Learn to Write Your Brand Story and Much More!

1. Introduction: Welcome to crafting your brand narrative. My name is Mari. I'm a brand narrator and storyteller committed to helping you develop a brand that is distinctive in a crowded marketplace. My expertise is crafting the narrative aspects of your brand strategy, which includes your business charter, brand story, and positioning statement. You don't need to be a wordsmith to create an inspiring brand narrative. I've discovered several hacks that will get your brand on the right track to creating a more meaningful and engaging customer experience. What you will learn in this course, we'll explore content marketing and how to implement it into your business strategy. I will show you how to compose customer centric brand messaging that you can display across your website, social platforms, and marketing materials. This course covers six lecture videos. You will learn basic concepts relevant to brand marketing and messaging, including the fundamental aspects of branding, brand voice, target audience, brand positioning, developing the business charter, and crafting a brand story. Understanding the fundamental aspects of branding is vital to business growth in ensuring the company's vision is aligned with its employees and target market. Establishing a strong brand voice is necessary to communicate your company's messaging in a way that connects two audiences. First, you must identify your target market, which is key to developing your brand strategy and effective marketing communications. Your business charter is the pillar of your business and communications. Your mission and vision statements draw out the essentials of your strategic plan. A good business charter drives your business and sets the tone for a clearly defined team purpose to achieve project goals. Declaring your brand's position in your industry is key and setting you apart from the competition. A brand positioning statement explains what your brand does, what who benefits and who you target. You will learn to define the company that you aspire to be, what they're well-crafted positioning statement. Finally, you will learn to write a compelling brand story that introduces consumers to your business and communicates how your brand will improve their life. Before we get started, I'll share a bit of my story. A few years ago, I was a driver for a very small startup of five employees, right? As we were getting operations off the ground, the pandemic hit. To save resources, each of us was given the opportunity to manage a department. I took over the social media thinking to myself, This can't be hard. I was so wrong. My content was good, but it wasn't getting any engagement. Our competitors platforms, we're doing much better than ours, was attracting people to their brand. I sought the advice of a few marketing experts to find out where I was going wrong. All of them agreed that my content wasn't the issue. Our website, social posts, logo, and messaging, we're all disjointed. We didn't have the money to hire a marketing firm to overhaul our entire brand, which led me the daunting task of figuring things out. That's why I created to help small business owners built the legacy of their company. 2. Understanding Branding : Hi everyone, I'm Mari. Welcome to crafting your brand narrative. If you are in the position that I was in having to develop your brand as you are learning, relax. I've packaged the most essential elements that you need to know in this course. Let's get started. What is branding? Simply put, branding is how customers perceive you. Their perception is formed by the brand experience, which can happen before they ever decided to make a transaction. When I'm scouting brands to make a purchase, I visit their social media and website looking for that warm and fuzzy feeling when making an emotional connection is disappointing to get that from one platform and not the others. I've experienced brands with great websites, but there are other platforms have low-quality photos or pages have one dark. As a customer, I'm going to wonder what happened. Brandon goes far beyond posting on social media and a cool logo. It's the entire customer experience. Focusing on the buyer experience is critical to building a great brand. Consistency is king checkout, Nike's website. They've customized experiences for women, men, children, and sports genre. If we go over to their IG accounts, they've mirrored these experiences. Each profile is directed at a specific market, basketball, women, skateboarding, runners, and the list goes on. Look at their main IG profile. They've masterfully created human experiences by showing their products on relatable people in places and scenarios where customers can see themselves. If a potential customer wanted to know where they can wear these shoes. Nike makes it clear their products can be worn by any athlete anywhere, anytime at school, on the court, the field, while dancing or skateboarding. Nike's target audience are young athletes, professional and amateur. Of course, non-athletes wear their shoes and apparel. Nike does a great job of not excluding them, but also not directing their product messaging towards them. Their tagline just do it transcends sport. So really, this brand speaks to anyone aspiring to do anything. What is brand experience? Brand experience influences how customers feel about a brand through a simple but meaningful encounter. Many aspects of a customer's experience contribute to how they view a brand. Here are some examples of brand experience. When you see logos, branding, store layout, and signage, these are all designed to convey specific desired emotions like trusts, excitement, or dependability. Creating catchy jingles or slogans may see meant a brand and a customer's mind. Having a strong online presence that brings the brand to mind when the company resolves a pain point for