The Power of Brand Storytelling in Driving Awareness and Taking Large Organizations to the Next Level

Eric Eden: 0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Samantha Carroll. She is the CEO of the agency once upon a brand. Samantha, welcome to the show.

Samantha Carroll: 1:10

Thank you so much, Eric. I'm so excited to be here today.

Eric Eden: 1:14

We appreciate it. Why don't you share with us just a minute or so about your background and what type of marketing you do with your clients?

Samantha Carroll: 1:27

Sure. So I am a strategic communications consultant. I actually started my career on the production side of TV, working for Comedy Central many years ago and actually get a kick out of some of the comedians early on that are now really big stars that I see here and there. But I quickly learned that the TV industry lifestyle was not quite for me. So I went back and got my MBA at Georgetown University. I focused on strategic communications and marketing and came out doing federal government consulting. After a few years of that I decided to form my own company, once upon a brand, and we work primarily with healthcare, health and social advocacy and education and tech type companies or nonprofit organizations and work mainly in the communications world of content development and of communication strategy, of building connections with stakeholders.

Eric Eden: 2:37

That's great. So tell us a story about some of the marketing that you've done, that you're most proud of the best marketing that you've done.

Samantha Carroll: 2:48

Sure. So I've been really fortunate that I've worked with some amazing clients and some amazing nonprofit organizations, but there's one that really does stand out and is near and dear to my heart, which is a nonprofit hospital in the Washington DC area and Maryland. They are now probably close to 100 million in revenue. At the time they had six clinics. They were opening a new pharmacy. Now I think they're probably up to about 65,000 people served a year, and I was brought on as a consultant to do a couple of things. So the goals were increased visibility, increased brand awareness and understanding of the community impact that they were making, and their foundation was to, and still is to, serve patients, whether they are insured or uninsured, and so for every insured patient they see that affords them to serve to uninsured. So they were making a huge impact in the community of underrepresented people in the DC and Maryland area. So another big thing that they wanted to do was to try to better align their communications with their five year strategic goals, and one of those was to be seen as a trusted center of excellence. And so how do we do that? How do we establish a strategy and a plan when there are so many different stakeholders. Here we had an uninsured population. An insured population donors, staff, volunteer refers to Mary Center, and so this is really more of a story of strengthening brand awareness by using storytelling as our basis, and so the very first thing I did coming into this was to understand all of the strengths they had in communication, all of the weaknesses, doing some of that traditional research work of understanding their target markets but really also understanding the internal struggles that some of the staff were having in terms of being able to reach these people right, this audience, and so one of the difficulties was that many of the uninsured didn't necessarily have access to technology, so some of the things we think about email and social media, we couldn't reach them some of the traditional ways. So we really had to think creatively and also position ourselves as this center of excellence so that it attracted the kinds of donors that they wanted to continue attracting and to grow that donorship base so that they could do even more. After looking through the research, speaking with a lot of people, understanding the different pain points across stakeholders, internally and also externally, what we did was rely on the idea of strong storytelling. So if we could create and align stories that help tell about the value of the community impact they were doing, of how they partnered with different organizations to uplift others. We could create shareable content. We could make it memorable. We could better align them as the center of excellence, also by tapping into they had this wealth of healthcare experience at their fingertips and weren't quite tapping into that subject matter expertise. We, with my wonderful colleague at the time we had been working together, jillian Swartz and I came up with four branded campaigns. What we did was we actually created silos based on not just a segmented group. We didn't just want to create communications for donors. We created branded stories that had some nuances between them. For example, one of them was to know fill in the blank of this nonprofit is to love. Fill in the blank of this nonprofit. The stories that we shared were all of the ways people loved this nonprofit. That's how we connected to people. That's how we created empathy and understanding. We established that deeper understanding with the audience of this is not just a place where you come when you have an annual physical or when you're sick. This is a place that is really a home for your health care. It's family care. It's how we're elevating the community. That was one of the campaigns. Another was the Center of Excellence. That campaign centered around all of the thought leadership that was at their fingertips. Instead of blogging about recipes or company updates, which are all useful, we wanted to tap into what kinds of information are these health care providers able to give us? How do we create content based on that subject matter expertise in a way that does not take up a lot of their time, because they don't have a lot of time. They're seeing patients constantly. That was a challenge, but by branding that content as Center of Excellence, it really put their thought leadership and expertise at the forefront. Each of these branded campaigns that revolved around stories were really organized according to that campaign. We had branded hashtags. We had a lexicon specific to that campaign. Any blog content that related only to that campaign was branded with all of those words and all of those hashtags. It was very clear when someone read a blog oh yeah, I get this, I understand. And it tapped into all of those different pain points of multiple audiences at once.

