From a very young age we love listening to stories. So brands should inject the magic of storytelling into their marketing to touch people emotions. A brand story is more than content and a narrative. Brand storytelling isn’t exactly a new concept, but with the growth of social media and content marketing, the opportunities to tell stories as part of direct and indirect brand marketing initiatives have become a priority.

There are a few secrets that brand storytellers understand and use to engage and connect emotionally with consumers.  These include a mix of branding fundamentals and fiction writing basics.

• Honesty and transparency

It sounds obvious, but to be trusted, brands must be honest because confusion is the number one brand killer. Honesty and transparency are very important in brand storytelling. If your brand stories are inconsistent, they’ll confuse consumers who will turn away from the brand. So you need to be creative but don’t stray too far from your brand promise.

• Put personality into the story

Brand stories are not ads and they are not sales pitches. Brand stories should be told with the brand persona and the writer’s personality at center stage. The goal of creating a brand personality is creating an identity for your customers to interact with.

Boring stories won’t attract and retain readers, but stories brimming with personality can. Customers may also buy into the culture around your brand, wanting to make themselves more like the personality you create by associating more often with your products.

• Create good characters for your story

It is always a good idea to create characters your audience will like and cheer for. That doesn’t mean you’re required to create fictional characters or mascots. You can use your audience’s buyer personas as characters to drive an even deeper relationship with your brand. When your target audience can relate to your consumers, their emotional connection to your brand grows organically.

• Don’t give it all away

By leaving consumers wanting more, each marketing tactic implemented to promote that brand (directly or indirectly) can build upon the one before it until the anticipation and buzz reaches a fever pitch. How to do that? With perpetual marketing tactics , such as Leaking bits and pieces of information, holding promotional events and contests. This tactics offer the perfect opportunity to include offline and mobile marketing in your brand storytelling initiative, too.