Are Your Stories Worth Telling?

We’ve all heard it before: the best stories make an impact. They connect with us emotionally and help us to remember information better.

Think about your favorite commercial. Did you laugh? Cry? Feel nostalgic?

We remember commercials that make us feel something. But not only that, we also remember the ones that connect these emotions to a particular brand.

This is why it’s important for businesses to learn how to tell good stories. A powerful, impactful story can leave a lasting impression on your audience, and make them more likely to associate those emotions with your brand.

But how do you ensure your marketing videos resonate with people?

Our solution is this story builder tool. It helps us accomplish a few things:

  • We stay better organized
  • We write authentically and make sure we’re staying on brand
  • We apply it to our creative concepts to ensure they align with our client’s marketing goals
story-builder

We recently tested this tool against a video we made for our friends at Stone Martin Builders.

Does this video about Santa sneaking through an older house on Christmas eve help sell new homes? We’ll let the story builder decide.

Our story builder tool can be used by companies in any industry. Test it out yourself and let us know how it works for you!

Consider these questions as you write your own story:

  • Identify Your Brand
    • Value Proposition – What is the product you’re offering? How does it solve the problem your audience is facing?
    • Look and Feel – What are your company’s key branding points and values? Which ones help to tell your story?
  • What’s Your Goal
    • Target Audience – Who are you targeting? What does your audience look like? Consider their age, demographics, location, and other characteristics.
    • Call To Action – What action do you want your audience to take? Are they signing up for a class? Are they purchasing a product?
  • Identify the Conflict
    • Conflict and Pain Points – What is your audience struggling with? What problem can you help them solve? How does this problem make them feel?
  • Be the Hero
    • Problem Solving – How does your value proposition solve your audience’s problem?
  • Brainstorm
    • Execution – What are some relevant ways you can tell this story? How can you keep it short, sweet, and to the point?

Need help with elevating your story? Contact us and we’ll help your brand tell a story worth telling.

Transcript:

Santa wants you to buy a house, and it’s in Alabama. Let’s talk about it. For a little while now, we’ve been working with the folks at Aston Martin Builders to create their video content. This is an Alabama-based builder.

They work with Group Two the ad agency for home builders, friends of ours. And while Group two creates the campaigns, what’s up, Alexis? We work on the video content for them, so we do the pre-production in collaboration with their agency.

We work with local video teams when necessary to film, and then we do all of the post-production. Today, I want to talk about this Santa concept that we did, which was a cue for launch to tie in with the holiday.

Now the thing that we’re going to talk about today and the thing I want to bring up over and over again is our story builder. So we’re going to get a stress test this video to see does it align with our story builder?

Did it make sense to make this video and why? So let’s put up the story builder right now. Now the idea here is we always want to tell stories that are compelling and compelling stories need. one thing a conflict, right?

All good stories have a good conflict. They have something that our protagonist needs to overcome. And so in this case, when you’re creating brand videos, marketing videos, pieces that are going to attract new customers clientele, you want to come up with a piece of content that establishes a conflict based on pain points for your buyer, your consumer, right, whoever your target audience is, things that are relevant to them. So if your target audience is, for example, in the market for a home, their pain point might be that their current home, their old home, their used home to borrow that from Group two isn’t up to snuff, so they might need a new one.

So once you identify those elements, you got your target audience, you’ve identified their pain points. Now you can start to develop the conflict of your story. Well, in this case, our conflict needs to have a resolution. We’re making marketing videos here, right?

We’re not going to end these videos with cliffhangers or scary surprises like the sixth sense. We want to have a surprise, where you your brand, your value proposition solves the problem or pain point for your consumer. Businesses are here to solve problems or fill a need.

So if your value proposition solves the conflict of your consumer, you are what you’re the hero of your story, right? And every time we do that, we’re able to tell stories that tie back to the consumer and make them realize you’re the optimal choice.

We wanted to do something that was timely, that makes sense for the holidays. And so we had this concept where what if Santa enters an old, not stone Martin Bel-Air home, old home with creaky floors, drafty windows and maybe some out of code electric?

So what do you think? Not bad, right? If you like it, please like below, share with your friends and and if you don’t like it, you know, just keep it to yourself. You don’t have to comment on everything.

In all seriousness, let’s see if the story works by analyzing this against our story builder, the concept of identifying our target audience, their conflict and how our value proposition solves for it in a simple video like this, did it work?

So our target audience are people who are living in an older home or in a not super well-built home. Let’s think about the pain points for them, the things that might be wrong with their old used home or the things they wish they had in their home, or maybe things they didn’t even think might be wrong with their current home, right? So what’s the conflict? How do we establish it or show it? Santa enters the frame, the house is creaking, the electricity goes nuts, and he wakes up the kids. Your home is so terrible. Santa can’t even give your kids presents.

It’s ruining the magic of the holidays. Your old home is literally ruining Christmas. It’s a pretty good conflict, right? But what’s the solution? Still, master builders, these folks have already figured this out for you have great quality homes you could buy right now.

Looks like the Santa video passes the test, right? It’s pretty simple thing, but you always want to break that down. You want to make sure that the content you’re delivering has a relevant message to your target audience and really positions you as a value proposition.

And the problem solver for that situation, I think that covers everything, right? We did the story builder, we talked about Santa. We made some jokes. If you like the video, like it, if you want to see more of them, subscribe.

If you have anything to say, comment below. And of course, thank you as always for watching by.