Considering the many things you likely have to take care of during a typical day, it’s understandable if you haven’t had time to work on your company’s story. You might be wondering how much good can come from creating and telling others about your company’s story.
With that in mind, letting people know more about your company can have more of a positive impact on your business than you might think. However, you might not know a lot about your company’s story. Or, you might know about your company’s story but not how to tell it.
No matter how you feel about your ability to explain your story, it’s always good to share this information with others. Don’t worry if you don’t consider yourself to be a storyteller.
Trade-In Tech is here to help you effectively create a story about your business that has a lot of important benefits. Here are many great ways that you can make your business more appealing by telling people about your company’s story.
What’s a Company’s Story? (I’m Not a Storyteller!)
Before we get started, you might be objecting to the idea of telling your company’s story. We totally get it. Don’t worry - you don’t have to be an author to tell the story of your brand. After a little thinking, we’re sure you begin to think of key moments throughout your company’s history.
Need a little more motivation to get started writing about your company? We’re here to help. As you start writing about your business, keep these tips in mind.
Start With Something You’re Passionate About
One major part of creating a great story has to do with how passionate you are about your chosen topic. For example, a mechanic might not be as excited to talk about flipping cell phones as someone in the electronics industry would. If the topic of conversation switched to car parts, the mechanic would probably start talking a lot more because they find this topic interesting.
When you’re talking (or writing) about something that excites you, such as your business, it’s much easier to create something that’s engaging. Fortunately, since you’re writing about your business, it should be fairly easy to start thinking of how to put your company’s story into words.
Take Sales Out of Your Company’s Story
Whether this is your first time writing about your business, or you’ve written thousands of pieces, it can sometimes be hard to avoid trying to sell your company while telling its story. An example of this would be to mention every single item your company sells. Yes, that’s important information. But it’s a small part of your company’s story.
One potential way to overcome this obstacle is to imagine that you’re a news reporter covering a story about your business. By doing this, you’re taking a step back and away from your company. This objective viewpoint might help you write something a little more engaging.
Sometimes, Less is More
You might be reading this and find yourself able to think of lots of things about your company that you want the world to know. While it’s good to be excited about your business, be prepared to do some editing as you continue writing about your company.
For many people, it’s easy to assume that they need to write out pages and pages of information. Fortunately, you don’t need to make your company’s story as long. It’s essential to remember that the average person has quite a short attention span - this is just the way it is. As you write about your company, condense this information into the important points.
There’s no magic amount of words it takes to get your company’s story out there. What is more important is that you start telling this story. By doing this, you’ll have a much easier-than-normal time connecting with other companies and people.
Try to Limit Your Use of Business Terms
Another trap that’s easy to fall into is using words you commonly use day-to-day. Most people will understand terms like smartphones and tablets. However, more complicated topics like application processors or camera image sensors might go over the head of the average consumer.
If you’re unsure of what is too technical or not, have someone else (not connected to your business) look over what you’ve written. Getting a lot of puzzled looks isn’t a good sign. You can even have this person highlight or otherwise let you know about words that seem too complicated.
8 Tips for Building Better Connections by Telling Your Company’s Story
By now, you have gained a basic understanding of your company’s story and why it’s so important. Now, it’s time to learn a series of tips that can help you create a story about your brand that everyone wants to read and share. Before you write your company’s story, make sure to follow the tips you’re about to see.
1. Create Videos About Your Business
Sometimes, you don’t want to open up another new document to type out part of your company’s story. If this is the case, maybe it’s time to start making videos about your business. Creating videos is a great way to potentially connect with your company’s audience. Videos are also extremely effective parts of most company’s marketing campaigns.
Videos are naturally effective ways of telling another person or company about your business. One study found that about 94% of marketing professionals felt that using video content helped others understand the explanation of a product or service. If you want to let someone know what’s going on within your company, creating a video is a great way to achieve this goal.
You don’t need to have rows of professional lighting and high-quality cameras to make a great video. In some cases, good lighting and a smartphone can be all you need to start updating your company’s audience in video form.
A growing number of people are actually watching video content from the internet more than they’re watching television shows or movies. Take advantage of this fast-growing audience by making a few videos for your company’s fans. If you don’t know where to get started, we’ve got more information on the best video-sharing platforms for your company to check out.