Eric Eden: 9:58

I think this is very interesting, because what a lot of companies do is they just blast a lot of different things out on social media. It's a little bit disorienting in terms of there's a lot of great things that any organization can talk about, but the bigger they get, the more things there are they can talk about. You can go in a hundred different directions when people don't know what to expect from your communications. That's when it's actually not strategic. What I'm hearing is that you were able to create four main themes and then build around those themes the message that you wanted to get out about trust and about center of excellence. When you made it thematic like that, what was the impact?

Samantha Carroll: 10:48

Yeah, I think that it was able to deepen the understanding of this nonprofit, not just, as I said, a healthcare place where you make an appointment once and then forget about it. We brought to life all of the different ways they do lots of different fundraising events and getting the community involved in a really critical way enable them to keep promoting their good work. When people understand the impact of specifically what a nonprofit is able to do for the community, it gets engagement, it gets them motivated, it gets them to act. With these branded campaigns we were able to increase visibility. We were able to grow the social media audiences, direct more traffic to the website and direct traffic in a really strategic way so that where the audience was and when we went into Google Analytics and HubSpot, we could see the content that people were engaging with online. We were very purposeful in placing our most important messages there. We want donors. Let's put something about a donor button. The placement of the information tied to that customer journey is so important. So establishing them as the center, it does impact all of the different events that they're doing. In no part was what we did wholly responsible, but do I think it contributed, yes, to their biggest event of the year. From the year before to the year that we worked there, their amount of money they were able to raise with this gala doubled. And again, communications and marketing is multifaceted, so I don't claim to take responsibility for that, but do I think all of these dominoes lean in and contribute 100%. And what also happened was that corporate America News Magazine actually recognized this nonprofit as the most innovative PR and marketing firm, and so what that does is, again, it increases the visibility, it increases their credibility. So by using a creative approach to storytelling with this nonprofit, we also enabled them to get a word recognition, which they were lovely in crediting our help in doing so. It's a nice story of impact in many different ways.

Eric Eden: 13:42

Yeah, the increased engagement that leads to being at least a significant contributing factor to increasing donations is meaningful for a nonprofit. I'm curious did the leadership of the organization in your opinion, could they feel the increased engagement from the storytelling and the strategic communications?

Samantha Carroll: 14:10

Yeah, that's a great question. Yes, they could, and in our experience, I often have to advocate for communications or marketing work on behalf of a client to the board, and so creating that buy-in is really important, because they're ultimately the ones who are approving any budgets. So with this, I saw a change as we move through this process of a better understanding of the proof and evidence behind the engagement online and how that can transform donor understanding, and so there is a direct path to fundraising when you can create something that proliferates out there. So when others see that the social media is going up and websites going up and we can see that we're hooked into where these donations are coming from, all of those are really important in creating that buy-in with the board. So it was very much appreciated all of the different steps that we took to push their mission forward in that way.

Eric Eden: 15:31

A big topic on the podcast here is always around marketing, roi and attribution. Clearly, it's a little bit different for a non-profit. In some ways it's not really about obviously specific numbers, but one of the things, especially when it comes to branding, is when we're thinking about increased engagement. The reason I ask the question can leaders feel it is because a lot of the feeling that people get is anecdotal versus quantitative and that all the groups of stakeholders, like you said, hear about it in different ways. A patient mentions it to a doctor, or doctors mention it to other people in the organization, or the stakeholders just discuss it with each other because it resonates with them all the way through to indicators, like you mentioned, of more people are engaged on the website and on the social media and with the content, communications. All of those are indicators leading up to the award, which is in a lot of cases. Awards are in themselves a feel-good thing, which is important, because a lot of the question sometimes is do people feel the momentum? Because you can often argue about the attribution and the numbers and what was the weighting of the impact. It's interesting to talk about the first touch and then the last touch before someone bought something. In this case, the first touch or the last touch before someone makes a donation. You can argue about what was important, but at the end of the day, it's usually all has some level of importance. I think that it's great that you were able to generate that feeling.

