Your cart is currently empty!
Tag: brand story
Brand Alignment: New Year, (Re)New Brand
Brand Alignment: Conducting Brand Reviews to Ensure Brand Health
It is a commonplace for a brand to overlook the importance of alignment. Companies view a brand as something that is completed once and requires little or no maintenance. This tendency to overlook brand alignment is why we developed the New Year (Re)New Brand webinar. The webinar serves as a reminder of the importance of conducting a yearly review of your brand.
Completing a yearly brand review ensures that any adjustments and realignment necessary for your brand occurs. The practice of completing a regular brand review also creates awareness of shifts in the marketplace, your business, or your employees. It also allows your businesses to adjust to small changes before any significant issues arise. When a brand is no longer appropriately aligned, the impact can be dramatic.
The Impact of A Poorly Aligned Brand
What happens when your brand is no longer aligned with your story and values? One of the significant impacts of a brand being out of alignment is the loss of trust from your customers. This loss of confidence is most visible when customers no longer believe the claims that a brand is making. Additionally, customers don’t think the company is making good on its claims. Another significant impact of poor brand alignment is the perception that the brand is out of touch with the current marketplace or possibly even reality. These are generally symptoms of brands that are dramatically misaligned. The practice of conducting a yearly brand review will prevent poor brand alignment from ever occurring.
Yearly Brand Alignment Review
Conducting an annual brand review is an essential part of maintaining a healthy brand. This will ensure that youer brand remains appropriately aligned with your unique brand story and values. At JRH Graphics, we recommend utilizing the 9 Components of Brand Workbook as the starting point for your annual Brand Review. During this review, you should look at the changes you have made in the past year. Additionally, account for shifts in the market and eliminate any invalid differentiators.
A thorough brand review helps you feel confident that you are entering the new year on the right foot. Go into 2020 as a brand and business that is fully aligned and ready to make a difference.
7 Strategies for Successful Storytelling Webinar
Power Up Your Brand Story on Social Media Webinar
We developed the 7 Strategies for Successful Storytelling webinar as a companion lesson to the blog post, Your Story on Social: 7 Ways to Maximize Impact. With storytelling being the foundation of the services we offer at JRH Graphics we wanted to take a deeper dive on this topic and highlight ways businesses can utilize these strategies immediately. We also wanted to highlight how each of these strategies could be utilized in various organizations and businesses so we provided specific exxamples of each in practice and shared some of the results we have seen.
Storytelling on Social Media
We reviewed the following seven strategies on the webinar, including why the strategy is successful and how to actually utilize the strategy.
- Get Visual
- Enroll Users Help
- Verify with Proof
- Create a Story Arc
- Expand on the Blog
- Enroll Influencers to Help Magnify Your Story
- Create Connections
The 3 Big Win Strategies
We focused the webinar of the following 3 Strategies that we consider our Big Win Strategies.
- Create an expanded narrative by utilizing the concept of story arcs. A story arc allows you to tell more of your brand story over the course of multiple posts creating deeper engagement. You brand story touches multiple aspects of your business so it should naturally touch multiple areas of your social media marketing.
- The second strategy is expanding your story on your business blog. Expanding your story on your blog helps highlight your knowledge within your niche and establishes you as a leader. This strategy can result in significant payoffs as blogging has a tremendous return on investment.
- BIG WIN strategy number three is to build relationships with your audience and followers. Social media is meant to be social, and businesses must utilize the tools available to build relationships with followers. Engaging with your followers will build trust. Talking with your followers builds loyalty. Educating your followers establishes you as an expert.
Enjoy The Webinar
Since we build flexible and adaptable solutions into our strategies all of the tips and strategies are moldable to your unique situation. We make sure that each strategy is adaptable to a variety of companies and that it will help you tell your winning story. Please enjoy the webinar. If you have additional questions or want to provide feedback or suggestions please reach out. Webinar also visible on the JRH Graphics channel on YouTube
9 Essential Posts for the Holidays
Please join us for our next webinar. We will look at the 9 Essential Posts Framework utilized by JRH Graphics and review how to use it to get the most from your posts on social media this holiday season. Using the 9 Essential posts framework and pairing it with a content calendar you can plan the best ways to engage with followers. The framework makes it easy to provide varied content that is educational, entertaining and useful for your audience. Join us on this webinar, and “sleigh” your social media this Holiday! Get it, sleigh instead of slay!
Branding Workbook: 9 Brand Components
Creating Your Brand Is Not Easy
Are you in the process of brand building? It is overwhelming, isn’t it? There are so many things that you want to say. So many services that you offer and they are all to solve problems that are loosely related. Or you are offering an alternative to the status quo. It doesn’t matter it feels like it is going to be impossible to get all of this into 10-15 words that speak clearly about your brand! It is not impossible, many have done it and you can as well. We created the “9 Components of Brand: Branding Workbook” to help you get organized and break you “brand” into pieces that you can manage and help you work up to the big picture.