the customer. Companies create this presence or through their website, social media, blogs, and apps. Finally, excellent customer service makes a user more likely to return. Let's go over the top five reasons. Branding is important. Brand awareness refers to how familiar your brand is to your customers and whether it's recognizable. It's your company's visual identity that encompasses your logo, brand colors, company name, and tagline. I'm going to show you a series of logos and taglines. Let's see if you can identify them. The more consumers recognize your brand, the greater trust and loyalty it builds. There is a reason you choose Apple or Samsung. Often customers gives superiority to one brand versus another, not because they've tested every product on the market. The visual identity of their choice brand is more appealing than the competitors. Branding sets your product or service apart from the competition, there are many similar products on the market, but few stand out amongst the crowd. Take forward and Honda, for example, you have two reputable brands, but one is known for producing great trucks. The other offers trucks. Setting your business apart is about finding your niche and perfecting it, not for you, for the customer. This separates great brands from good ones. A great brand identifies a problem or customer pain point and works to resolve it. Next, branding helps consumers to connect to your product, service, and overall mission. Consumers feel most emotionally connected with brands that come across as caring about people like themselves. Buying a car can be a long, tedious, overwhelming experience. As you step onto the lot and overbearing salesman shadows your every move. And when you sit down to buy your lift to Hegel a good price. Carmax identified this as a customer pain point and capitalize from it. They market no haggling, creating a more comfortable buying experience. Branding helps deliver a great customer experience. As a company, you need a brand promise, a tangible benefit that makes your product or service desirable. The customer's experience is your delivery on a promise. This is why, no matter what country you visit, McDonald's, their staple menu tastes the same. It's why every in and out has customer lines down the block because they deliver quality. You can taste a brand promise is nothing if it's not follow through with action. The success of your brand relies heavily on listening to understanding the customer, empowering employees to achieve excellence, and making sure brand standards are met on the front line. Educating your employees about your brand message is the key to ensuring that your company keeps its promises to your customers. When you give employees a deeper understanding of what you promise your customers and how their performance fulfills that commitment, your employees will consistently provide the great brand experience your customers expect. 3. Finding Your Voice : Brand voice is how your content sounds and consumers hits your voice, is a reflection of your brand's overall personality. It grows out of your core values and who you are as a company. This is why using a consistent voice throughout your messaging makes your brand more memorable to customers. In this next lesson, I will introduce several free platforms that you can use to help discover and amplify your brand's voice. Hey, there's no shame and saving money, especially with these high gas prices. Yes, you will have to work around watermarks. So one or two here and there won't hurt. Utilizing free resources will help enhance your content. As you build a customer base and get your business off the ground. The only platform you need to purchase, in my opinion, is Canva pro. You can do all of your design, scheduling and videos on this platform. But I digress. If you're having trouble figuring out who you are as a brand, take this free online brand personality quiz. Skip down to the results. The quiz will generate a color palette and a list of words that help identify and represent your brand. You can build upon these results. Brand voice and tone. Brand voice represents the unique personality that a brand projects through it's written content and different communication channels. It is the message that you consistently preached across your platforms. To discover your brand's voice, take an audit of your existing content, look at several of your best and worst posts. By best, I mean, most engaging. Choose posts that received the most likes and comments. Analyze the nature, sound, look and feel of these posts to find out what sparked a positive or negative response from your audience. You want to continue doing what's working, but need to understand why it's working. Now, let's look at brand tone of voice. Brand tone of voice refers to how you deliver the message. Your brand's tone of voice should be unique to your business. The goal is for your voice to cut through the noise of a crowded marketplace. According to Nielsen Norman Group, a website's tone of voice communicates how an organization feels about its message. The tone of any piece of content can be analyzed along four dimensions. Humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm. We will use the examples they provide it to see how these four dimensions of tone can be varied to create different effects, Let's consider a small piece of copy that almost every content team must consider at some point, an error message. At the core of every piece of writing is the message, the information we're trying to communicate to the user. In this case, the message is an error has occurred. There tone will be how they communicate that message. There is a site that I would like to share, portents.com for teens. Tone of voice generator can give you beginner insight about the tone of your brand. I'll walk you through how it works. The tool asks a series of questions about your brand's