How building a Story Brand can help take your Content Marketing and business growth to a higher level

We identified Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller as one of our top content marketing books for marketers in a recent blog post.

It’s a strategy that we’ve been exploring in our own marketing and one that is especially rising to prominence in the B2B space where selling on features and specifications doesn’t get you all that far anymore.

Creating a Story Brand is very important in modern marketing for a number of reasons

  • Brand stories add a human element to your marketing by giving your communications a mission – to serve a specific type of customer.
  • They build communications around relatable and genuine experiences not just promotion.
  • They create more of an emotional connection through content that is more engaging.
  • The best brand stories provide “teachable moments” and opportunities to learn.
  • They are designed to be shared.
  • Stories are more memorable and convincing than using facts and reason alone.
  • They tap into human desires, aspirations, fears and other basic impulses.

How to create a brand story

Building a Story Brand means creating a narrative that puts your customers first.

It is one thing saying you are customer centric but quite another doing it consciously.

If you think about your favourite film or book – and then think about some of your favourite brands (the ones you buy on repeat), the chances are they follow most, if not all, these steps.

How building a Story Brand helps marketers achieve organisational goals

The implication for you, as a marketer is clear.

In marketing, the customer (reader) is the hero of the story.

You (or your client) is the guide

You (or the client) are providing the plan to get them from where they are now, to where they need to be.

And you’ll get what you YOU want, once they get what THEY want.

Examples of Story Brands in action

The agency Knap Sack Creative is a Building a Story Brand partner and has a page dedicated to sharing examples of Story Brand in action. Click here for some examples.

In almost all cases, as the book outlines, you need a guiding principle or statement that is the embodiment of your offer that is then used as the gateway to all your marketing positioning and communications.

If you’ve not read it yet, we recommend getting a copy – it also comes with a cool online tool – the Story Brand Script – which helps to create simple one page Story Brands for your business, customers and clients.