Concept of a Brand storytelling isn’t new, but with the tremendous growth of content marketing and social media, the story telling part of direct and indirect brand marketing action have become a strategic priority.
Today’s strongest marketing teams have many innovative new roles like brand creative, data architect and content director. Now the focus is more inclined to increasing consumer emotional involvement in the brand. Turning your design brand into a memorable story is one of the most effective ways to stand out from the online ocean of designers. With a strong story, your brand become more personal and therefore, easy to approach. Be real! Your customers want to connect with real humans, not a company.
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While creating a memorable story does take some time and thought, below you have few advices which will give you excellent starting point for your own real story brand that sticks with current and potential clients even after they do some shopping around.
A character, gives you a story. A character relates to audience that makes friends with, or hates like a real enemy. Obviously, as a brand publisher, you want to be the central character, possibly the good guy that readers love. For this, you have to get real and personal; showing struggles and downfall of your team and you give shine to your personality and creating a character that either remains same in conflicts or changes due to conflicts. Both of the characters are admired depending on the situation.
Creating a plot helps readers walk along the story in a much easier way. Also, predicting the beginning, middle, and end connects readers to closure and structure. As a brand story, your beginning will give explanation of who you are and what your work is. The middle part of story will include conflicts, downfall, details etc. And the ending part brings all together by explaining how you overcame your failures. Ending also explains how readers can join you in your story. Your story must have a perfect theme.
To capture your audience’s attention right away, you could be simply introducing the main mission of your brand. Start with some foreshadowing of the struggles you have confronted. The best way to do so is to give a teaser of something alluring and then goes into beginning of your story.
Conflict in your stories is the basis for creating an emotional connection with an audience and it also carries a tedious description of a company. For graphic designers, the easiest way to come up with a conflict is to know the problem your brand encountered and solve for customers. It would be a problem you couldn’t find the past clients problems and figure out how solve this problem. It would be difficult for the general graphic designer.
Readers are unsatisfied without the ending part of the story; same goes with the brand story, except that the ending has to be your call to action. Impressing your audience with a memorable story, what next you want from them? Contact you? Telling your brand story in an exquisite style and ending it with a question like “Ready to place an order” or providing company’s contact info is makes your graphic design more interesting.
Setting a tone for your graphic design, it could be serious, professional, funny or quirky– but keep track on consistence throughout. Your voice has to be real and genuine otherwise you would be difficult to keep it up across your marketing media. Why tone of your graphic need to be authentic? It is so, you come across as relatable.
For a brand story, including just a copy is not enough; add graphics, videos and photos to display what kind of company you are. Including photographs of the company in different stages of its story, creating a video to display your story in short, include photographs of your work which mention different aspects of your skills. Tell your story in comic book like style full of graphics and hilarious comments.
Add few interactive elements; it keeps your clients engaged; don’t overdo your brand story keep it balanced otherwise it will distract your audience. Pop out extra titbits make illustrations dance keeps an audience engaged. You can also use parallax scrolling make your story feel more like an interactive movie.
Using headings and subheadings with many graphics and little body content allows readers to skim through at their own pace. Nevertheless, including too much information makes skimming almost impossible. Very little information doesn’t give readers a memorable experience. So before launching your story testing is suggested.
Every designer or developer is different, so their story line will differ too. Some of their creations may look like a timeline, while others may look like a comic book, or even others may look like a scrapbook album. However, it is a suggestion to you to stick with clear, efficient story line to make your brand much more memorable. The real and crafty graphic story allows people to relate to your unique brand story; that brings a strong foundation of loyal customers for years long.
