How to Integrate Brand Storytelling in Your Social Media Strategy

As a marketer, you already know how important storytelling is to your brand and overall marketing efforts. Through effective storytelling, you can achieve various objectives that you may be trying to accomplish in your marketing strategies, such as brand awareness or lead generation.

Implementing your storytelling efforts through social media platforms is a great way to tell your brand’s story to your target audience. If done correctly, you can increase brand awareness, consumer reach, and build relationships with target consumers.

Now, brand storytelling can be tricky to incorporate into your social media marketing strategy. Consumers are aware now more than ever of the promotional and marketing tactics that brands use to market their products and services to them.

To build a connection with consumers, you need to build a unique storytelling strategy in social media that translates to different platforms and still appears as a unified message. Of course, doing this correctly is a struggle among many content and social media marketers. According to a report from The Manifest, 24% of marketers said that building a community within social media is one of their top challenges.

Thankfully, there’s no real secret behind incorporating storytelling to build a community, reach consumers, and increase engagement on social media. What it takes is ensuring your story connects with your target audience so that they’re attracted to your brand.

Here’s how you can implement brand storytelling into your social media strategy in an effective way.

1. Get to know your audience.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: before you start creating and scheduling posts, get to know your target audience first. Learn about their habits, their pain points, the kind of content they consume, and other details about them.

Learning about your audience allows you to develop your brand storytelling so that you can effectively implement it across all platforms. Remember that your brand isn’t the hero in your storytelling, it’s your customer. Your brand acts as a guide for your target consumer to solve any problem they have.

The best way to identify and know your audience is to develop customer personas based on data you’ve collected from your social media platform, Google Analytics, and other analytics tools.

2. Take advantage of your own content.

Social media marketing is typically considered under the umbrella of content marketing. Content marketing encompasses different forms of marketing including social media, email, and blogging. All of the content marketing resources you produce, including blogs, ebooks, and videos, are great tools to implement your brand storytelling.

For example, if you run a digital marketing business, you can create an ebook based on your knowledge of a topic your target audience often asks about. This demonstrates your brand authority and shows your audience that you want to help “guide” them in their professional efforts. This ebook can then be shared on multiple platforms your target audience is frequently on.

Other contents you could use to tell your brand story are blogs, case studies, and even white papers. Just make sure to take your audience into account when writing these documents.

3. Support a meaningful cause.

Emotions play a big role in effective brand storytelling—all of which can be expressed across social media. This can be achieved through supporting a charity or cause that aligns with the brand. Supporting charity and other causes helps a brand connect with audiences by appearing authentic.

This further allows you to express your brand story so that your audiences are able to see your brand as a guide, not as a seller of products or services. Some common causes include supporting breast cancer awareness, donating to homeless shelters, or helping those in poverty.

Your brand’s storytelling bit needs to be implemented in a clever way so that your target consumers feel a connection with your brand. There are plenty of ways to incorporate your brand storytelling into your social media strategy, whether it’s through blogs, posts, ebooks, emails, and other forms of media. Get involved and make sure your brand story excites your target audience so that they can become loyal consumers!

Check out my blog, What is Inbound Marketing and How Can It Help Your Business? for more tips about inbound marketing.