Samantha Carroll: 17:17

Yeah With them, because one of the campaigns that we did was explaining to people that one insured equals two uninsured. While they could see monetary increases over the years of donations and the number of donors, the other objectives was increase the brand awareness for insured patients that this is a hospital of excellence that they should be coming to and that it's twofold it's not just them coming and getting excellent care, it's them coming and then also being able to afford other people excellent care. I think that the brand storytelling in that way is so much more compelling. The old adage like facts tell, story sell. You get people excited and engaged and wanting to act in this way. You're right, a lot of times does lead to monetary changes and ROI, but there's also the sentiment, the perception that's really tangible. That's helping fuel all of the other pieces of the marketing puzzle.

Eric Eden: 18:35

Let's not undercook it in your story here the uninsured versus insured. Given if you look at how much it costs to have insurance, every business owner would strongly say that this is a big issue because it's so expensive for people to have good coverage these days. I would say it's highly important, also controversial, and I think it's just a really important thing. It seems like you just say insured or insured, but it is a very polarizing topic because it's so expensive. It's like for a family. I don't have the exact set of top of head, but it's like more than $20,000 a year is like the average.

Samantha Carroll: 19:21

Yeah, absolutely Insurance.

Eric Eden: 19:24

It's not a small amount of money. So when you talk about people who can't afford that, the percentage of Americans that can't afford that is significant. So just highlighting a central issue like that, building around a central issue like that, is really important. It can drive this emotion. So I think it's a great story. Let me just ask one more question about overall branding and awareness and storytelling, the intersection of that trifecta. What have you really learned about that over the years working with clients that you would share with other marketers as advice or a takeaway of how they could take it to the next level?

Samantha Carroll: 20:19

Yeah, thanks for asking that. Brand storytelling is so important and especially lately, it's become even more important. I have actually started to see a lot more press and a lot more media talking about it, which is really nice to see. There's something called I just read about this which I had always known this concept, but I did not know that it had a name called narrative transportation. It's the idea that and I fall prey to this 100 percent, which is when I'm watching a great show on Netflix or I'm in deep into a book I'm really interested in. The kids do this too. No one can talk to me. I am lost in this story. When we connect to characters, we can see ourselves, we identify with those people, we have empathy. There's a deeper connection. Brand storytelling must be part of a marketing strategy because it helps people connect. It helps people engage. But the other really cool thing about storytelling is it's one of the most powerful ways for people to remember something. If you think about some of these people with amazing executive brands, they tell stories and it resonates inside your head. That's what's really helpful. But I like the idea of people using storytelling especially for things like advocacy and impact work, because it does help people remember that they're involved is what keeps the machine going.

Eric Eden: 22:09

The key about being memorable is that when it's memorable, it creates a lot of impact, right?

Samantha Carroll: 22:20

Yeah, exactly, it stays in people's heads and they think about it, and they think about it even after they are away from the computer, in a different way than telling, giving someone a statistic about something.

Eric Eden: 22:34

They'll share the story with their friends, for example. Right On that note, I encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends, because people need to hear about the power of brand awareness and storytelling and the impact that it can create. I think that there is a special offer we have for you all, so I have designed.

Samantha Carroll: 22:53

It's called the Consultants Brand Strategy Workbook and I'm happy that you'll be able to put a link out for the audience. Whoever would like to grab a copy of it. This is based on years of my interviewing stakeholders to get to the heart of the early information that people can use to develop brand strategy communications work. This kind of a workbook will help lead someone through the process of creating their own brand strategy if they're a consultant or a coach or a marketer, but it also can be used over and over again with their clients when you're in that discovery mode.

Eric Eden: 23:37

Awesome. Everyone should take advantage of this resource if you want to learn more about the concepts that we've been discussing here. Again, thank you so much, Samantha, for being with us today. We appreciate the great storytelling.