Earlier this month, HMG Creative hosted our very first webinar, Brand Story: The Foundation. Led by our Senior Brand and Marketing Strategist, John Paulsen, this webinar was the first in a three-part series to help bolster brands. With a huge team effort, our first episode was a hit! We focused on helping businesses navigate their brand presence during this transitional time in our world. By sharing a sneak peek into our methodologies, we showed participants a few key steps to help their brand find its purpose again. Here’s how we did it:
The Process
The time was finally right to break into the video world and provide video content for our audience. We also have experts on our team with valuable knowledge that could really help brands right now. Knowing the power of inbound marketing, we wanted to share this knowledge to make new connections and better support the community during this time.
We identified some of the key components of our brand story process and thought about how we could package them into bite-size, DIY lessons as a free resource for growing businesses.
The Message
John Paulsen plays an integral role in our partnerships with clients. As HMG’s Brand Strategist, he gets to know businesses on a personal level by helping them dig deep down and remember WHY they started their business in the first place. We refer to this important step as “discovering your brand story,” also known as your purpose. Confidently knowing your purpose helps us tell your story and helps your business succeed.
Strategy vs. Story
When it comes to a brand/marketing strategy, your strategy is generally going to be centered around features and benefits. Its goal is to effectively sell. A strategy focuses on what it is about the product/service that appeals to people, their style, their taste, etc. Essentially, it’s a devised plan to sell.
Your story, however, is more about history. It involves the story of the people who work for your business and encompasses the driving factors of why they work there. Rather than a devised strategy, it’s an organic component that already exists within your organization. It’s the original motivation for your business – your WHY.
Key Elements of Uncovering Your Brand Story
Motive: We refer to motive as money. Every business has a motive of making money, but this isn’t your reason for existing. There’s always something deeper.
Ambition: Your ambition is WHY you started your business (aside from motive). In the webinar, John took us through some practical exercises on how to discover your brand’s ambition.
Approach: Once you know your why, then you have to implement it across your organization. This involves alignment across your brand, including your company culture and consistency within internal/external departments.
Message: Here’s where you take your unique story and figure out if it appeals to anyone. Be careful not to formulate your story based on what you think people want to hear. Instead, stay true to the original script and find a way to communicate it effectively with people.
An intro to HMG’s Brand Toolkit
With a variety of teams working together to keep a business operating effectively, it can often be hard to streamline your brand story organization-wide. That’s where an external partner comes like HMG comes in. We work with your team to discover and refine your brand story, then equip you to implement it across various teams throughout your company. After walking through the story process, HMG Creative delivers a comprehensive Brand Book including your brand difference, vision/mission statements, guiding principles, brand promise, voice and personality, competitors, and more.
If you’re ready to take the next step and partner with a team of experts for support, we’d love to help!