One of the advantages of craft is the stories centred around it. Stories of the techniques, the process, the materials, the heritage, the inspiration, and the maker, the essence of which becomes embedded into the objects created. This makes storytelling a must-use, visibility-increasing component of your marketing strategy to help your craft business stand out. Brand storytelling does this in the following ways:

1. Establishing a USP

In marketing, there is what is known as a Unique Selling Point (USP). In other words, what makes your business, product or service different from similar offerings in the marketplace? Your USP is the thing that sets your craftwork apart. And the stories you have to tell about your craft contribute to shaping your USP. Your USP will help you develop a strong brand identity that encompasses your mission, purpose, values, messaging, graphics, craftwork characteristics, and so much more.

2. Becoming memorable

A distinctive USP, in turn, makes your craftwork memorable. People remember stories over facts, and when the story of your work resonates with them, they will find it easier to recall what you do. By sharing the stories centred around your USP, you strengthen the customer connection to your work. This is important because connections will help you engage with your customers, building relationships that lead to trust and loyalty.

3. Generating awareness

Being memorable generates brand awareness. When your audience becomes more familiar with your work and story, they start to recognise what makes your craft unique, your signature style. As a result, your craftwork immediately stands out to those who are drawn to what you do and why you do it.

4. Creating emotional connections

Brand awareness leads to emotional connections as the people who come to know and connect with the story behind your craftwork become more invested in what you do. When people buy into your story, emotional connections form. They start to appreciate your work as being more than just another product, viewing it as something meaningful to their lives. This is the reason why storytelling is a powerful brand asset. Stories can fire up the imagination, touching people on a deeper level in ways other marketing strategies cannot.

5. Building Trust

Emotional connections build trust. Trust turns audiences into customers. The people who buy your products and then tell others about you. Trust occurs when people believe in what you say and do. Building trust requires consistency in the messages you share and how you show up and present your work. Gaining trust is a gradual process as people come to know more about you. Building trust requires exceptional customer service skills because the way you treat your customers can make or break their trust in your craft business.

6. Gathering a community

Trust gathers a community of loyal followers who willingly support and believe in what you do. Having a community puts you in a position of influence to inspire and motivate others for the better. Influence comes with responsibility, and when used to good effect, it can lead to acts of positive impact that extend beyond your business, community and industry, leading to even more stories to tell.

If you are fed up with your handcrafted products being invisible and want to learn how to use storytelling to help your business stand out from the crowd, read Harnessing the power of storytelling in your craft business to help you create better customer connections.

– Tapiwa Matsinde

[Image credits: The image shown belongs to rovenimages.com sourced via Pexels. If downloaded and used elsewhere, please credit accordingly.]

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The 5 story types are:

1. The Emotional Connection Story

This is the story that builds an emotional connection between you and audience. Emotional connections create a bond of trust and loyalty. A 2015 survey by content marketing agency, Headstream revealed that if people really love a brand story 15% will buy the product immediately, 55% are more likely to buy the product in the future, while 44% will share the story. Emotional stories can also tug at the heartstrings. When using this story type, be authentic and don’t over do it by becoming too sentimental as that can have the opposite effect of making your audience feel uncomfortable.

2. The Entertaining Story

People love to be entertained and injecting a bit of humour into your brand stories is one of the best ways to do this. Humour brings joy and makes people feel good. This story type can offer a form of momentary escapism when times are tough. Using humour in your brand stories helps to make them memorable, relatable and shareable. When using humour in your stories ensure your message doesn’t get lost in the laughs, as too much humour can lead to not being taken seriously.

3. The Inspirational Story

The inspirational story motivates audiences to do and be better. This story aligns with their values and helps build community. Inspirational stories can inspire your audience to aspire to improving their lives, the lives of others or the world around them. This could be improving their well-being, learning something new, or becoming part of something bigger than themselves. Inspirational stories foster brand loyalty even creating life-changing movements.

4. The User-Generated Story

Some of the best brand stories are those told by your customers, and the user generated story focuses on sharing them (with your customers permissions off course). User-generated stories provide social proof, which can increase your business’ credibiblity and trustworthiness. Types of user-generated stories include testimonials, case studies, and social comments and captions that you can use in your digital channels and printed marketing materials.

5. The Problem and Solution Story

The problem and solution story is one of the most common story types. As the name suggests you highlight a problem in your audiences lives and position your product or service within your story to provide a solution to overcoming it. To create emotional connections and build trust use personal or real-life user-generated examples in your problem and solution story to illustrate what you are saying.

