When you sandwich them together, though, it’s an interesting combination. Also, when you try to do it in the digital age, it creates memorable content that attracts customers to your brand.

Business storytelling on social media isn’t a new concept, but when done well, it’s interesting. Instead of people thinking of suits and stock markets when they think of a business, they’ll be able to relate to the faces behind a company.

What is Business Storytelling?

Business storytelling is the practice of sharing a company’s narrative with the rest of the world. Before becoming a successful business operating out of one or more properties, they start from much humbler roots.

Apple, for example, was started in a garage. Since its founding in 1976, in addition to a headquarters, there are more than 500 retail stores, countless products, over 130,000 employees, and a net revenue of more than 50 billion USD in 2018.

The purpose of this kind of storytelling is to help humanize a brand and connect to your audience in a way that isn’t dependent on you bombarding people with ads, or trying to sell them a product. Instead, talk about things like how are you changing the market, and how did you go from an idea to a brick-and-mortar store?

As much as we enjoy hearing stories of success, we also like to hear about the lack of funding, the constant borrowing at the beginning, environmental hazards, and furry critters making their way into your workspace. These sorts of things are relatable to the average Joe.

Most people aren’t business moguls, but they have had an odd encounter with Mother Nature at home. This sort of content is relatable, and if you share it on your social media channels, you can engage customers in a way that makes them loyal to you.

The Five Steps to Effectively Tell Your Brand’s Story

When it comes to explaining your brand and doing it online, there are five things you have to do.

• Have defined metrics.

• Show your brand’s best self.

• Leave the audience wanting more.

• Be consistent across all channels.

• Involve the public.

Through following the five previously mentioned points, and practicing your craft, you’ll be able to effectively tell your story on not only your website but also a variety of platforms.

Defined Metrics

Keeping your content focused on one or several areas is important to keep the attention of your audience. If you’re a restaurant owner, it doesn’t make much sense to share content related to deep-sea diving.

There are several things you can do to make content that works.

• Have a clear narrative.

• Say what happened and the setting.

• Who was involved?

• What were you trying to do?

• What challenges were overcome?

A Quick Example of Some of These Principles in Action

When Joe Smith’s Pizzeria was first opened, there were issues with the wood-burning stoves that were being used. The kitchen staff was burning the pizzas, and the opening was a nightmare. However, over time, the kitchen figured everything out, and the pies now come out perfect every time.

The crust is hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the cheese is slightly browned on top but still gooey. Come on over to Joe Smith’s Pizzeria and grab a slice today, at our location at 123 Main Street in Anytown, USA.

Highlighting What Went Well With This Post

Joe Smith’s Pizzeria highlighted several of the things that people like to see. We know that this pizzeria makes pizza, and it’s a short story that flows logically. It also tells people of an issue, who was affected and how the issue was remedied.

Something that we liked is that the second paragraph of what will eventually be a post on social media used a variety of adjectives to give the reader a better picture of the pizza. They also gave the location of their restaurant, so you can go and check them out.

Showing Your Best Self

When it comes to posting about your businesses online, it’s important to tell stories that are relatable to everyday people. The story from the pizzeria is a great example of this because we’ve all burnt something in the kitchen.

The post doesn’t have to belong or be complicated, our example was less than 100 words, but when having story time on your Instagram feed, for example, you want to be concise with your words. This is done not to make people feel trapped in your post, sort of speak.

While showing your best self, it’s also important to talk about previous failures. People learn by making mistakes, and if you only highlight the good and never the mistakes that lead to the lessons, you’ll seem less human.

Another thing Joe’s Pizza can do is highlight not only the product but also the ingredients. If he locally sourced some of his ingredients, he could do a social media spotlight on some of his suppliers. Not only does this create an online sense of community, but people are more attracted to places that are farm-to-table because the products are fresher and better for you.

Leave Your Followers Something to Think About

Think of this as the “it” factor of your post, that helps set apart your company from others. This could be the lessons you learned along the way and why they’re important or applicable to situations outside of the business world.

If you’ve had a lot of highs and lows while building and maintaining your brand, consider doing a Spotlight Sunday series. In this campaign, you would share a short story and what you learned from it.

We are going to share two of our favourite life lessons that we learned the hard way. Rather than share the long version, we went for how it would be written on a throw pillow you would see in a Target. Every day may not be good, but there’s something good in every day. The other quote is you can’t control how other people act, but you can control how you react.

After reading the first quote, most people go, “Huh, I did have a bad day, but x happened, and that was great.” The second quote has a lot of practical wisdom attached to it. If two people are having a disagreement, and one person is yelling, and the other person is calm, then the calm person can work to de-escalate the situation.

Be Consistent Across All Your Social Media Platforms

When building your brand, it’s important to think about how your social media profiles will look across different accounts. You don’t want your accounts to look disjointed, and if we learned anything from the Tidying Up with Marie Kondo show, it’s that when things are organized, they spark joy.

Your brand should use the same colour scheme, and similar profile pictures, and have posts and stories that relate to your interests on the Insta, Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media feeds that are used.

It’s important to note that you may not be an expert at this at first, and that’s okay. With time and practice, you’ll learn how to tell your story consistently across multiple channels in a variety of ways to keep it fresh.

Emotional and linguistic consistency is also imperative. Customers like to have their expectations fulfilled and want their content to be consistent in quality, language, and attitude. There are now many online tools and services like Grammarly, ClassyEssay or TopEssayWriting that can help you maintain your tone and voice throughout all of your content, whether it’s for social media or blogs.

Involve Your Audience

One of the benefits of using social media is you get to take advantage of the wide reach of the internet. Why not take it one step further and build a sense of community while building your brand?

You can talk about things that affect not only your company but also how it affected you personally. If you collaborate with other people and groups, mention them. We briefly touched on this earlier with Joe’s Pizzeria and the social media spotlights.