For more information on Brand, click here
What Exactly Is Brand
Remember that a BRAND is not your logo. It is not your identity and your BRAND is not something that can be sold. Brand is moments, memories, sights, sounds, tastes and smells. It is a gut feeling that a person has about your business. A BRAND is emotional because humans are emotional and they make decisions based on feelings. Therefore, your brand is not what you say it is… it is what your audience feels it is. You have to make your audience feel something. What are you going to make them feel?
For more information on Brand Storytelling, click here
Getting the Most Out of the Branding Workbook
In order to get the most out of the Branding Workbook, you should set aside time to work on each of the activities, time that you can focus on just the topic at hand. Be completely honest with your answers. Make sure that you are realistic with your strengths and weaknesses so that you aren’t building your brand on false pretenses. As you proceed through each component in the workbook, take a look back at the previous components and see if they align with one another. If they don’t think about why that is the case and how you may reconcile those differences as you continue to develop your brand and brand story.
Most importantly, be open and honest with yourself about why you decided to do what you do and why it matters to your audience. Your “why” is the foundation for all the other components, if you aren’t honest with this then your brand will forever fail to be authentic. Branding is an iterative process, you won’t complete this workbook and have the perfect brand statement immediately, but you will get there. What you will have is a better understanding of all the components you should take into consideration when working on branding your business.
What Are the 9 Components?
- You
- Your Competition
- Your Differentiators
- The Audience
- Your Business Personality
- Your Story
- How you React In Crisis Situations
- Your Vision (Goals, Plans and How You Communicate them)
- Perceived Authenticity
You Are the Number One Component
The first component of your brand is you. It is your business, after all, so it makes sense that you are the number one component of your brand. Component one is where you are going to look at your passions, your values, the things you want your business to be known for, and most importantly, you examine your “why.” Take your time with this section; honestly think about your answers to the questions.
Don’t stretch the truth; don’t overstate the facts, and think about how your answers will be received by the audience. You are building all the other components of Brand off of this foundation, make sure it is stable. If you nail this component, you are well on your way to creating a viable brand. Your chances of being seen as authentic by an audience are not good if you lie, stretch the truth or “fudge it.” Be honest, real, and emotional in your answers.
The Next Component Involves Examining Your Competition
Presumably, you are entering the marketplace with a product or service that was not available before, or you have an improvement to an already existing item. To know this, you examined the marketplace and what other vendors and businesses had available. What were the voids in the market before your product? How does your product fill those voids? How does your product/service change the lives of users? This is a basic before and after arc in a brand or product story, and the only way to tell it is to examine your competition. Honestly and objectively look at how you compare. They will naturally do some things better than you, and you will do other things better than they do.
Component Number 3 is Defining The Differentiators
You have determined what you do well, you have looked at and compared what others in the market do well, and you know how you, your business, and your products compare, So now, what are some of the critical aspects of your business that makes you different. At the core level, not superficial things but a differentiator that will make someone choose you over your competition.
Differentiators should be marketable things AND something that your customers/clients will value? Remember you can’t be everything to everybody, so if your differentiators narrow your audience down a bit but open the opportunity to have more engaged followers who share your values and believe in your business, then that trade-off is undoubtedly worth it.
Without Component 4 Your Brand Does Not Exist
Your audience holds a great deal of power in this process and it is imperative that you examine the likes, dislikes, habits, and expectations of your ideal clients and make sure that your brand is offering them what they are looking for. Your audience is your potential customer base and they are the reason you are in business. Without your audience, you have no customers. No customers mean no business. Oh, and if you don’t have an audience then you don’t have a brand, remember your brand is based on the emotional response to your business. So take the time here to do some research and develop a few personas that accurately represent your customer.
What Emotion Directly Proceeds the Purchase
You felt overwhelmed, so you bought a planner to help you keep organized. You felt old, so you bought a bright red sports car. You felt betrayed by corporate America, so you get your coffee at the local coffee house. An emotion directly proceeded these decisions to purchase and emotions are powerful motivators. Marketers know this and that’s why they capitalize on them to sell products, yes even the local coffee house does, and it’s not betrayal it is a smart business strategy. So what emotion are your customers feeling right before they come in to make a purchase with you? Pinpoint that, and your business changes. Emotions are universal, sell the emotion everybody will get it.
