What Makes a Great Brand Story

Your potential customers live in a noisy world, so your company needs to build a concise story that will penetrate all of the clamor and actually reachyour consumer base. This means condensing the major points of your company into two consumable bits: your company story and your founder story. Having both and keeping them distinguishable from one another is really important for ensuring that neither overshadows the other, but together will create leverage for a great brand story.

The 2 components of an effective company story:

1. The myth of your brand. Describe what it is about your brand that is spectacular and illuminate the ideal long-term impact of your brand on the market.
2. The literal description. What your company is tangibly offering should complement your brand’s myth for a complete, overall profile.

As with any material that you’re going to put out for a mass audience, your company and founder stories should be descriptive, yet concise and representative of your brand’s voice.

Use your core story to:

Introduce potential investors to your team and their backgrounds. It’s memorable and trust-building when it’s consistent with the messages you have on your site and across social. Remember to be warm and personable along with these pre-packaged descriptions to avoid sounding generic or pitch-y. Remember, ideally you’re building a long-term relationship with venture capitalists and investment firms.

Become the target of admiration for aspiring entrepreneurs. Founders often focus on clamoring for the top and forget that a lot of their popularity and partnerships can come from others working to build something. Your company and founding stories — especially when given with transparency and humility — can be an avenue to meaningful connection.

Instruct your prospects on how to think of you. Everything you do, say, and write communicates to prospective customers how they should view your product or service and whether it’s worthwhile fitting it into their lives and wallets. Lean on your core story to quickly and effectively communicate your value at all moments on all channels.

Form a unique hook for media, bloggers, and product reviews. A little-known fact about content producers is that it’s often hard for them to prioritize their topics and know where to focus their writing. If you’re seeking content partnerships or publication—particularly if you have a distinct background or remarkable founding story—this can get woven into your company’s core story to help content producers cover what matters.

Attract partners and employees to join your team. Your core story will subtly answer the “why us” and will magnetize people with compatible values or ideals towards what you’re building.

Simple, digestible, impactful, memorable, and repeatable should be the main descriptors of your company’s core story. Once it is, your company story can be used to create all of your marketing materials, including your website, landing pages, social media campaigns, whitepapers, etc.

The 3 components of a great founder story:

1. Your founder story should focus on you and your team as a group of people that come together to bring their most innovative selves forward and create great products as a result. It should show your personality, your voice, and your positioning in the lives of your customers. Be as specific as possible about how you and your team members’ experiences in respective fields of expertise complement one another to form a one-of-a-kind group.
2. Talk about why you felt personally motivated to start the company. Explain why it’s your mission to make sure your product is made available to the market. Readers of your founder story should believe that there is a real need for and benefit to the product.
3. We need to know why you’re special. What obstacle did you overcome to give you a totally unique perspective on what the market needs? Or, what’s your compelling advantage over someone else with a similar idea or product? Your audience should learn all about the edge you have over every other entrepreneur.

These two pieces of your branding are essential for reaching your customers, so nail them down and start getting your prospects to believe in what you’re doing.

Also shared on Medium.