The Ultimate Guide To Visual Storytelling For Brand Building (+ Examples)

Establishing a brand identity is more complicated than it seems. Today we are going to provide a guide to visual storytelling for brand building.

It’s not simply about telling people who and what you are in a compelling way, which is what brand storytelling helps you achieve.

It’s also about showing people using visual cues.

This post shares everything you must know about visual storytelling. It also talks about how it can help your brand reach a greater audience and compel them to become your followers or customers.

What Is Brand Storytelling?

Brand storytelling is an experience that communicates what your company is about through stories.

And to create more empathy and kinship from your target audience towards your brand, you must inject emotion into them. The feelings you convey in your stories should align with what your brand is about.

In doing so, you attract people who share the same values as your brand, which could lead to turning them into your loyal customers.

Why Using Visuals Is Important For Telling Your Brand Story

Images and videos, whether streaming or played on TV,  are great narrative devices for a reason that’s different from words: they clearly narrate the story you want to convey.

The words used in brand storytelling enable you to paint a picture of your company. When done correctly, your audience will take the emotions and feelings from the image you’ve created, creating a much stronger recall of your brand.

But the problem with words is it takes too much to process the information in your audience’s head. 

They have to read the text and make sure they form the idea in their minds correctly as you intended it. This is only possible if your story is clear and leaves no room for interpretation.

To avoid these complications, use visual content to tell your brand story instead.

“What you see is what you get,” which is a saying that applies to visuals in brand storytelling. As a result, your audience can easily see and process the story simultaneously without pausing and thinking about it.

At the same time, visuals catch people’s attention and hold it longer than words would. This isn’t to say that text is ineffective, but there’s a lower likelihood that people will take time to read a story for minutes. 

They also contrast with visual storytelling, where everything is shown to you in a few seconds. Not to mention, graphic design trends like colors, art style, and concepts engage people’s senses more than plain text.

How To Tell Stories About Your Brand Using Visuals

If you’re ready to embrace visuals as part of your visual storytelling, below are things you must do to get started:

Determine The Goal For Your Brand Story

In other words, you want to achieve something with your story. Aside from promoting your brand, there has to be a greater purpose for sharing your brand story with people.

What feelings do you wish to evoke from your story, and how do they line up with your brand’s voice?

How do you plan on measuring the success of your brand story, i.e., what metrics can you use to identify whether you increased sales and customers after launching your story?

These are just some of the variables you must consider to help your brand measure its storytelling and see whether it achieved its goal or not.

Flesh Out Your Main Character

Every story has a protagonist that people will gravitate towards. To create a relatable character, s/he should be someone who shares the ideals of your audience, as well as their pains and hardships.

Break Down The Parts Of Your Story

To be clear, visual storytelling can range from long-form video content or full-page ads. Regardless of length and size, it should be able to communicate a full story that people can easily pick up.

And just like any story, your visual brand story must have a conflict, rising action, and resolution for it to be truly effective.

Bring Your Story To Life In Visual Format

Once you have established the skeleton of your brand story, you need to determine how to breathe life into your story concept.

It starts with identifying the form on which they will be created. As mentioned, you can choose from video to image or any content type that people can see.

Next, you must determine which tools to use. Adobe Photoshop and GIMP are graphic design tools you can’t do without for creating eye-catching images. For videos, you can’t go wrong with Filmora or Camtasia.

For other visual content types, you can use OneStream Live Studio for recording live streams that you can share straight with your audience and edit as part of a professionally produced video.

Best Visual Storytelling Examples For Brand Building

To give you ideas on how to approach brand storytelling using visuals, below are examples that you can take cues from:

Reckon Commercial Campaign

Reckon is an accounting tool that helps professionals and business owners take on top of their expenses. 

And to help communicate that message, it showcased different characters in their video representing each of their target audience’s pain points.

Reckon can position itself as a viable solution to this problem by voicing accounting concerns through these characters.

More importantly, the video showcased Reckon’s whimsical and upbeat brand, making it much more fun to watch even for people not looking for accounting software.

Apple

The technology company has been synonymous with its clean and minimalist visual ads for all its products in the 2000s. 

Its iPod ad stands out the most among its memorable ads due to its brand storytelling.

Even in the 80s, with its Macintosh commercial, Apple was never afraid of innovation using cutting-edge technology, which has become the brand’s hallmarks.

But the brand struck gold with the iPod, a first-of-its-kind MP3 player that carries more songs than any device on the market.

The ad is simply the front of the iPod with the words, “Say hello to the iPod. 1,000 songs in your pocket.”

As mentioned, one story or ad does not make a brand. It’s the consistent output of copy, images, and videos over decades promoting its innovative products that have made Apple a household name through the years.

Airbnb

The brand was initially marketed for people looking to rent homes, which doesn’t separate it from a bed and breakfast. However, Airbnb was able to find a niche of its own by tapping into community storytelling.

People who book homes using the app aren’t just paying for the lodging. They’re also paying for the hospitality to the unique culture of the place where they’re staying.

This is evident with Airbnb’s YouTube channel, which showcases the unique stories of hosts and lodgers. It features images 

Everyone part of the Airbnb community is essentially an ambassador for the brand. By taking part in the experience provided by the platform, they are creating a brand for the company.

Conclusion

Visual storytelling goes beyond the call of duty to help bands establish themselves in the market.

Sharing your brand identity through visual storytelling allows you to forge a deeper relationship with your target audience. Aside from people reading what you want to say, they get to see and experience your brand up close and personal.

Hopefully, this post has encouraged you to implement visuals into your brand storytelling to increase your reach and turn people into rabid customers.