What’s Your Story? Brand Storytelling to Grow Your Customer Base

Humans are hardwired for stories. Stories are intuitive, emotional, and evolutionary. A good story has the power to capture attention, trigger emotion, cement memories, and build relationships. By the numbers, humans are twenty-two times more likely to remember a story than they are a list of facts and figures. But what does that really mean? And what does that have to do with marketing, particularly marketing in the education sector?

In the past few years, content creators and brands have adopted storytelling as a human-centered and compelling marketing strategy that turns passive audiences into engaged customers. In fact, customers who feel an emotional connection to a brand are 71% more likely to recommend that brand to others. However, flexing this creative muscle can feel challenging without guidance or a starting point. Read on for best practices in creating and wielding your brand’s story to strengthen your customer reach and engagement.

What is brand storytelling?

Ultimately, your brand story captures customer attention and builds a bond between you and your audience by leveraging narratives that reflect real customers’ pain points, experiences, and the unique way that your product or service helps to solve their problems. The story is not about you or the company. Instead, it is a human-centered way to share your company’s history, mission, purpose, and values through stories of the ways you have positively impacted your customers.

Getting started with your brand’s story

Commit to these tried and true best practices in telling your brand’s story.

1. Use the 5 W’s (and 1 H) questions. Looking for a starting point? Grab a notebook and pen and start brainstorming using the classic who, what, when, where, why, and how questions. Who was your brand’s last customer? What problem did they have and what happened when you helped solve the problem? Why did they have that problem? When did they choose your solution (what was the catalyst moment)? Why did they choose your company over another? How did you solve their problem?

2. Get the story straight from the horse’s mouth. Not sure how to best answer the questions above? Go straight to your customer and get their take. Personal outreach is time-consuming but can give you the most compelling sound bites. A more time-effective strategy is asking your customers to complete reviews and push for specificity by asking the above questions.

3. Start with the end in mind. This is true in two ways. The first is to ensure you have a clear goal in mind that you hope your story will help you achieve after reaching your target audience. The second is to actually start your story with the ending. This could sound something like:

   “Principal Andrews met with his teachers with a smile on his face and relief in his eyes. If you had told him in September that his team would nearly double math achievement for students that school year, he would have asked you ‘HOW?!’ As he and his teachers celebrated a 43% increase in math state testing scores, he was even more grateful for the confidence their young mathematicians developed over the year using our student-focused intervention program.”

   Now your audience is hooked and wants to hear the rest of your story.

4. Weave your story throughout your marketing. From social posts to customer pitches to blog writing, your story should show up across your marketing channels. Whenever you can root marketing collateral in customer story and experience, you are increasing the likelihood of sales, referrals, and increasing engagement.

5. Keep it short and sweet. Do you enjoy listening to a long-winded story? Likely, not. The same applies in brand storytelling. In 2022, the average human adult attention span is 8.25 seconds (a goldfish’s is 9), so a marketer’s job is to tell a compelling story as concisely as possible. If you had to, could you condense your brand’s story into a tweet-length version? This is not to say there is no place for a longer narrative in your marketing efforts. It is just an important thought exercise in clearly articulating who you are and the value you offer your customers.

6. Try our template. Sometimes a little nudge is all you need to get the creative juices flowing. Check out our downloadable brand storytelling template and watch the pieces fall into place! In it, you will find the opportunity to identify your brand story’s archetype. This topic deserves its own blog post but essentially Carl Jung, historic psychologist, identified twelve personality archetypes. Brand storytellers must identify which archetype best aligns with a customer identity and craft their story around it. Check out these examples for high-profile brands that have zeroed in on their archetypes.

Not sure where to start? Ed2Market is your partner in developing and executing a successful marketing strategy. Our expertise is in marketing education products and services that impact teaching and learning. Let us help you get in front of educators who need your products and services now!