Sports branding designs for Yoga G

2 Steps To Maximise Your Brand & Marketing ROI

Telling the world who you are and what you believe in is what good branding and storytelling is all about. It’s about taking a few well-chosen words and combining them with images, either still or moving, to really craft brands’ stories that are both memorable and meaningful.

So why is brand storytelling so important? And is it really possible to increase your brand awareness and even your marketing ROI by harnessing it?

I think so, and if you look around at the moment on advertising and in social media you will see how a lot of brands are exploring ways to really get more connection with their audiences.

So let’s looks at how you can use brand storytelling to maximize your brand and marketing ROI.

Step 1 | Your Words

From your narrative to your copy, everything from your brand values, your essence, your mission statement, your vision statement, your history all make up the core elements of your brand’s strategy.

From there, you have your content which includes everything from your marketing communications, your website copy, your social media copy. All of that is very much about words and the narrative and the tone.

When you get clear on who you are and what you stand for, you can begin to communicate with your customers more effectively and look at step two, which is your visuals.

Brand Identity for Yoga G

Step 2 | Your Visuals

This is where you get to bring all of the words to life and tell your brands story and narrative in a more visually appealing way.

So what can you do from a visual telling story perspective?

Everything from your brand identity, your visual identity and the different ways that you might want to express that identity, whether it’s purely through illustration, purely through photography, purely through graphic design, or sometimes it can be a combination of all of those things.

And once you have achieved these two steps you can then combine them to fully market your business, and then start to roll out your brand assets across your marketing, social media, staff uniforms and signage and even store interiors. Use can also use mediums like video and animation to bring your brand’s story to life.

Sports branding designs for Yoga G
Brand Identity for Yoga G

So, when it comes to your business, is it really possible to increase brand awareness and even profits by harnessing the power of your brand story? We think so.

At the same time we understand that as a busy business owner or marketing manager with hundreds of competing priorities, it’s sometimes difficult to even find the time to think about your brand story and how to fully use it across your marketing mix.

Thankfully solving this problem for business owners is what my team and I do all day, every day. So here are 3 ways we can help:

1 | Book a brand discovery session
During this 60min session, we’ll take a look at what’s working and what could be better using the 3 C’s Clarity, Consistency and Credibility. Click this link to book your session.

2 | Download a complimentary copy of The Art of Telling Your Brand Story workbook and
learn the 6 essential deep dive questions
we ask when uncovering a companies brand or messaging strategy.

3 | Got a marketing brief you’re ready to discuss?
Contact Debbie direct to arrange a meeting debbiee (at) firecreativemedia (dot) com


Brand Values

Setting New Standards with Brand Values

Today I want to talk about brand values and why they are a really important part of creating your brand strategy.

Whether you’re a marketing manager or business owner looking to set new standards within your business, these simple brand value strategies will help ensure you attract the right partners, customers and staff into your business.

How brand values form part of the vision
One of the reasons why it's really important because your brand values not only form part of the vision of the business, in terms of where it's going but also the foundation of how the business is going to be built from the ground up.

In fact, your values can have an impact on things like the kind of standards that you set in your business, so things like what kind of level that you want to play at, and also, your values then can have an impact on formulating your client avatar.

When you know your brand values and you're clear on those brand values they will also help you work out what kind of clients, customers that you want to either, not just market to, but obviously attract to the business.

Brand values can impact the colours used in your branding
The other reason why they're really important is actually that your brand values can also have an impact on the colours that you use for your branding. For example, if you go on the internet and you look at colour psychology there are lots of different colours that relate to different types of values and energy.

For example, the word trust is synonymous with things like the colour blue, and then there are other colours that are more creative in energy, like orange.

When you really think about your brand values you can actually use them to choose the right colours for your business and your brand, and it can make a difference in terms of, attracting the right or wrong customers to your business.

Brand values categories
You can break brand values into two categories. First, you've got your core brand values, which, form the core foundation of the business in terms of standards and who you are and what you stand for. And then, for example, you are developing a brand campaign that's for a specific product and service, you would then have a number of extra keywords or values that you think that are important to a specific project.

For example here’s an example we created for an engineering company ... They had built their business to a certain level, but in order to go to the next level up they needed to invest in a brand campaign that would stand out from their competitors, and this meant getting clear about their values and the kind of customers they wanted to attract.

So before we did any kind of creative work
We took time to look at the brand values of the business, and as you can see, there's a real mix of different words. Some of them are about the business, words like strength, prestige. The main thing was that the words were important to the business from a core perspective, but also product specific keywords as well.

Another area that we're seeing an increase in...
are companies looking to make their business more purpose driven, and a lot of businesses at the moment are, reviewing their standards, In fact I was watching a video featuring the CEO of a venture capital company who was doing a talk at the New York Stock Exchange who said he had seen a 700% increase in companies wanting to be more purpose driven. That's pretty interesting.

So, what if you are looking to add some kind of social responsibility to your business? A good resource for this is the UN Global Goals. I believe they were brought out in 2015, and I think there are about 12 goals* which look at different areas in the world that they see as being really important to focus on and improving. I know myself, I've had a look at them, picked out a couple of things that I know that are really integral and important to me, not just personally but also as a business owner.

Another great resource I use is a platform called GeniusU. It's an entrepreneur network, which is free to join. On there you can find a series of individual micro degrees that can help you review and find both the values and purpose of your business.

And of course, I’ve integrated the links into this article of any of the above resources that I've mentioned.

So… When was the last time you reviewed your brand values? Are they aligned to your business and own internal brand standards?

I really hope you enjoyed the tips that I've shared today, and obviously, please either give me the thumbs up or leave a comment below, if you have story or experience about how changing your brand values improved business performance and reputation? I’d love you to share.

Correction: *actually 17 UN Global Goals