personality using Nielsen's four dimensions. The results were render a tone of voice closest to your brand. I randomly selected answers for the walk through. My brand personality result was lighthearted. It's important that you think about your brand when taking online quizzes versus your own personality. It's easy to intertwine the two. Once you identify your brand tone of voice, I have another free resource that will help you improve your writing and deliver a clear message. Grammarly offers a free keyboard app for your mobile device that you can download through the App Store or Google Play. The app has built-in AI and tone detection that allows users to communicate their message more effectively. I recommend you also download the free online Writing Assistant to your computer to improve your contents, grammar, spelling, style, and tone. Now we're watching a short video by Grammarly, and they'll show you how it works. Okay? 4. Identifying Your Target Audience : Identifying your target audience is one of the single most important task in your brand strategy. Your target audience is made up of various buyer personalities that you want your brand to appeal to. You don't have to convince these consumers to buy your product or service. They are naturally attracted to it. However, you do want to keep them coming back for more. Besides having a great product or service. The buyer journey is a very human experience. Empathy towards the customer is vital in making a human connection. Empathy allows you to better understand customer pain points, what they value, how they want to connect, what sparks a connection to your brand. Knowing who is engaging with your brand is the first step in identifying your target audience. Target audience is the group of potential customers your business is trying to reach with its marketing efforts. Using what you know about your target audience will help you pinpoint your ideal customer. To great ways to find out who is engaging with your brand is to check your social media analytics and competitors profiles. Each social platform has an analytics page where you can see the demographics, geographical, psychographic, and behavioral data of your audience. The analytics will reveal if you are reaching your target audience, you could be reaching people with your content, but not necessarily potential customers. Finally, checking out what your competitors are doing will help you understand your own customer profile. Do some detective work, visit competitors, blogs, social media pages, and asked to see if you can understand their target market strategy. As you investigate, find out if they have a specific target audience or multiple audiences. Look to see how they are promoting their products and which ones they feature. Go through their timeline and see how often they post, sign up for their blog and newsletter. Become a fancier competition to understand why their content is appealing to customers. Assess what you can possibly do differently or better. After you review your analytics and assess your competitors, use rival IQs free social media analytics tool to check your performance against other brands on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you have business profiles, all you do is type your URL and your competitors to generate your report. Rival IQ will send your free snapshot to your email. Let's view the Twitter results. As you can see, monster has more followers, but Red Bulls overall engagement rate is higher even with less tweets. If we scroll down, we can see the activity of the two brands. You can track your competitors, posting schedule, top performing tweets to see what's working and what areas you can improve. Data and analytics are important to your target audience research, but only scratched the surface in identifying your customers. You'll have to dig a little deeper to understand the buyer persona's in your target audience. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer. Buyer personas help you understand your customers better, making it easier to design content, messaging products and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of your target audience. There are three types of personas, marketing, protocol and design. Marketing persona's are created using marketing segmentation data such as demographic, geographical, and psychographic information derived from surveys and analytics, helping you to better understand customer characteristics by motivations and lifestyle choices. Marketing persona's are good for determining what types of customers will be receptive to certain products or messages. Protocol persona's are your ideal customers. These persona's are typically created prior to conducting any true research. Small business owners tend to rely heavily on this persona when there are limited resources such as time and money to create true research based persona's. They are based on secondary research and the teams educated guess of who they should be creating for protocol persona's lay the foundation to building research-based buyer persona's finally designed persona's focus on user goals, current behavior and pain points, as opposed to their buying or media preferences and behaviors and real people. If you are just starting your business, you should start identifying your target audience using protocol persona's. However, if you are turning a profit and having established online presence, you can level up to design or marketing persona's. A buyer persona is one of the most important aspects you need to understand before embarking on your content marketing journey. It's one of the key pillars that will play a big role in whether your business is going to be successful or not when creating content specifically for your target audience, consider these four questions. Who should receive your content? What are the points you want to communicate? What actions do you want to motivate? Where will you distribute your content so that it will reach your intended audience? I created a whiteboard animation video of a mock business to put you in the shoes of the customer. What in the message speaks to you as a customer? See if you can identify their company's target audience. Take notice that the ad was targeting single moms, but not openly excluding single dads are two-parent families. The goal in creating a persona is to describe your ideal customer, a person who you are in business to help one who is searching for an answer to their problem or have found the answer and seeing if your business is a good match, this is the customer that you want to direct your marketing towards. Let's take a closer look at Janet to see if she fits into ECI target audience. