Brand Storytelling with Your Influencer Community

in Brand Awareness, Influencer Marketing, Influencer Programs, Influencers

From the invention of the first product, companies have been using storytelling to gain loyal customers. Our brains are wired for stories, even when that story is about a product or service. And as digital marketing increasingly develops relationships with influencers — creators who generate original content and share that content with loyal followers — curating influencer communities that facilitate brand storytelling is more important than ever.

In an increasingly crowded marketplace, one of the best ways to reach today’s busy customers is by using influencers who can help share your brand’s story. These influencers have a highly-engaged audience who pay close attention to everything they say about the brands they consume.

Using influencers with large, curated followings can get your brand’s story in front of the right customers. Influencers are great storytellers, but it’s important that any plan to use them focuses on maintaining a core message that’s tweaked to suit the unique audiences of each platform. Whether it’s Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter, consistency within market messaging is the goal. And this means your influencers must know your brand’s unique story, connect with it, and be able to share that connection with potential customers.

But, even influencers with large followings can be a mismatch for your brand and story, and even the most effective influencers are working harder to make sure their stories are heard. That’s why partnering with the right influencers, those who are experts at understanding their followers and who are attuned to your brand’s unique story is so important.

Your Brand Community Goes Beyond Traditional Influencers

Your community of storytellers isn’t limited to traditional influencers. Employees, affiliates, partners, and customers can all be influencers, too, working to share your brand’s stories. So how do you identify these additional influencers?

Monitoring customer brand sentiment and NPS are two ways to identify existing customers who understand your brand messaging and are already sharing your story. Tracking sentiment is also a way to identify employees whose understanding of your brand makes them natural brand ambassadors. Affiliates and partners, those who have an agreement with your brand to represent it in a particular manner, also present opportunities to become a part of your influencer team.

Using Brand Storytelling to Expand Your Reach

By creating unique stories around your brand that demonstrate why your product or service solves a problem or fills a need, you can expand your reach. These stories should target the right audience in the right way and be used by the influencers who will most effectively share them with your target audience. Designing an integrated plan for your brand’s story that includes both social and traditional media, and digital advertising should be a part of the process as you develop your influencer community.

Finally, brand storytelling is not a one-and-done. You’ll need to view the process as a long-term strategy, one that takes into account your brand and the various influencers who will be telling your story. Cultivating relationships with influencers, whether they be traditional influencers, customers, employees, or affiliates, will help to ensure that your brand’s story will remain relevant and compelling on any platform.

Need an all-in-one tool to take your influencer marketing to the next level? Sideqik can take you from the research and discovery phase all the way through to management and reporting.

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Nancy Rothman

Nancy is a passionate, results-driven marketing executive with more than a decade of experience in building robust integrated marketing programs for brands of all sizes, with specific expertise in the martech space. Prior to Sideqik, Nancy held roles at four successful martech startups, each of which received multiple series of fundraising and included two acquisitions. At CallRail, specifically, Nancy served as the director of marketing where she built the company’s brand and established it as a leader in its space. She also held roles at MeetEdgar, where she oversaw the entire sales and marketing practice, increasing the company's user base and annual recurring revenue, as well as PureCars, which was acquired by Raycom Media in 2015. As vice president of marketing for Sideqik, Nancy is responsible for developing and executing on the company's marketing strategy to drive overall business growth.