These are just 5 proven types of brand stories that you can use to increase your sale conversions. Your brand stories can focus on one of these story types or be a combination of a few or all. And, regardless of the type of story you use remember to keep your stories authentic, because ‘66% of people believe the best stories are those about regular people.’ [source. Headstream, 2015]

Which of these brand story types would work for your artisan business? I’d love to know, do share in the comments.

– Tapiwa Matsinde

[Image credits: The image shown belongs to PNW Production sourced from Pexels. If downloaded and used elsewhere, please credit accordingly.]

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Storytelling is a powerful way to attract and help your right audiences emotionally connect with what you do. Why? because audiences are more likely to remember a story than facts, as underscored by the popular saying ‘Facts tell, stories sell‘ (attributed to Bryan Eisenberg, an online marketing expert).

With so many businesses offering similar things, telling the stories behind your craft offerings cuts through the noise by acting as a beacon that draws customers towards you. Thoughtful and targeted brand storytelling takes your customers on a journey of discovery, helping them decide whether to invest in your objects or that of your peers. Consumers are craving deeper connections especially given what the world has been through with Covid. They want to be inspired, and knowing that real people are behind the objects that have caught their interest helps them find meaning in their purchases. Storytelling helps them achieve that.

As a maker business or artisan retailer the crafts you make or sell are rich with stories waiting to be told. As a writer telling the stories of artisans from around the world, I know the life-changing impact storytelling has on raising the visibility of a maker and their craftwork. I also know, however, that it is not always easy to turn the stories of your craftwork into relatable, shareable, attention-attracting content. Here are 4 straightforward and easy-to-implement tips to help you get started with harnessing the power of storytelling to help you create better customer connections:

1. Create a signature story

Harnessing the power of storytelling starts with creating the one story that is relevant to your business. Create a signature story that shares the why behind your craft and business- the reason you set it up and create and sell the objects you do. Create a story centred around your passion, purpose, inspirations, where you are based, the materials you use and what your workshop or retail store is like. Include information about you as the maker, or the artisans you work with. You can do this as an interview or a video that you can transcribe into text. Include your customers in your brand story by sharing their testimonials and experiences, this helps make your stories relatable, building trust with potential customers.

2. Keep your story authentic

Tell the story of your business in your own words and voice. Your style of speaking is what makes you you. In copywriting and marketing, this is called tone-of-voice. To capture your tone-of-voice you can record yourself speaking and listen to how you speak, and sound, taking note of the words you use. If you’re hesitant to do this because you are not a ‘writer’ know that people are more likely to connect with what sounds and feels authentic over perfectly polished text with no personality. Pro tip: run the text through a grammar and spelling editor or get a trusted person to review it to help you polish it up.

3. Repurpose your story

Your signature story is just the start. Give your story wings by repurposing it. To repurpose is to adapt something for a different application. When you have created your signature story, break it up, for example: into quotes, single sentences or short paragraphs, or record them as sound bites for video and audio. Doing this gives your one story mileage.

4. Share your story on the relevant channels

For your brand story to be effective and reach your desired audience you have to put it out there. Share your signature story across your various marketing channels. To maximise your reach and impact do your research to ensure you are using the relevant channels your target audiences are on.

Those are some tips that I hope you will find useful. If you are a maker or artisan retailer who wants to harness the power of storytelling to help you raise your business profile to create better customer connections and get more consistent sales it’s time to start putting the stories of your purpose and creations to work. Head this way to discover how I can help.

– Tapiwa Matsinde

[Image credits: The image shown is by Sarah Dorweiler on Pexels. If downloaded and used elsewhere please credit accordingly.]

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By now, we all know that we ‘should’ share our craft business brand stories on our website, social media platforms, and in our newsletters, but how exactly do we do this in a way that is purposeful, impactful and genuine while not feeling like we’re oversharing?

There is no specific strategy for this; you are the strategy. You get to decide how you show up, what you choose to share and what you prefer to keep private. And that starts with being super clear about what you will and won’t share. If being seen as the face of your artisan business is a struggle, read: How to show up as the face of your craft business when you don’t like being in the spotlight.