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer. Buyer persona's help you understand your customers better, making it easier to design content, messaging products and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of your target audience. Eci is marketing. Ad is directed towards single working mothers who are finding it difficult to work because they lacked childcare. We've also been introduced to Janet, who seems to fall within ECI is target audience. Now, we can begin to build out a buyer persona to see if ECI services can alleviate Janet's problem. When developing a buyer personality, you are looking to identify several aspects about your target audience member. For this section, you can grab your notebook and brainstorm when you know about your buyer from your social analytics pages and current customers, you don't need a fancy platform to begin building out your persona's. However, if you're looking to create a professional profile, HubSpot Canva and edit.org offers free buyer personality templates, but we'll get to that later. What do you already know about the buyer? Write down as much as you can. You're going to use the information you have and break it down even further. The first thing you want to identify as demographic information, such as age, location, occupation, and income. It's important to know who needs your business, where they live, and the value they place on your products and services. You are going to direct your marketing to this group using the correct social platform. If your target audience or 18 to 25-year-olds, marketing on Facebook is not going to lure customers. What problems is your buyer experiencing that you can solve? One of Janet's main problems is that she doesn't have a car, which is creating time management issues. In addition, her daughter's daycare closes at five PM. Living in LA is expensive and she can't afford additional babysitters. Your buyer's problems are creating other challenges. Janice daughters daycare closes at five PM, preventing her from working overtime and meeting financial goals. She's already paying for daycare on a tight budget. Pay for additional childcare is not an option. The buyers mood, and personality are important in the tone of your messaging. If your target audience members are mostly workaholic introverts with stressful lives, your messaging should have an empathetic, supportive, thoughtful tone, not a fun and playful tone. Your messaging should reflect the nature of your buyer. Finally, you need to know the goals and needs of your buyer. They will be looking to you to help meet their goals and needs. According to ECS messaging, they open early and close late while offering low cost tuition options. This will help Janet free up time in her schedule to work overtime uninterrupted without spending extra money on after hours childcare. In the next two slides, I want to focus on buying roles and buyer's journey. Buying roles refer to the activities that one or more persons might perform in a buying decision. Here are the five buying roles. Initiator, the person who first suggested or thinks of the idea of buying the service or product. Influencer. A person who influences other members of the buying center in making the final decision. Decider, the person who ultimately determines any part or the entire buying decision, whether to buy, what to buy, how to buy, or where to buy. Buyer, the person who makes the actual purchase, user, the person who consumes or uses the product or service. Based off these descriptions, Janet falls into the category of initiator, decider, buyer, and user. Lastly, we'll briefly discuss sources of information where you decide to publish your content marketing. What platforms are media channels? Determine if you reach your target audience. Going off research, Instagram users are women, 18 to 34. Janet is active on social media. Marketing on this platform would yield a good outcome for ECI business. What is the buyer's journey? The buyer journey happens in three stages, awareness, consideration, and decision. In the awareness stage, the buyer becomes aware that they have a problem. And the consideration stage, the buyer defines their problem and considers options to solve it. Finally, in the decision stage, the buyer evaluates and decides on the right provider to administer the solution. Your objective as a business owner is to empathize with the consumer and work to solve their problem like ECI did in the video, Debbie made a human connection when she shared that she also was a single working mom on a budget, putting herself in the place of the customer, builds trust and respect amongst her audience. Circling back to creating professional buyer persona profiles, there are three platforms that you can use to develop your buyer persona's, Canva pro HubSpot and edit.org. Each platform offers a free basic version of their design tool. Hub spots make my persona is an awesome free design tool available to small business owners. It's interactive design tool helps users build persona's directly on its platform. They will provide additional depth of understanding about