Your Business Personality
Businesses have personalities just like the people who run them. After all, you would not expect Oprah and Gary Vaynerchuk to run a business the same way. Oprah’s company has a different character, then Gary V’s who curses all the time provides blunt, real advice, and he most certainly will not be wearing a gown to a gala anytime soon. The idea here is if you are representing the company, the personality of the company should match your personality.
If you are the chief behind the scenes guy, then the personality should match your chief front of house officer. Neither is right or wrong, but it may feel incongruous and impact the perceived authenticity if the eccentric scientist at the head of your company was forced to waddle out on stage for company presentations in a tuxedo he only wore for those occasions, and shoes he always fell in. Let the man wear his Birkenstocks and lab coat for goodness sake.
Your Brand In A Crisis
We don’t like to think about things like a crisis, but you are better off preparing for a disaster that will never happen then assuming it will never happen and having to scramble to make difficult decisions in unfriendly conditions. Have plans in place, communicate plans clearly, and if the worst happens, you activate those plans. The essential thing to keep in mind here is how you will respond to the crisis without undermining your values. In a crisis, you must make decisions based on your company values do not abandon them for the business as you are merely prolonging the demise. A business shaken by a crisis can recover, a business that leaves its values to save face is doomed to fail.
Component Number 7: Your Vision
The goals and plans for the company and how those are communicated to employees (if one of your goals is to grow).
A vision statement is a form of internal branding that reflects the values of the company and plan for where the company wants to be in the future. Every member of your business should be able to identify with the vision statement .it should make them all feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves. Think big and stretch the concept of your business with your vision statement. Your own little business may surprise you and show what it is really capable of.
Bringing It All Together With Your Story
Component 8 is where we start to pull it all together. You are looking to engage your followers with an authentic story that answers important questions like the following:
- What do you do?
- Why do you do it?
- What problems do you solve?
- Who is your ideal customer?
- Who else do you serve?
- How are you different from your competitors?
- What does the company believe in?
- Why should the audience care?
Man, that is a mouthful… and I even forgot something, you need to be able to boil your story down to 10-12 words at times! As you begin the process of building out your story you may feel a need to go back to a previous component and revise it because it does not quite ring true to you. That is okay, it is why we call it a workbook. You are working to develop your brand and you should do everything possible to make sure it feels right for you. If it doesn’t feel right for you it won’t feel right for others. Go back tweak it, make it feel good. Be honest, and be real. Include your struggles and don’t forget your journey.
Once you have your brand story you can use it to create your key messages, brand talking points, and other marketing materials, Brand story first so that your brand identity is reflective of the values and story.
What is Number 9?
That last component of a brand is an essential one, and that is authenticity. You have not arrived at your finalized brand, brand story, and visual components to support it until you can say, “yes, I feel good about all of that and I have no problems defending that statement for as long as this company is in existence.”
Ask yourself if you are being real. If you can answer a truthful yes to all these questions you might be ready to go.
- Does your brand story sound like something a human would say?
- I can not identify a single place I embellished the story, used hyperbole, or misrepresented my experiences.
- I made sure the emotions portrayed are real and will connect with others.
- I talk about the struggles and hard times for myself and the company.
- I let my passion show?
- I highlight the unique qualities of the company in a way that will appeal to our audience.
You know your business better than anyone else. You know what is true and what is a lie and so will your audience. Branding is a long term strategy when it is layered together with storytelling, and engaging your followers regularly on social media it helps you build an audience that likes, knows, and trusts you. An audience that will call you first when they need your services, or know somebody who does. Don’t rush it. Sit with it for a couple days, allow it simmer in your brain and if it feels good in a couple days then try it out on somebody. Edit based on the input you recieve, let it sit, repeat.
Download Your Copy of the 9 Components of Brand: Your Branding Workbook Today
This workbook is created as a tool to help you focus on your brand and what items should be taken into consideration when brand building. We believe in the power of stories, We recommend you develop your story first and then focus on the brand.
Brand Storytelling Matters: Tips for A Powerful Story
Brand Storytelling Creates Connections
Stories create connections, which an essential part of doing business today. Businesses can no longer remain faceless entities and be successful. In order to survive a business needs to find a way to connect with its audience, in order to thrive they need to pull on heartstrings and engage at a much deeper level than ever before. If a business isn’t making an emotional connection between its brand and its audience then they risk failure.
This is where your brand story comes in. It gives your business a human touch. Your brand story should weave together facts and feelings. It should include your why. Why you do what you do and why you believe it matters. It should also tell your audience why they should care about what you do.
Selling the Universal Emotion Not the Product
I remember when I first started doing marketing work a mentor saying to me, you aren’t selling a mattress you are selling a good night’s sleep. I was very confused as he dropped this piece of wisdom on my head and walked away because I wasn’t selling mattresses I was selling books. But the more I did social media and marketing the more I understood you are not selling products you are selling the emotional connections and the universal feelings. Nobody knows how your mattress feels, but everyone knows the amazing feeling of waking up feeling revived after a good nights sleep.