YouTube
The most popular way to tell your company’s story in video format remains YouTube. Recent research shows people worldwide watch a billion hours of content from YouTube each day. With so many people watching videos on YouTube, it could be a good idea to get these people watching content about your company.
Making videos on YouTube might also improve your company’s search engine rankings. This is because Google owns YouTube, often placing videos from the latter into its search engine results. Chances are, you can make a few searches in Google and see YouTube videos show up on the first page of Google.
Considering that YouTube is about to eclipse all of televisions regarding how many hours of it people watch, it definitely makes sense to start posting YouTube videos about your business as fast as possible.
Twitch
If you asked some of the most popular content creators how they connected with their fans, a growing number of people would mention streaming. While it’s a newer concept, streaming is fairly easy to explain. It’s simply another term used for live video, typically longer in duration than a standard video.
Let’s say that you wanted to create a 15-minute video that was free from errors and gave a quick explanation about something. In this case, recording and uploading a polished video would probably be the best way to get your company’s message across.
We’ll be honest - streaming isn’t for everyone (especially those new to making videos or people who don’t want to talk about their business in a live streaming format). For those who are comfortable spending time in front of the camera, streaming can be an incredible and under-utilized way to connect with an audience who shows interest in your business.
You could consider having a stream that showcases new electronics you recently purchased. Or you can host a stream that allows people to ask questions about your company. Some businesses hold informational streams that can educate and sell an audience on doing business with your company. If you’re comfortable with streaming, it can be a strategy that can pay off for your business.
Social Media
You don’t only need to use YouTube or Twitch to start making great and informative videos. With that in mind, there is a wide range of social media websites that also allow you to create and/or post videos to their platforms.
One of the best social media websites you can use to share videos is Instagram. This popular social media platform has about 320 million users around the world. Needless to say, Instagram can be a powerful platform to use for video creation and sharing. Since it’s a platform built for people that like viewing pictures and videos, you can gain a lot of engagement by using Instagram.
Another popular social media website remains Facebook. Regardless of how you feel about this platform, research shows that it currently has about 2.89 billion active users each month. Some people enjoy using Facebook to stay connected with their family and friends. People also use this social media platform to learn more information about businesses.
If you’re looking for another, less often utilized way to form connections through videos, you might also want to check out Pinterest. This social media website primarily uses Pins to connect its users with interesting content. However, you can also create Pins that are based on your company’s videos. It might not be the method that gains your videos the most traffic. But, for some companies, Pinterest can become one of their most popular social platforms.
You might also think about posting your company’s videos to LinkedIn. To some people, this might seem like an odd choice. However, LinkedIn does allow you to embed videos into both your profile page and your created posts. Since LinkedIn primarily functions as a business-to-business (B2B) platform, it’s a great place to start making connections with other companies.
2. Let Others Know About Your Inspirations
Many people depend on some type of inspiration to motivate them. Whether it’s an inspirational movie, a great book, or a song, we all have things that motivate us. If you’ve found that special something, it could be a good idea to share it with your company’s audience.
When you’re sharing what you or your employees have been enjoying, it creates content that your customers or business partners might find engaging. You could find that sharing a great business book or motivational song really helps someone out during a tough time.
What’s also great about sharing what motivates or inspires you is that these topics are great content ideas. Does your website or social media pages need new content, but you can’t think of any ideas? Take some time to share your inspirations.
If you suspect that anything you like might alienate your audience, it’s probably in your best interest to leave out those inspirations. These might include anything that has to do with either politics or religion, two topics that are best kept private.
Another way to help you determine what or what not to share is by pretending you’re talking to one of your grandparents. If you wouldn’t share a song or movie choice with them, it’s probably best to not mention these inspirations to your customers.
3. Take Lots of Pictures
What good is a story without pictures? If you asked most people, they would likely tell you that every great story needs pictures to go along with it. When you’re telling your company’s story, it’s always a good idea to include pictures.
You can take pictures of your building, workspaces, work teams, and anything else that could make a great photo. Including these photos within your company’s content helps readers visualize your business, which is great for making connections with an audience.
There are many more beneficial reasons to start including images in the content your company creates. One of these benefits is that content with photos is more encouraging for other people to share. After all, you likely wouldn’t share a 2,000-word blog post that has no images. However, taking lots of pictures can benefit people who resell electronics.