buyer persona's and guide you through the process of building one on their site. They're designed tool is probably the most fanout and functional of the three platforms. Kava Pro is my design platform of choice. I can pretty much do anything on this platform. They have a free basic version or you can purchase Canva Pro like I did. Non-profits can sign up to receive Canva pro for free. You can schedule pulse, create videos with music posters, T-shirts, and so much more. Camera has got you covered when it comes to all things design. Edit.org is like Canva pro. They offer thousands of photos and design templates, all for free. The premium version gives designers access to 50 thousand premium templates, five gigs of space and high-quality downloads is definitely worth checking out. Especially if you are creating designs like buyer persona's for internal use only. The only drawback that I can see to this platform is that load times are a little slow. 6. Constructing Your Business Charter : After identifying your target audience, you can begin to compose your business charter in relation to your brand's messaging, your business charter is comprised of your brand's mission and vision statements and value proposition. These are elements of your brand strategy that drive your business. A mission statement defines what an organization is and why it exists. Your mission statement should define who your primary customers are, identified the products and services you produce, and describe the geographical location in which you operate. And effective mission statement must be a clear, concise declaration about your business strategy. Your mission statement provides the framework and purpose of your vision. You want to leave a lasting impression on consumers, should answer these four questions. What we do, how we do it, who we do it for, and what values are we bringing? Most mission statements are between 13 sentences, never exceeding 100 words. I'm going to walk you through how to structure your mission statement. There are three parts to a mission statement. Target market. The target market is the first component that must be created when composing a mission statement. To which group are you offering goods and or services? Contribution. The next component to a successful mission statement is outlining your contribution. What products and our services does your business or organization offer? Uniqueness? What makes your goods and or services unique? Why should consumers purchase it from your business or organization over the competitors? Step one, what do we do? My company's purpose is to, what does your company do? You want to be very specific, write down exactly what serviced your business provides. For our sample statement, I've put together a list of three services, selling books, feeding the hungry, and repairing cars, will go with car repair. The name of our shop will be best auto. So I will say my company provides socially responsible and sustainable auto care. How we do it. Here, you implement your business's core values. Here's a list of sample core values. Provide superior customer service. Ensure equal access to resources. Use eco friendly car parts. How we do it? We use reconditioned and eco-friendly car parts. Now we'll start to piece together our statement. My company's purpose is to provide socially responsible and sustainable auto care using recondition and eco-friendly car parts. Next, we answer whom we do it for or why we do it. You're letting your customers know why you are passionate about your product or service is why you started your business in the first place. So for best auto will say, to ensure cost-effective auto care while reducing the vehicular footprint. So if we put it all together, it will be my company's purpose is to provide socially responsible and sustainable auto care using recondition, an eco-friendly car parts, and shearing cost-effective services while reducing the vehicular footprint. Be sure to replace my company with your actual business name. Read over your mission statement several times. Let friends or partners you trust, offer you feedback. Take time to revise your statement. There will always be better ways to express ideas. Here we have our final sample revision. Best. Otto is committed to providing socially responsible and sustainable auto care using recondition and eco-friendly car parts, ensuring cost-effective services while reducing the vehicular footprint. If you're still having trouble writing your mission statement, honey Book.com offers a free mission statement generator that can help you craft your mission statement. It may not generate exactly what you are trying to say, but it will give you inspiration and puts you on the right track. Next, we'll move on to writing your vision statement. A vision statement is a broad view of how your company is going to leave an impact on customers and the greater community. It describes where you are taking the company vision statements or future based and meant to inspire and give direction to employees of the company rather than customers. Your employees are the primary audience for your vision statement. If they don't know about the company vision or doesn't resonate with them, it won't serve any purpose. If you don't know where you are going, however you get there. There are two types of vision statements, concept based and quality-based. Some vision statements are based on concepts are big ideas that reflect the company's goals and transcend time, situations and places, what the company hopes to convey about their product or services future impact. This distinct statement is focused on customers or position the company wants to hold in their industry. A great example is Disney's vision statement. They kept it simple but far-reaching to make people happy. Quality-based vision statements focused on internal goals and what a company hopes to perform on behalf