Be Heard in the Crowded Marketplace
Great brand storytelling allows you to be heard in a crowded marketplace. Now more than ever there are more people making things, and offering services. The marketplace is overcrowded. Some products and services are even great. So what makes you different? Why do I choose you and not your competition? How do you stand out? Your brand story is how you stand out.
Brand Storytelling is Powerful
When crafting your brand story think about what you want your business to be known for. When everything else is said and done what do you want people to say when they think about your business? What is the single most important message you want to deliver? Once you have that message in mind figure out a way to wrap that message into a story that your audience will connect with and you are now on the road to having a brand story that will connect.
Your story is the most powerful and flexible tool in your toolbelt. It should act as a compass that guides your business in all that you do.
Aspects of a Powerful Brand Story
So what are some things necessary to have a powerful brand story? That’s the thing with storytelling, it is not an exact science and there is not an exact formula. But we all know a good story when we hear a good story. So in my effort to figure out some things needed for a good story, I watched a lot of Ted Talks and searched around the internet for great sites on storytelling like echostories.com. I discovered great nuggets of wisdom, things that many of us already believe to be true. Unfortunately, I did not discover the silver bullet… the surefire way to have a story that connects with your audience. So since I can’t give you that yet here are a few tips.
Get Emotional
Inject emotion into your presentation with stories. The objective of a story is to make your audience feel something. Happy, Sad, distraught, hopeful. It doesn’t matter what emotion the story brings about per se as the emotion creates a connection. Tell the story of how your product saved a life, the story of how your business gave you a purpose, that great story about how you helped a mother connect with an estranged child. Take this commercial for example…
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
Did You Feel Something?
No matter how you feel on the issue, I guarantee that ad for Verizon (btw) made you feel something. It injected emotion into its advertisement and that emotion made for a powerful commercial and made you feel some kind of way. Verizon is saying in this commercial that part of its brand story is the power of communication to bring people together. That love can always call back using Verizon phone service. The beauty of this for Verizon, is they didn’t even have to spell out the connection. By simply having the Verizon logo at the end of that spot creates the connection the emotions you felt there are tied to Verizon, and you want to go connect or reconnect with somebody using a Verizon phone! Yes, it just as easily could have been Sprint or Metro PCS but it wasn’t.
Make A Connection with Your Audience
The other thing that made the Verizon advertisement so powerful is the connection that they made with the audience. The story they are telling is aimed at those celebrating Pride in the month of June. It was created in partnership with PFLAG, a National organization that unities families and allies with people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. They knew their audience. They knew that many people who identify as LGBTQ have struggled with coming out in their lives. This struggle is universal in the community so they were able to connect with the audience by being aware of, and sensitive to this universal truth. As a business, be aware of your audience and your followers. Is your brand story or aspect of a brand story something that they will connect with? If it is not, should it be part of your story?
At First This Then That
Change is a fundamental portion of a story including your brand story. At first, this was the truth, that is why our founder created (brand name) and now this is the truth. Apple is famous for using this in its story and in presentations. This is computing now, but with this brand new Mac we have challenged the status quo and this is what computing will look like! And those of you who are like me and want things to be easier, newer, better, and not the status quo eat it up. This then that creates suspense and excitement, both emotions and emotions create connections. And if you watch a lot of Apple product reveals you notice that they draw out the suspense to the point where your body is physically reacting to it. Ah the beauty of storytelling… when listening to a good story your body reacts like it is there and it releases hormones and endorphins. You are literally feeling the emotions and it does not matter that it is a new computer that has nothing to do with it, the feeling is what matters.
Don’t Forget Your Why
A key aspect of your brand story is your why. Why is it that you do what you do and why should your audience care? You need to wrap these into that emotional story to create the connection between the product/service, the emotions, and your overall brand. The why is not to make a profit, as Simon Sinek says that is just a result. The why is… why do you get out of the bed in the morning? What is it about your business or work that gets you excited? Why is your business special? That is what will connect with people and make your brand story special. I can’t tell you what your why is… you need to dig deep for that. Just remember that your story is the most amazing thing about you and your business so don’t be afraid to say what you believe. Highlight your values. And create a brand story that is awesome and will connect with your audience and beyond.[
Simon Sinek Start With The Why
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I hope these tips help as you begin to work on your story and make brand storytelling a hard skill in your business. If you need help with any of this check out some of our other resources or contact Jonathan at jhoward@jrhgraphics.com.
May we also recommend taking a look at this blog post.