Speaker 1: Are you struggling to make sense of your brand story, or maybe you just don't even know where to start, or quite simply, you have no idea what a brand story even is? Well, I've got you, because in this video, I'll be sharing five storytelling techniques that you can be using in your social media right now, complete with business examples, to help you leverage your social media's brand story and communicate effectively to your customers. All right, let's get into it. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Side Hustlers Handbook. I'm Kate Emily, your go-to girl for marketing and business tips to help you hustle smarter, not harder. Subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to be notified when I post a new episode every Tuesday. Telling stories is a powerful tool in human communication, and research even shows that the brain responds to stories in deeply affecting ways. It's the power of creating a connection and a feeling from the communication that you're presenting to your customers. If figuring out how you can leverage storytelling in your own branded communications, this video will go through five strategies that you can be using on your social media to help leverage brand storytelling. I'll be sharing totally actionable tips that you can be doing right now, as well as sharing some business case examples, so you can really get the ball rolling. Strategy one is showing your human side. So you've probably heard this before, but sharing your human side behind your brand is going to help engage your audience further and get them to become more loyal and engaged with what you're up to. So ways you can do this is by showcasing you as the founder of your brand, as well as showcasing stuff that's happening behind the scenes, works in progress, or your offices or team. So a company that does this really well is Shopo, a fast fashion company that showcases what Jane Lu, who's the founder, is up to on pretty much a daily basis. So they're really great at leveraging what their audience is engaging with, and they really understand what they interact with. So what you can be doing right now is this week showcase something that's happening behind the scenes with your brand, whether it be you as a founder or your team or something that you're creating. Strategy two is sharing your brand's backstory. So this is a great way to show insight into your brand and create that story for your customers to follow about where you've come from and where you are now. And while you may be new, so you may not have a long history, you can still showcase things that you as a founder have been up to. So as a business owner, what did you do 10 years ago that really was that pivotal moment for you starting your own business? So a really great example of this is Land Rover, who made this tweet about their vehicles being used in the army. So not only is this a throwback to their earlier years, but it also showcases how great quality they are as a company because the army even used them. So something you can be doing right now this week is to use the hashtag Throwback Thursday or TBT against one of your posts and talk about something that happened at the start of your journey, whether that was a year ago, 10 years ago, or yesterday. Something that shows progress. Strategy three is experimenting with narratives in your posts. So while images are really important on social media, especially with the likes of Instagram, creating a story that goes with that image is really important. So making sure you spend enough time on creating captions that tell something more than what the image ever could. A great example of this is Samantha Wills. So while this is her personal account, her brand, Samantha Wills, which is her jewelry brand is directly associated to her. So really this is a branded account. She tells stories on her social media about different things that have been happening in her life. I love this story about her mom wanting to knit her a scarf because she saw this photo on her Instagram account and was like, hey, I can do that. But that's so relatable, right? So everybody has had their mom say to them, oh, why'd you buy that? I could have made that for you. But yeah, it's creating that relatability and also a greater story because we could have just looked at this photo and go, hey, she looks pretty, nice photo, but it's actually told a lot more about her story. So something to do right now is start experimenting with longer captions. So try three to five sentences and see how you go. This will not only show you more insight into what the photo is about. So especially if you're posting a photo of say a food product or a workout and you go into actually detail about what that's about, step-by-step guide sort of thing. Or whether you talk about something from the point of view of more of a feeling or an emotion that's associated to that image or something that's triggered you to actually post about this today. This will give so much more insight into you as a brand and will have your followers engage with you a lot more. Strategy four is sharing inspirational messages. So as you would have seen on Instagram many a time, these inspirational quotes are really a great way to engage your audience. But the trick here is to make sure that they're super relevant to who your audience is and the challenges and struggles that they're going through. So a really good example of this is Honest Company. So they're a natural soap and beauty baby care brand. So they create these quirky quotes, which are directed at mums. And it's because they really understand their audience that they've been able to get such awesome engagement. So something that you can be doing right now is to leverage what your customers are saying and work out what their challenges are and create quotes for yourself. Use other brands as inspiration, but come up with something unique to your brand. Strategy number five is leverage your customers' content. So not only is this a great way for you to have more content that you don't actually have to create yourself, but it's social proof. So it's showing prospective customers that other customers love your stuff, but it's also a great way to engage with the people that are already using your products. A really good example of this is Frank Body, who are a body scrub brand, so a coffee body scrub that their customers have absolutely loved and they love posting about. So they use their content on their own social channels to boost their own content production, but also be able to create that social proof of that they're actually a really cool brand to be a part of. And a lot of people love buying their stuff. So a do it now for you is to create a unique hashtag like Frank Body did with the Frank effect and communicate this to your audience. Get them to post about your product or service with this hashtag and start sharing those photos. And once you do, this will create a behavior that then more people will get on board with. But if you're really small and don't have a big following yet, then engage your friends and family to do this for you. And once you start creating that social share mentality, you'll create way more user generated content and be able to leverage your users' stories. So if you're excited to test out these brand storytelling strategies in your social media, comment below with the strategy that you're most excited to test out. If you're still a bit confused about what your brand story is and how to leverage it, check out my video, how to find your brand story, which goes through this really clever activity called the five why's, which will really help you nut it out. If you'd like some more help with building your brand story, download my free worksheet, which goes through the steps to building your brand story. The link is in the comments below. If you liked this video, please give it the thumbs up. It really helps my channel and please share it with any business owners you think are struggling with finding their brand story or communicating effectively on social media. Please comment below with any comments about this video and the strategies I've shared and whether you've tried any of these before or if any other great strategies for sharing a brand story. I'd love to hear from you. So that's it from me for today. I'll be back next Tuesday with another episode of the Side Hustlers Handbook. So make sure you subscribe and click the bell to be notified. I look forward to sharing more insights on branding, marketing, business strategy stuff in the future. So stay tuned and until next time, bye for now.