of their stakeholders. These include the type of products or services they hope to provide as they grow. Nike's vision statement extends from their mission. Our mission is what drives us to do everything possible to expand human potential. We do that by creating groundbreaking sport innovations, by making our products more sustainable, by building a creative and diverse global team, and by making a positive impact in communities where we live and work. If we continue with our best auto example, our next step is to describe what we do as output. Provide eco-friendly and sustainable auto care. What is the best autos niche? Describe what sets them apart from the rest. We use reconditioned eco-friendly car parts to help customers save costs and the environment. How do you want to impact your target market? We want to make cars more eco-friendly one part at a time. Describe how you make a human connection. We work to prevent and reduce the vehicular footprint. After putting it altogether, we get our vision is to reduce the vehicular footprint by making cars more eco-friendly one part at a time. This is a simple, achievable statement. They look towards the future in hopes to make a positive environmental impact. The final component to your business charter is your brand value proposition. Your value prop distinguishes you from the competition and should clearly tell your customers why they should buy from you and not the competitor. Your value prop entices customers to buy your product or use your service. Your value proposition should answer these three questions. What your products or service will deliver? What customers reap from your product or service, why your brand is the best choice. Like your mission and vision statements, keep it short, simple and clear. To craft this statement will follow Steve Blank's very simple and concise value proposition template. We help X do Y and Z. Best. Auto Care helps car owners reduce their vehicular footprint by using eco-friendly and recondition car parts, which are efficient, sustainable, and cost-effective. When you finished constructing your business charter, you can start to display it across your website and social pages. Your value proposition typically will go in your homepage above the scroll. Your mission and vision statements can be displayed on your about us page. 7. Brand Positioning : Brand positioning explains to customers the values, benefits, and ideals of your specific brand. It is a complete strategy that implements different unique elements, such as a logo or a tagline to show why your business is better than the competition. A brand positioning statement is how we brand ensures their marketing campaigns stay true to their core values. It ties your business vision, identity, goals, and product image altogether to place your business in a notable place in the market. Before we get started, I'd like to point out that a value proposition and positioning statement contains similar elements of your brand strategy but are directed to different audiences. All your other core messaging that you've learned so far can be used externally across your social platforms. Your positioning statement is used internally to remind employees of the company's audience, industry, and goals. By now, you should know who you serve, what you serve them with, and how you serve them, will answer the remaining questions to begin developing our positioning statements. Why do they need your product or service? What makes your brand trustworthy? How do you solve the problem for your target audience? How is your brand different from others that offer similar products or services? It drives me crazy when I purchase a service and run into technical difficulties and there's no customer service number or email to contact anyone. As a customer, you feel duped, lost, and angry is hard to avoid thinking that the business just gained at your expense. Customer service needs are important. As a customer, you want to relax knowing that if something goes wrong, you'll have support is reassuring when a company is transparent in their practices and empathetic towards the customers concerns. Why do best autos customers need their product or service? Because their customers care about the environment and what to reduce their vehicular footprint. What makes a brand trustworthy? I'm going to play advocate for a moment. Personally. I'm not loyal to any brand, meaning I don't stick to one brand no matter what the cost. I am an experimental customer. If I see something different, I will try it even though a brand I really like is right there. I know it sounds strange, but I'm happy having choices and being able to act on those choices. Some customers will restrict themselves. Only one brand because they think going with another choice will have some negative repercussion. I've seen people in the store indecisive over a particular brand, even though it has the same ingredients and it's cheaper, they will whisper under their breath, I bet or not, that customer loyalty. Getting customers to the point where they don't need to experiment with anything else. Or believing that trying another brand will have unforeseen consequences. The only time I go back to a specific brand is when I'm not in the mood to experiment. If I'm looking to ensure a desired outcome, I'll go with a specific brand. Let me share an example. I love Nike's brand and shoe designs. They make sleek, performance enhancing shoes. However, they are a bit too narrow for my feet. When I'm in the market for performance shoe, I typically go with New Balance. My wife feet fit more comfortably in that brand. So although I love Nike's brand, if I'm looking for a desired result, I will choose an alternate brand. I don t trust Nike any less. They still make a great product. I simply know that the other brand is going to help me reach my goal. Branch trust is a powerful tool in creating