Why Audience Is the Most Important Element of Your Story

Branding is storytelling. The key to effective storytelling is knowing your audience and reaching them with your mutual interests. Recognizing how to segment that audience and communicate to them in the most effective way possible can create a larger, more dedicated following.

Benefits of Brand Positioning

If branding is telling the “why” of your company, brand positioning means understanding where your audience is and how you are positioned in your customers’ minds.  The goal of brand positioning is to generate a unique impression in your customer’s mind.

What makes you different from the rest of your competitors in the marketplace? Brand positioning requires looking at how your competition is trying to market to your customers. How is your story different from theirs? Knowing what makes you unique and positioning yourself to strike on what makes you unique can make your story much more interesting.

Recognize Your Customer Touchpoints

Where are your customers coming into contact with your brand? Identifying all the places where someone may come into contact with your brand is very important for brand positioning. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes, are you reinforcing positivity at every step of their interaction with you? Your brand’s story can crumble if customers have a negative experience at one of your touchpoints.

Consistency is important if you want to position your brand positively in your customer’s mind. Allowing a customer to have a negative interaction with your brand at one of your touchpoints can make you seem inauthentic. Keeping your audience happy at all touchpoints breeds trust and respect between you and your customers, and reinforces your brand’s story within their mind.

Buyer Personas Overview

Buyer Personas are your ideal customers. These are the people most likely to use your product or service, meaning that these are the people you will want to tell your brand’s story to. Understanding your audience is a powerful marketing tool. Well-thought-out buyer personas streamline your marketing efforts and help you target the right people. Don’t be afraid to use buyer personas as a guide to effectively communicate your brand.

How Do I Recognize My Audience’s Personality?

One way to segment your audience is by personality. Communicating your brand’s story based on personalities and how people process information can help you reach your entire audience. Psychologists have studied personalities and there are many different models that segment people based on how they process information. One such model was created by Dr. Gary Coture. The D.O.P.E personality guide organizes people by birds, and it’s a fun and easy way to remember different personalities:

• Dove – The mediator. Doves are supportive, good at listening, value relationships, considerate, patient, and consistent.
• Owl – The analyzer. Owls are detail-oriented and process-driven, they approach problems analytically and with precision.
• Parrot – The talker. The most talkative and outgoing of the group, the parrot is interactive, optimistic, enthusiastic, energetic, and humorous.
• Eagle – The executive. Eagles are direct, dominant, results-oriented, and bottom-line focused.

Targeting these different personalities when telling your brand’s story is a unique way to deliver your message and will help you effectively communicate the “why” of what you do.

The Next Steps

Now that you have identified your story, your marketplace, your audience, and the different personalities within that audience, you can market to them. Craft different versions of your brand story based on different personalities.

Do you know if your audience is predominantly eagles and doves? Use that to your advantage and tell your story in a way that effectively communicates to those personalities. As you develop these messages, never forget what makes you unique, or why you do what you do.

The process of telling your story never ends, it is always changing, and as your business grows and develops, so does your audience.