Connecting prospects to your brand story is an essential step in the journey to turn them into customers. But for some businesses, no matter how many tweets they write, articles they publish or white papers they place on their site, inbound marketing doesn’t seem to lead to results. Often, the reason their inbound strategy isn’t working is because they’re not telling their brand story.
How does your brand story relate to inbound marketing?
Your story is more than just how you came to be in business: it’s a narrative that encapsulates who you are, what you do and why you do it. Your story should identify a piece of the market you saw unfilled and describe how you filled it. Moreover, in order to make your brand story engaging, you also need to think about how your target audience connects with it.
The idea of connection is where your brand story meets inbound marketing. Remember, the inbound marketing process has four stages: attract, convert, close and delight. By beginning this process with a story that hooks prospects, you’ll have a better time completing the steps and turning them into a customer.
How to communicate your brand story through inbound marketing.
If you have an engaging, descriptive brand story, you’re ready to begin using inbound marketing to leverage it to drive your bottom line. Think of inbound marketing as the creation of unique content that brings people to your site and turns them into customers. Your brand story is the backbone of that content: a strong narrative to connect your audience with your brand and gives them just enough information to make them desire more. Here are the steps you need to take to ensure your brand story is coming through clearly in your inbound marketing:
Create diverse and remarkable content:
There’s a lot of content out there on the internet, so yours needs to be powerful enough to cut through the noise and attract new customers. While targeting it to the correct audience is a big part of the equation, it’s also important that you’re leveraging your brand story to develop unique and remarkable content for every platform. Whether you choose distinctive photo campaign to accompany your tweets or an infographic with strong design and statistics to spark your audience into action, use your story to create content that’s uniquely yours.
Integrate your audience into your story:
To engage your target consumers with your brand, make them part of your story. This could be through direct communication on Twitter, using user-generated content or other methods of communication that show your audience they’re a part of your brand to help to engage them. One example of this comes from Rent the Runway, who seeks to make high-fashion styles accessible for all women by offering designer clothing for rent. They took reviews and pictures members had sent to their site and created Our Runway, a campaign to celebrate real beauty and a tool to help members find clothing for their body type. Not only did this integrate their customers into their message, but Our Runway helped Rent the Runway increase the likelihood of renting a piece of clothing by 200 percent.
Marketers, how are you using inbound marketing to tell your story?
Photo credit: Search Engine People Blog