Having images in your content is also great from an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint. Major search engines like Google typically want to send their users to pages that are engaging. In most cases, Google won’t send pages to the top of its results unless they include at least one image.
4. Show How Others Feel About Your Company
Sometimes, the best way to talk about your own company is to have others do this for you. One of the best ways to achieve this goal is by collecting reviews or testimonials. Essentially, reviews and testimonials might sound like the same thing. In a basic sense, they are. With that said, testimonials and reviews are a little different from each other.
Reviews are usually managed by a third party. For instance, let’s say that your business receives reviews on its Google page. In this situation, Google collects and manages the reviews. This means that Google is in control of whether to leave reviews up or take them down.
On the other hand, testimonials are usually long-form reviews that your business collects and manages. With this advantage, your business can have a little more freedom with how the testimonials look when they’re finalized. In most cases, getting both reviews and testimonials at the same time is the best possible outcome.
You can start including reviews or testimonials almost anywhere, including your websites and social media pages. Having other people talk about your business can be a major help when it comes to boosting your company’s sales. One study found that about 72% of those surveyed would not buy a product or service until they could read reviews about it.
By working to collect reviews and testimonials, you’ll make sure that any interested people have lots of good things to read about your business.
5. Post News About Your Business
Chances are, throughout a typical week, there are lots of things happening within your company. With that in mind, why not let other people know about all of the cool things your company is up to?
Over time, many of your customers will build close connections with your business. Because of that, some of these individuals will naturally want to know about what your company plans on doing next. When you can meet these people with engaging news-related content about your business, you’re making sure these connections only grow deeper.
Another great way to keep customers in the loop about your business is by sending them emails. And, there’s almost nothing better to include inside of these emails than news about your company.
6. Using Social Media to Spread the Word
When you think about your company’s story, it’s not always easy to instantly come up with a long story that mentions every relevant detail about your business. There’s no law saying that you need to tell the story of your business all at once.
If you’re looking for a quick and simple way to let the world know more about your business, why not do this on social media? Understandably, the world of social media might seem a little daunting or intimidating for your business. Fear not - we’ve got more information about some of the world’s most popular social media platforms.
Trade-In Tech
If you want more people to find out about your business, you’ll want to make sure you’re on Trade-In Tech. Formed in 2012, Trade-In Tech is a members-only wholesale electronics platform for people and companies throughout the electronics industry.
Joining Trade-In Tech is easy to do. All you need to do is set up your account and provide us with some information about your business as well as references. With this system in place, we help ensure that it’s not easy for scammers to enter our platform. After your account is set up, you can begin enjoying the many features that Trade-In Tech has to offer.
One of the best things about this platform is that we offer an exclusive marketplace where you’ll always find great deals on electronics from some of the most popular companies, including Apple, Samsung, Sony, LG, and many others. This marketplace is also categorized with sections for the most popular types of electronics, including:
Smartphones
Tablets
Laptops
Televisions
Smartwatches
Home tech
And much more!
Trade-In Tech offers much more than an awesome marketplace. After you become a member, you can create your own social page that gets seen by our huge network of fellow members. You can use this page to update people about your business, list what you have for sale, and much more.
Another stand-out feature of Trade-In Tech is the massive amount of exclusive members-only that gives you strategies and tips that our CEO, Hayden Howard used to begin his multi-million dollar companies. Trade-In Tech’s content can help you do everything from grow your business to learn how to recycle electronics.
If you’re using social media to share content about your business, there’s almost no better place to do this than on Facebook. We mentioned Facebook earlier as a great place to share videos, but it’s also a platform you’ll want to check out to talk about your business.
Facebook is a great place to regularly post content about your company, including promotional information, new pictures, and much more. You can also use Facebook to engage with other companies, conduct polls to gain visitors’ opinions, and share the latest meme.
When there’s a little bit of wiggle room in your company’s budget, you can always try Facebook’s wide range of advertising features. Through paid Facebook advertising, your company can begin gaining even more traffic. Whether you flip phones or sell other types of electronics, Facebook can have a lot to offer.