customer loyalty. A customer will stay committed to the brand, even if they are not entirely satisfied with it. People trust brands for different reasons. Some brand's promise and money-back guarantee on their product or service, which appeals to customers who value security. Others place trust in a brand's longevity, knowing that brand will be available, which offers convenience. What makes best audible, trustworthy customers who valued green products and services, trust them more, 80% more. They are marked as healthy and safe versus competitors. Here's our statement. Best, ATO will always operate in ways that lead to sustainable outcomes for the customer and environment. A pain point is a specific problem that perspective customers of your business are experiencing. Customer pain points are key to creating great products and services. Here are some general customer pain points. Financial, is the price worth the value of the product? Am I getting a return on my investment for this service? Productivity. Is your product hard to find? People want convenience and efficiency, especially when it comes to making purchases, are using a product. Support. Has Customer Support been helpful and knowledgeable? Did they resolve my problem quickly? Processes? Did I have difficulty during the buying process? Here are some other examples of customer pain points. Forms that don't work in your website. Slow or no response to inquiries and feedback. Anything that doesn't work, poor or inconsistent user experience from visit to visit, lack of support, quality issues, complex processes for making a purchase return or other engagement, and poor customer service experience. How was best auto solving a problem for their customers? Best auto provides green customers with sustainable, cost-effective auto repair. How is your product different from competitors? Product differentiation is key and setting your brand apart from the competition. Binding characteristics about your product or service are important to how your target market perceives your uniqueness. Therefore, knowing your customer's pain points can help you develop a better product or service. Take for example, iPhone. Iphone is uniquely desirable because of his camera quality. It can stand up to any professional equipment on the market. In my opinion, iPhone's camera is superior to all other phone competitors. Over the years, they have incrementally improve their camera to that of professional photography and videography equipment. Ask any influencer or social media coordinator what they used to shoot and they will always tell you, iPhone, not a competitor. How is your brand's product or service different from the competitors? Best, auto aims to make a difference to the world that we live in by rethinking auto care. Best, auto values, community and environmental growth by making sure that our services are always socially responsible and products sustainable. We've come to the final step. Writing our positioning statement will be using a pre craft, a template that will allow you to plug in your brand's information. Let's go over. Our company is targeted toward core customers who want what they want. Our company offers, how you propose to give the customer what they want and makes customers how your company makes them feel. So within the brackets, you will write your company's name, target audience, what sets you apart and customer need. Best. Otto is targeted toward car owners who want socially responsible auto care. Best auto offers a safe alternative to traditional car repair with sustainable auto care services in equal friendly car parts that makes customers feel their actions are making a difference. 8. Crafting Your Brand Story : Brand narration is the central building block of a meaningful brand strategy. A well-crafted story can significantly increase its value. Remember, the way you share your content matters. When you're story resonates with customers. It builds trust, loyalty, and inspires engagement. Today's customers are interested in what your business stands for, not just the services you offer or the quality of your products. That's why every brand needs to tell its story. You aren't just selling handmade socks or fitness class. You are selling your personal journey. Your story may not appeal to everyone, but it will appeal to someone and that's someone matters to your business. Often small businesses don't see the value in having a brand story, let alone any messaging at all. They focus on their product or service and invest all of their resources and output. You need a compelling brand story because it helps the audience understand and interpret the position of your brand. Your brand story will set the tone for your business. The purpose is to create a narrative around the customer experience. If customers can relate to your story and your reason for creating your product or service, they will share it. I call this evangelizing. Once your messaging begins to resonate with customers, they will evangelize your mission, vision, and core values through word of mouth, social media, and making purchases. They will take your brand story and mesh it into their own experience until they become one aesthetic. Customer experiences involve your story. Every photo, video posts and testimonial, we'll continue to build upon the legacy of your business by fully describing how and why you came to exist. The story builds a foundation. This foundation helps guide the customer journey. Let's take a quick look at Warby Parker story. Before getting into their story, they state their mission and vision statements. And the opening paragraph, they clearly define the problem and the conflict that inspired them to act. Every idea starts with the problem. Ours was simple. Glasses are too expensive. Our founders were students when one of them lost his glasses on a backpacking trip. The cost of replacing them with so