10X Your Brand Without Spending A Dime
10X Your Brand Without Spending A Dime
If you were walking down the street and a random person asked you to do a business deal with them, what would you say?
But if the person handed you their business card and let you know that they’re the CEO of Microsoft and the information is true, without you knowing anything about the CEO, what’s the chance of you agreeing to shake that person's hand?
The reason people agree to do business with each other, whether it's B-to-B, C-to-B, or B-to-C, is because they are familiar with you. To have people familiarized with you, you must have a brand and a story behind your brand that they can remember.
Branding without storytelling is like a novel without characters—it lacks depth and connection.
Even with all the right tools, the most important part of branding was telling stories.
In fact, tell hundreds of stories about your brand, starting from founder stories, customer stories, customer success, employee success, challenges, struggles, and highlights.
Branding is the memory of certain characteristics that people associate with you and your business. And it takes time and frequency for those characteristics to be embedded in people’s minds. You’ve got to get good at telling stories and telling stories in volume.
But to know how to tell stories about your brand, first, you must have a framework - a story framework that let you do the storytelling over and over again in the most efficient way.
Without a framework, you’re chasing two rabbits and end up with none.
There are plenty of frameworks out there that you can use for storytelling, but pick the simplest one - the simpler, the better.
Here is an example of a simple framework that you can use to tell the story about your business.
That framework is called WHO-WHAT-WHY:
WHO: Who are you? Who is your business? Can you verbalize the who in one sentence? For example, "I am Ricky, the founder of the Thai Academy." Another example, "I am Bill, and I am a technology entrepreneur." You see the key thing in answering the who is your name or your business name and the title. You’ve got to pick a title that people can see, feel, and relate to. Don’t pick a title like Superman or Superhuman. Pick a title that people can relate to in their life, and you will score this part.
WHAT: For the WHAT, you will tell people the things that you’re doing to help THEM. People want to know what value you can bring to them, not to you when you tell them stories. People listen to your story, but they care more about the things in your story that add value to their life. For example, "My name is Ricky. I am an entrepreneur that helps other startups launch and scale their business." Another example, "My name is Bill. I am a technology entrepreneur, and I build computer programs that replace repetitive work that you have to do like calculating algebra or tracking time on a piece of paper."
WHY: Finally, the WHY. The why will tell people the importance of who you are and what you do to them. When you answer the why, frame it in a way that has meaning to people’s lives. This is as important as the other two parts above. The meaning makes your story sticky, and that's how you embed your brand into someone’s mind forever. For example, "My name is Ricky, and I am an entrepreneur. I help other people launch and start their business online so that they can earn more than what they think they could earn in a regular job."
Once you nail down the framework, the next part is to distribute the stories across multiple platforms. The more platform, the better. The more platform, the lower the cost that you will acquire customers.
Here are the 10 platforms that have more than 2 billion users combined that you can distribute your stories with ZERO cost:
Facebook
Facebook Group
Instagram
Twitter - Now X
LinkedIn
YouTube
Pinterest
Blogs
It takes time to get familiar with a story framework, and it takes time to master the framework in your daily communication (verbal, written, etc.). But once you understand the power of a storytelling framework in business, you will never look back.
Good luck.