Telling great brand stories is key in any organization’s communicational arsenal. Telling great fan stories is a great way to do it.

As brand marketers, we’re often asked to tell the stories of our brands.

One thing that many might have trouble with is uncovering the stories within the organization and what types of stories a brand might tell.

On the subject, we’ve published two articles of relevance. In the first, we outline a 3-step process marketing team can embrace to properly discover, shape and tell brand stories. In the second, we explain the 6 types of stories your brand can use in their brand storytelling.

From there, it’s all in your hands.

Finding the right story.

Scripting it.

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Producing it.

Publishing it.

Easy peasy.

That’s what we call customer-led storytelling.

Clients often ask us to show examples of work we’ve come across that are great examples in brand storytelling. Here’s one we especially enjoyed watching.

Pierre’s story within the Assassin’s Creed universe

In this examples published by Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, we witness a great example of brand storytelling using a customer’s story. Or in Ubi’s case here, a megafan story.

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These are the types of great opportunities that a brand might miss when creating regular testimonials, customer success examples, customer case studies or business cases.

What are the advantages of telling great customer stories?

A great customer story brings value to the brand on many levels:

  • It shows potential customers that you have experience and that your product and service actually brings results;
  • It can be used by the sales team to distribute to potential clients as they consider working with your brand;
  • It has expanded reach potential through the client or stakeholder that is mentioned in the content piece as they will most surely share and amplify the story;
  • It has internal communications relevance as it shares organizational success through a well produced and high-value content;
  • It is a great way to showcase employees, their stories and responsibilities and how it integrates with the overall organization’s mission.

(And in the case of the Ubisoft video above, this is exactly it. A fan-story that morphs into an employee-story)

In our 6 types of stories your brand can use in their brand storytelling article, these types of stories fall into the “Differentiation” category, as they are great tools as clients and customers consider choosing your brand in their customer journey. They can be used once a prospective client knows you exist (the awareness phase) and evaluates your value in comparison to other solutions (the consideration phase)

What are the key elements of a customer testimonial?

There are many ways to structure a customer testimonial, but with experience, we’ve found that these elements must be integrated in the content:

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  1. What were the customer’s problems and their organizational context?
  2. What was the value they were looking to create by solving this problem?
  3. What were their key decisional factors to choose their final solution?
  4. What solution did the brand bring to the table?
  5. How was the customer experience, the process of implementing the solution?
  6. What is the current situation in regards to the initial problem?

Through this, audiences will connect even more if we can feel the energy, the emotions, the state of mind of the stakeholder, their personal experience with you, throughout the process. Emotional involvement and a compelling narrative helps and creates a deeper bond between your audience and your brand.

As mentioned by Dr. Paul Homoly in a Forbes article on storytelling: “It’s important to select stories that are emotional to you so you feel them while you tell them,” says Homoly. “You are trying to move people to action—to make a decision, follow your advice, take their medicine. To move people into action, you need to move them emotionally.”

 

If you are not already leveraging customer stories in your brand storytelling, we cannot recommend enough that you start doing so by asking around and collecting these great successes that your brand has had. They are there, you know it, it is just a matter of gathering, shaping and telling these stories.

Need help? Our teams of brand storytellers are there for you. Contact us and we can help build a customer-led storytelling process in your organization today.