To share the brand stories of your craft business without losing your soul:

1. Be yourself

Your stories are a communication vehicle through which your audiences can get to know and connect with your personality. Everyone’s personality is different. You don’t have to shout to be heard if that is not you. It’s ok if you’re shy, it’s ok to be selective. Equally, it’s ok if you’re bold or an open book. Whether you align with the former or the latter, sharing your stories requires an element of vulnerability, and for most of us, being vulnerable is never a comfortable space to be in. The trick is to be aware of the line between telling the stories that give your audience an insight into who you are and what you do, versus giving away every single detail. Unfold your Story, our signature storytelling course, guides you through the process of doing this.

2. Be selective

Sharing the stories of your craftwork and business without losing your soul requires setting boundaries by being selective about what you share and when, and how you share. To ensure you share the content you want to share, create a story bucket system of categories that you can refer back to, and keep you on track. Unfold your Story shows you exactly how to do this.

3. Be present

For your stories to have effect, you need to be present, not just by sharing them but by actively giving thought to how your storytelling strategy will unfold. Shut out the distractions and give yourself the time and space to truly connect to the purpose and impact your stories can have, and to appreciate why telling a particular story matters when it comes to promoting your business.

4. Be consistent

Consistency is an essential ingredient to being successful at almost anything. Consistency helps you get into a repetitive rhythm, repetition creates processes, which create ease. Again, this will look different for different personalities, working styles and circumstances. The question to answer is ‘what does consistency mean for you?’ because being ‘consistent’ by churning out content and posting multiple times a day, because that’s what you’ve been told to do, is not going to help.

Whether you are bubbly or reserved, the best way to share your stories is to do it your way. If you need help figuring out how to share the brand stories of your craft business without losing your soul, have a look at Unfold your Story, our expertly crafted storytelling masterclass for artisan businesses. Learn more here.

– Tapiwa Matsinde

[Image credits: The image shown is copyright Cup of Couple via Pexels. If downloaded and used elsewhere, please credit accordingly.]

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Now that the hype has settled, marketers and content creators are getting a clearer sense of how to make the most of this technology. It all comes down to retaining the authenticity of our humanness by not becoming reliant on the technology. AI may have its advantages, but it cannot replace the human-centred experience. The phrases, emotions, gestures and quirks that make us who we are. This is what writers, professional copywriters and content creators who are focused on creating authentic content understand.

If you are producing blog posts, creating website about me pages, captions for social media posts, and so forth you are creating content and AI is being promoted as the wonder tool to generate this content in seconds. The advantage of speed is what makes AI attractive. I mean who wants to spend 3 hours writing and editing a blog post when with a few prompts ChatGPT can give you a search engine-friendly 500-word article complete with sub-headings, examples and bullet points in under 3 seconds?

It sounds too good to be true, and while AI delivers what it has been created to do, on closer inspection it is the quality of ‘good’ and generic-sounding copy that concerns ethically-minded content creators. At the time of writing, AI can only pull and generate information from what already exists, based on what its creators and their algorithms have fed it. This means that whatever content an AI tool generates is already stale. And by using this content we are simply regurgitating the same content as every other user rather than creating our own fresh content.

In fact, Google, which has Gemini -its own AI tool- has updated its algorithm to reduce low-quality or unoriginal content showing up in search results by 40%, and that includes auto-generated content. (Google Blog) So if you are not careful using AI to create all your content could harm your content marketing efforts.

Also, if you use AI to generate your content be aware that you may not own the copyright. This has the potential to create all sorts of future legal problems.

Does this mean you shouldn’t use AI? No, of course not. AI is a big help for creating content, and we admit that we do use it for ideas, prompts, and images, but like with any powerful tool, you need to use it responsibly. That means:

Don’t just copy AND paste AI Text

Generating AI content is just the first step. Unless you want your brand to sound like a clone AI results need to be edited, fact-checked, re-written and given a ‘voice’ before the content is acceptable to use. This process can take hours, and by the time you’re done, the content is completely different to what you started with.

Use it for ideas and prompts

AI content generators work well as search engines. If you are stuck for ideas it can offer up suggestions that you can then use to craft your own authentic copy.

Whether or not you choose to use AI to create your content when it comes to crafting the stories about your work remember that AI is no substitute for the person behind the craft. So let’s Keep. It. Real and put in the time and effort to create our own authentically-us content.

– Tapiwa Matsinde

[Image credits: The image shown belongs to Karolina Grabowska via Pexels. If downloaded and used elsewhere please credit accordingly.]

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