You can also go to community events, set up a booth, provide some food, and snap some pictures. Another idea is if you’re a car dealership, whenever you sell a car, why not snap a picture of the salesperson, the family, and the vehicle?

You can also say who everyone is and a couple of features about the car. This makes for great content on your feed, and it helps differentiate you from other dealerships in your area because you are adding faces to your story!

Finally, the stories don’t have to always be about you or the brand, talk up collaborations with other people and businesses. Say how they’re changing the game, and highlight the lessons learned from not only that collaboration but about life in general.

The post Business Storytelling: Building Your Brand Using Social Media appeared first on Tricky Enough.

On top of that, another tactic that is also commonly used is promoting your blog in other countries by translating your content into more than one language. There are many ways in which this can be helpful for your brand and it can truly help you increase your blog visitors.

Whether you own your personal blog or are trying to further promote your business through social media, branding your brand on an international level will help you reach out to many more people and have readers and customers from all around the world.

Here are 5 tips to help you get started for Branding Your Blog Internationally

1. 
   

   Localizing your brand

   
   

The very first thing that is important to know in order to make this work for you is the difference between localization and translation. While it is common knowledge that translations are what will make your content available to users from all around the world, localization is what will take it a step further.

First of all, localization is a part of the translation. This makes them work together and complete each other. Localizing your brand essentially means that your content will truly make sense to the local market and is relevant and fitting to a country’s culture.

What often happens in translations is that a word or a phrase is not properly translated into another language as it doesn’t have the same meaning as the original language it was written in. Localization of your content will help you avoid these mistakes and make your content available and understandable by anyone who reads it, no matter what language it is translated into.

2. 
   

   Working with native translators

   
   

The biggest reason why mistakes occur as far as localization is concerned is that many blog owners choose to work with people who are not native speakers of a language or who are simply not truly qualified for their skills. It is very easy to claim things on the internet and many blog owners who are still new in the field can fall into this trap.

Working with native translators will help you solve one of the biggest problems you can come across, which is not translating your content in a way that makes it culturally relevant to every country. This further elongates the localization problem and simply confuses the reader, as they can’t relate to whatever you are writing.

A native, professional translator is the best person for this job as they will be able to offer on-point translations of any native word or phrase in the selected language. The only problem here is that you will most likely have to work with more than one translator but in the end, you will benefit from the quality of the translations they will deliver.

3. 
   

   Running your social media accounts

   
   

A thing you need to keep in mind before you decide to go forth and make your blog available internationally and in more than one language is that you will also have to be able to communicate with your readers in their native languages. This is pretty difficult for any person who is just starting out and doesn’t work with many others.

The best thing to do here is to either limit the languages you translate your content into or to incorporate some people into your business who will be able to help you run your social media and talk to your customers in order to make sure that they are always satisfied.

What you need to take into account is that your social media accounts are what will help you make your content more visible to native speakers from all around the world and it is the best, quickest and easiest way for you to communicate with your readers. The content that you choose to share on your accounts should probably be shared in every language, in order to make sure that all of your followers have access to it and understand it, especially if you only chose to have one universal account for every platform.

Investing some time and money into your social media accounts will really help drive more readers to your blog and you will be able to establish a better relationship with your audience. By having people run your social media accounts in the languages you have chosen to represent you will show your true interest and will to satisfy your followers’ needs.

4. 
   

   Creating relevant content

   
   

Another thing that you should take into consideration is that you will need to create content that will be relatable to the people which you are trying to reach out to. For this tip, it is important to understand your target audience and to make sure that you have a way of understanding what is interesting to each country.

This is something that you can find out in two ways. First of all, you can ask the help of your translators and have them help you come up with topics which will be interesting to the readers of each language. If you are looking for another way to find relevant topics, you can also follow other blogs of natives and through them find ideas for topics and content creation.

You need to keep in mind that something that might be interesting for a group of people might simply not be appealing to others. When trying to brand your blog successfully and make your brand available in more than one language, you will need to take the preferences of all of your readers into consideration.

Creating different articles for every language might seem like a lot of work if your blog is still small but its something that will truly help you reach out to more readers and allow your blog to grow a lot faster and more successfully. You can always have your friends or even guest writers write for your website and allow them to work on content which will be entertaining for your readers and followers.

5. 
   

   Translating the name of your website into different languages

   
   

Another thing which can really help you brand your blog internationally is to translate the name of it into all the languages you are using. Some people might want to keep their website’s name the same in every language they support, but there are benefits to translating the name into more languages.

First of all, it is a matter of whether the name can be translated or not. If it can, you should try and find the word phrase which will better be translated to the chosen language with the help of your translator. The reason why this will be beneficial for your blog is that it will allow users from all over to world to find it, even if they weren’t searching for its name in particular.

It is way more likely that a native speaker will search for a word or phrase similar to your blog’s name in their native language rather than in English. If you keep your blog’s name the same for every language you provide on it, you will have a harder time reaching out to some potential readers online.

Making your blog known internationally

There are many ways for you to make our blog more well-known and marketable online when you decide to go ahead and translate your content into more than one language. Branding your blog internationally might seem like a difficult task at first, but there are truly many ways for you to make this journey easier.

No matter how small your blog is, working with professional translators and social media managers will truly help you reach out to more people and make your content available and enjoyable to all the people you are trying to reach out to.

Even if you have to put some time and effort into making it run properly, you will be able to see more traffic being directed to your website and you will also manage to make your content more enjoyable to native speakers. In every way, these tips will truly help you achieve the goals you have set for your blog and make it more popular amongst people of many different countries and cultures.

The post 5 Tips for Branding Your Blog Internationally appeared first on Tricky Enough.