Another popular social media platform is Instagram. Depending on how often you use social media, you might not know what this platform is. Instagram is a free social media app that allows its users to specifically share photos and videos with each other. You can also include text inside of these posts.
Instagram is an awesome platform for people and companies of all ages. It’s also incredibly popular with over one billion accounts using this social media platform. What’s a little different about Instagram compared to other platforms is that it works the best within the Instagram app. Fortunately, this mega-popular app is available on both iOS and Android devices.
In the past, you could barely use Instagram on a desktop or laptop computer. Fortunately, this is changing as the Instagram team continues working on making this service as accessible as possible.
Chances are, your business is likely either working or going to work with other companies. If this is the case, LinkedIn could become one of your company’s most valuable platforms. You can use LinkedIn to create a page about your company, connect with other accounts, and tell the story of your business. And, yes, this website is about much more than a place you use to find a job.
There are several ways to accomplish storytelling on LinkedIn. One way many companies achieve this goal is by filling out information on their LinkedIn profiles. Much like other platforms, you can also share information about your company by creating a post on LinkedIn. However, that’s not the only way to reach an audience on this platform.
LinkedIn also allows its users to create paid advertisements on its platform. If you need to get in touch with people or companies on LinkedIn, utilizing this platform’s paid advertising system can be a great way to accomplish this task.
Another incredibly popular social media platform for marketing your business is Pinterest. Pinterest utilizes a system of pins to collect and organize its content. The concept of this social media platform might sound a little confusing, but it’s not once you start using it.
One of the best ways to tell your company’s story on Pinterest is by creating lots of Pins. Being that Pinterest is such a popular platform, it’s best to try and post at least a few pins every week. Your business might get even more engagement by posting pins multiple times per day.
If you’re not always going to be on the computer, you can also choose to schedule Pinterest posts. All you have to do is create your content and schedule when you want to post it - Pinterest does the rest.
To post Pins that perform well, it’s good to include a description for each of your pins. While taking this step, try to also include keywords that are relevant to what your company works with. If you can follow this step with a link back to your website, you should start gaining lots of traction on Pinterest.
Twitter is another popular social media platform. However, the thing about Twitter is that it moves fast. If you don’t know about Twitter, it’s a social media website that consists of Tweets or short messages created by its users. And, there are a lot of people using Twitter. Recent research shows that an estimated 353 million people use Twitter each month.
If you want your business to start gaining popularity on Twitter, it’s helpful to start interacting with other users. You don’t need to overthink this strategy. The best things to start doing on Twitter are to follow other accounts and leave thoughtful comments on other user’s tweets.
One thing that Twitter helped to pioneer was the profile background picture. While it might seem like a minor detail, having a good background profile picture helps your account stand out from the more generic ones.
Something else that’s beneficial to do on Twitter is to use hashtags. Hashtags are how Twitter sorts and categorizes all of its many tweets. Some hashtags you might be interested in could include #smartphones or #electronics. Use relevant hashtags in tweets about your business to help ensure they’re seen by many people.
With several popular hashtags in your company’s tweets, you might be surprised at how many people and other companies you start connecting with on Twitter.
7. Work on Your Brand’s Style and Voice
You can most likely remember a time when a company’s advertisement had an impact on you. This doesn’t have to mean that an advertisement made you cry or gave you some deep emotion. Instead, this advertisement might have made you smile or think about an important issue.
As you begin telling your company’s story, you have a great opportunity to develop a voice and style for your brand. This voice and style can both be helpful as you continue writing about your business. With a proper style and voice, you humanize your company. This helps ensure that your business is as engaging as possible to the public.
8. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help
At some point, you’re likely to encounter a time when you’re unable to talk about the story of your business. It’s also possible that you simply don’t have the time or energy to complete this task. If any of the previously mentioned things are true, it could be time to ask for help.
In this day and age, with so many people working remotely, it’s easy to find the help you need. With enough instructions, you should be able to find a writer who can take the ideas you come into a conversation with and put them into words.
As you can see, telling your company’s story is an important thing for any business to do. At first, it might seem understandably nerve-wracking to tell your company’s story. By following the information found in this guide, you should be able to achieve this important goal. You can find out more information related to this topic by making a visit to Trade-In Tech’s blog. On this blog, you’ll find all sorts of content about how to manage an electronics business.