Storytelling Through Brand Journalism

Building Trust And Confidence In Your Brand

If you’re not willing to tell your story to the world, who will? We’ve developed PR strategies for a lot of organizations over the years. There’s nothing like positive publicity to drive new business growth. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the benefits of creating your own news content and distributing it via organic and paid digital channels.

This approach is called Brand Journalism and it’s been adopted by many successful organizations to foster trust and a stronger connection with its audiences. As a long-term strategy, brand journalism informs and entertains first, and helps sell things second. While sales may take a back seat, the audience develops more brand loyalty as they receive value from the content. Brand journalism is a step beyond content marketing, because it requires an organization to establish its own newsroom as a content hub where meaningful stories are generated, then shared.

Stories To Tell

These are authentic stories that bring value by genuinely talking about various aspects of an organization in a journalistic manner. They cover a range of aspects like the history of the organization, community involvement, milestones achieved, leadership and employee profiles, as well as work culture, behind the scene activities and why it does what it does. These  stories help to humanize the brand, display its expertise, create an affinity and influence behavior.

A brand’s newsroom looks for ways to present information in an entertaining format. You need to be able to look at your own organization as an outsider and figure out what is interesting and why. Then you need to package that up with good copy, video, photography and graphics like any other news organization would.

Brand journalism lends itself to greater transparency and credibility for the brand. It has proved instrumental for organizations during times of crisis, regular scrutiny, brand audits or while having difficult conversations with their audiences. This doesn’t happen in a day and is the result of joint efforts made by a team that is responsible for sharing stories about the organization in a journalistic manner, as part of a “newsroom”.

Ironically, when brands start publishing entertaining stories about their own organizations, they frequently find that they get more favorable media coverage. This side benefit is often because this strategy forces you to package your stories as news outlets would. When you do that, it shouldn’t be a surprise that more news outlets pick up your stories.

Not Sure Where To Begin?

At Dooley PR and Marketing, our team of experts can help you keep your marketing and communications strategies up to date with the current trends. Let’s discuss how we can best assist you with sharing meaningful stories about your brand while building trust and credibility with your audiences.