By Rivka Willick

I often work with business professionals that struggle with branding.  They work hard on improving their products, skills, and services, but are often lost in the crowd.  They will pour buckets of money into logos, titles, taglines, and web designs only to step away looking like everybody else. Others will spend months or years writing books or creating expensive content rich videos only to turn around and see their slightly altered information promoting another business a few months later.

Why does this happen and why is it so common?  It happens because most people don’t infuse themselves into their branding. Each individual is unique and therefore interesting.  As time passes we become 10,000 stories, each tale making us a bit more complex and intriguing. These stories are an amalgam of life experiences, personal heritage, family legends, imagination, and a wild mix of the culture to which we are constantly exposed.

We are our stories….and that’s a good thing.  Stories are the stickest of all spoken or written communications.  The story format is easy to remember and often hard to forget. It’s the natural branding tool.  Stories also turn bland easily copied information into one-of-a-kind content that will be associated with you and your business.

Let’s say you’re writing an information rich book or video about your area of expertise. Maybe you’ve spent years researching and writing it. Once it’s printed it will only take few minutes to copy and ‘spin’ the contents so it’s technically a different text but has all the same information.  (This can be done with any information thick content). Now let’s say you’re writing the same book or video but you infuse your stories into it.  This not only improves the content by making it easier to comprehend, fun to experience, and memorable but it also infuses your story DNA into the content. It’s easy to recoginze and tough to steal.

This same logic applies to webpages, printed brochures, company names and logos, and marketing materials. When you weave your stories into your content, you will own your brand.

By now you’re probably nodding your head and agreeing, but how do you find the stories?  You can make something up, or maybe dig up a high school essay, but you know that’s not right.  If you are a natural storyteller you might be able to create content on your own, but most professionals know the wisdom of seeking out experts for best results.

I’m a story coach and I help people find their stories.

When they find their stories everything tends to come together. Their branding stands out, writen and video content pops, and communications in general greatly improves.

Story coaching can be done in person or online thorugh Skype or Google Hangout.  It’s time to find your stories so you can stand out from the crowd.

Learn more about story coaching or schedule a session with me at Rivka@SimplyExtraordinaryTales.com.  

Mention this blog and receive $50 off a 3 session package.