high that he spent the first semester of grad school without them squinting and complaining. The others had similar experiences. And we're amazed at how hard it was to find a great pair of frames that didn't leave their wallets bear. Where were the options? It turns out there's a simple explanation that I were industry is dominated by a single company that has been able to keep prices artificially high while reaping huge profits from consumers who have no other options. Warby Parker was started to create an alternative by circumventing traditional channels, designing glasses in-house, and engaging with customers directly. We are able to provide higher-quality, better, lucky prescription eyewear at a fraction of the going price. We believe that buying glasses should be fun and easy. It should leave you happy and good-looking with money in your pocket. We also believe that everyone has the right to see 2.5 billion people around the world need glasses, but don't have access to them. Of these, 624 million cannot effectively learn a work due to the severity of their visual impairment. To help address this problem, we worked with a handful of partners worldwide to ensure that for every pair of glasses sold appears distributed to someone in need. To date, over 8 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through our buy a pair, give a pair program. There's nothing complicated about it. Good eyewear, good outcome. So your business didn't just fall out of the sky. Something happened to spark your entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe a bad experience with a similar product or service, or even an exceptional talent or genius idea that makes you believe you can stand up to the competition. I will give you another example. You may know of a couple that's been together for awhile and they just seemed perfect for one another. Well, didn't you want to know how they met? You're seeing this great relationship. It's human nature to want to know how they got there. If their story is compelling enough, you will proudly share with friends and family when referencing a great relationship. It'll even inspire you to find a great relationship of your own. Your brand story is how you came to be. The audience doesn't need all the details, only the most important and engaging ones. Let's dive into writing a brand story will be using a pre crafted template. In this example, in the brackets, you're going to fill in your business messaging. And the founders bracket, you can put your name or simply say I, we, or our family, name, your company. Explain what prompted you to start your business. It doesn't necessarily have to be a problem. It could be that you discover an innovative approach to an old concept. Describe how you are changing the industry. Next. Tell us what you have accomplished thus far. How many products have you sold? How many people has your business helped last? What impact do you hope to make in the future? After we plug-in best autos information, this is what we get. Our family started best auto care because vehicular emissions are one of the largest producers of greenhouse gases negatively impacting human and environmental health. That's why we use reconditioned eco-friendly car parts and sustainable practices to help reduce the environmental impact of traditional cars. Along the way, customers have saved over $100 thousand using our sustainable products and services. By the year 2030, we aim to be the leader in green auto repair. A great brand story is engaging, short and evokes emotion. It should be honest, have a clear structure, and highlight important facts. A customer should be able to read your story and clearly understand why your brand exists and why they should buy from you. All the customers. Answers should be found in your brand story and other messaging. For this last example, I will show you another way to write your brand story using a three-part model. Problem solution as success. You're beginning paragraph will explain the problem that you solve for your customers. The middle will present a solution, how your product or service is solving their problem. The last paragraph where we describe the success or positive impact your brand is looking to make. The three-part model allows you to incorporate more context into your story. Follow along. As I read. In college, I saved up enough money to buy an old use car that my dad in mechanic helped me fix up. On my way to class one day, puffs of black smoke build from the exhaust pipe, creating a dark cloud all around the neighborhood. Kids choked on the toxic fumes. As I drove by. Vehicular emissions are one of the largest producers of greenhouse gases negatively impacting human and environmental health. We believe people should be able to drive a car that others can't hear and smell. We started best Auto Care, a green auto repair shop that uses recondition, eco-friendly car parts, and sustainable practices to help reduce the environmental impact of traditional cars. A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year from tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions. Not to mention the additional footprint for manufacturing and shipping car parks. Since 2019, we've saved our customers $100 thousand using recondition parts and sustainable services. We aim to help reduce mains carbon footprint 20% by the year 2030. Best auto carrier is here to help car owners have a clean, green driving experience. That's it, everyone, We're done. My final piece of advice is to look at stories of brands you admire in your industry. Just be sure to tell your story and not someone else's. Congratulations, you made it to the end. You now have the tools and resources to start developing your small business brand's messaging to display across your social media pages and website. Don't forget to download the worksheets in key branding terms. I provide it. Bye for now.