Building a Story Brand

Lifted Logic builds the greatest websites of any digital marketing agency in Kansas City. We make incredible functionality that looks stunning and we do it while having fun. 

You read this 👆type of language over and over again when you research businesses online. 

While it’s good to inform potential leads about your record of success and your services, building a story brand framework puts your services into the important context of how they solve problems. 

What does it mean to build a story brand? In a nutshell, story branding is telling the story of your user, whoever that may be. You’re communicating to them specifically about solving their problems, versus trying to convince them you’re the right choice based solely on your general expertise.

When it comes to writing content for your business that engages and informs your users, everything starts with understanding. You need to understand who your user is; their concerns, fears, and goals. 

The best content starts with research

The content team at Lifted Logic talks about “user intent” a lot, because without a grasp on the “why,” you can’t fully answer their question. Understanding their intent begins with understanding who’s behind the search. 

Finding your audience

Taking a look at your existing customer base is a good first step in understanding your website users. Are you a med spa with a solid base of women in their 50s who undergo regular, scheduled treatments, or are most of your patients in their 20s and 30s who keep aging at bay with tox and professional skin care? 

Most professional copywriters wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) build the same story brand in those scenarios, because those users aren’t seeking solutions to the same problems and they’re likely at very different points in their lives. 

Developing user personas

Think of the user persona as the person you are talking to with your story branding. Essentially, your user persona is a fictional character who represents the type of user you expect to use on your site.

Learning more about the people who currently use your website drives an even more effective outcome for your story branding efforts. There’s likely a good deal of overlap between the type of person using your website and your existing customers, especially if you do e-commerce or online booking. 

One effective method of developing user personas is pretty straightforward—ask them questions. Ask your existing customers if they’d be interested in answering a short survey, and consider adding a survey option as a small pop-up on your website. 

When it comes to understanding your user, you’ve got to dig into the data. Our content department is knee deep in those sweet analytics every day. The data we gather from user behavior on websites tells important information. 

Geographic information, for example, is vital to optimizing your local SEO. 

Does story branding have to do with SEO?

To be perfectly unclear; yes and no. 

When you think of search engine optimization as its own separate beast, it doesn’t necessarily impact the story brand you’re building. But when you consider good SEO and good story branding both have their roots in user data, the connection becomes clear.

Consider keyphrase research. You need to think like a user to pin down the right user intent behind the different types of searches. Someone searching “what is a med spa” definitely does not have the same intent as someone searching “med spa near me.” 

The research done to optimize for search should also help build out user personas, which ultimately means producing stronger story branded content.

Is my brand story the same thing as the story brand I build?

If you’ve been working to market your biz for a minute, you’ve probably learned the importance of telling your brand’s story. Potential and existing customers want to know about the companies they interact with. But really, it makes more sense to refer to this as your brand narrative.

Narrative versus story

So maybe you think we’re splitting hairs because going between brand story and story brand is confusing as hell. You’re not totally wrong, but the idea of a brand narrative has evolved in recent years among marketers. 

By switching to the idea of a narrative, you open up the bounds of what message you get across. Your narrative is your past, present, and future. Narrative drives the broad vision; it’s an evolving sense of your brand and the stories fit inside of that narrative. 

A story is character-driven. Stories explore the problems, fears, dilemmas, choices, and successes of those characters. 

The framework for building your story branding

As a good rule of thumb, you can build the best story branding around the following framework:

7-Step Story Branding Framework

1. A character
2. Has a problem
3. And finds a guide who understand their fear
4. And gives them a plan 
5. That calls them to action… that results in
6. Success… with the risk of 
7. Failure (if they go with the wrong solutions)

The key: never stop talking about the user’s problem. 

Don’t begin with the “we” (things like your company’s core values or accolades). The first thing you want to talk about in your web content is the user’s problem and how you specifically can solve it. 

The issue with starting out by listing your services and accolades is that a user often doesn’t know what services they even need. They know they’re looking for help and guidance, and they want to get it from a trustworthy and capable source. That’s you, and you’ve got to prove it by proving you understand what their problems are. You’re meeting them where they are, instead of asking them to meet you halfway. 

Here are a couple of examples to show you the difference between the type of writing a lot of blogs default to and good story branding.

Example of building story branding language

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re writing for; story branding is not only possible, it’s essential to connecting with your user. 

It’s easier to get personal with readers when writing for the med spa industry, to call back to the last example. After all, pretty much everyone has at least one aesthetic concern they’d fix if they could, even just signs of aging. That’s easy to relate to and talk about. 

Now let’s consider a very different industry: construction.

Marketing in construction needs to reach a huge variety of potential customers, but they all face similar issues. So, to put our money where our mouth is, here are some direct examples of transforming your typical marketing language into customer-centric story branding. 

Want expert help with building a story brand? Hi, we’re here 👋

Whether you want Lifted Logic to create a site for you that’s chock full of incredible, SEO-based story branding content or you want to start with ongoing marketing efforts to engage your customers, you can’t go wrong. Our team of content specialists are supported by a world-class team of web developers and designers. 

Use our project planning tool to discuss your project and you will hear back from a team member within 2 business hours.

At Lifted Logic, we love to help our clients feel more confident and informed in their digital decision-making.

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