claiming that that’s enough to invest in you. But these lived experiences shape us and how we see the world. It also impacts the businesses we create. Diverse businesses have better returns we create which is proven by data, but deeper than that.

A lot of us left the corporate world because it wasn’t serving us and it’s okay to call this out. As business owners of excluded groups, we’re now building the culture we needed at earlier stages of our journey. For me, I started owning how being nonbinary allows me to see beyond the standard, default options presented to us and how I incorporate that into the strategies I develop for my clients.

I had a client find me cold by Googling “trans social media manager” or “neurodivergent copywriter.” People want to feel seen and understood by the person they’re working with.

No one can do the work exactly like you. It’s time to own that.

Leveraging Brand Story in Your Marketing Strategy

So as you’re pulling together the threads of your brand’s narrative, what’s next? In my signature framework, it’s the first aspect to nailing your profitable positioning, but you can start weaving this into your marketing right away.

Your story can make a great welcome or introduction carousel on social media. You can include some of this in your welcome email sequence to nurture leads, and it can inform your bio on social media or when being introduced for speaking or on podcasts.

LinkedIn is the social media platform where I’m most active and it’s the very place you’d least expect it, but the posts where I speak about my own story and journey recovering from trauma and domestic violence, my identity as a non-binary and neurodivergent person have performed far well than my educational posts alone.

We prefer to invest in people, not businesses. Even if your service is amazing and solves people’s problems, we still need to feel connected to the person. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we choose to go to the big box or Walmart equivalent to your solution? We then default to price and you no one wins when we race to the bottom.

This is a perfect starting point to building out your marketing strategy for 2025, something I plan to dive in deeper with future videos and articles. I’m speaking at Global Entrepreneurship Week on this topic and will create a virtual option on 12/5/24 at noon CST.