Brand Videos Are Not Storytelling. Here’s What To Do to Avoid Falling Into the Most Common Storytelling Trap
So many of the business owners and nonprofit leaders we talk to think that brand storytelling begins by getting their team on camera or producing a polished brand video.
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.
What they don’t consider are the many steps that have to take place before the camera ever turns on. And all of the strategies they have to consider to get that video out into the world so it performs.
In other words, people get excited to tell their story (which is great!), but in doing so, they skip two critical brand storytelling steps:
- Strategy. How does this video actually fit into a broader marketing strategy, fundraising strategy, or organizational goal?
- Distribution. Is this video going to sit quietly on a website or get posted once on social media? Or is it going to be used as a real tool, pushed intentionally in front of the right audience on the right channels?
Without a real brand storytelling strategy, you can spend serious time and money producing a beautiful video that simply sits there, doing nothing for the organization.
Here’s how to actually begin the storytelling strategy process — and why the filming itself is the smallest piece of the bigger picture.
Storytelling Is So Much More Than Video
It’s worth saying clearly: storytelling doesn’t have to mean video. Video is powerful because it helps people connect faces and voices to a mission, and we do recommend it in most cases. But a real storytelling strategy should live in written content, simple social posts, email campaigns, or a mix of all of it. The strategy comes first — the medium is a decision you make within that strategy, not before it.
Let’s dive into creating your own storytelling strategy. It happens in two parts:
Brand Storytelling, Part One: What To Do Before You Hit Record
Most of the real work in storytelling happens long before production day. Here’s an example of a sequence we run for our clients.
1. Start With Your Marketing Strategy
If your organization already has a marketing strategy, start there.
Go through it and identify where storytelling can amplify existing goals, or where there are gaps that have gone unaddressed simply because there wasn’t yet a way to add an emotional element to the plan. That’s often exactly where storytelling belongs.
If you don’t have a marketing strategy yet, this is the moment to build one.
Every organization, regardless of size or where it is in its storytelling journey, needs this foundation. Storytelling without a strategy to plug into is just content. And it’s unlikely to resonate with your audience.
2. Understand Your Audiences (All of Them)
Before you write a single script or plan a single interview, you need real clarity around who this content is for. Most organizations aren’t speaking to just one audience. They’re speaking to several, and that means treating this as a segmentation challenge.
Take a nonprofit as an example. At a minimum, you likely need to reach:
- The community you serve
- Your existing donor base
- New donors
Each of these audiences needs to see themselves in your story, which means mapping out what type of story resonates with each group. There will be overlap. You might tell one core impact story that demonstrates real change in your community. But the way you frame it, the language you use, and the emotional angle you lead with should shift depending on who’s watching.
A story built for community members isn’t automatically the right story for a donor audience, even if it’s rooted in the same event or the same person.
This is where audience, message, and positioning all come together, and why strategy has to happen before the camera turns on.
3. Decide Where the Story Will Actually Live
Once you know your audiences, you need to know where they spend their time. If your community audience is active on Instagram but your donor audience lives on LinkedIn, that changes how you shoot, edit, and pace your story for each platform.
Don’t create one video format and expect it to perform equally everywhere. A story that feels native and authentic on Instagram – shorter, more visual, more casual – will likely need a different cut, a different opening, and sometimes a different framing to land on LinkedIn with a business-minded donor audience.
Planning your content by channel during pre-production, not after the footage is captured, is one thing that separates a real storytelling strategy from a single one-off video.
4. Then, and Only Then, Move Into Production
Once the strategy, audience mapping, and distribution channels are clear, you’re finally ready to move into actual story creation.
This is when you go find the person, the family, or the organization whose story demonstrates your impact, and you begin the work of honing how that story gets told through interviews, scripting, and planning the footage you’ll need.
Brand Storytelling, Part Two: Getting Your Story In Front of Your Audience
If the strategy work up front has been done well, everything after production should feel comparatively simple.
You already know your audiences. You already know where the content needs to live.
Now your job is execution:
- Cutting and sizing videos appropriately for each platform
- Making sure the footage and story pairing feels authentic to each channel
- Building out content for your website, email marketing, and direct outreach to your community or donor base
- Repurposing the same core story into different formats for different audiences, rather than posting one version everywhere and hoping it works
This is the distribution phase — and it’s just as important as the story itself.
A beautifully produced video that never gets in front of the right people, in the right format, on the right channel, isn’t a storytelling win. It’s a missed opportunity.
Take the Time to Develop a Storytelling Strategy. It Will Continue to Pay Dividends.
If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: filming is the smallest part of the actual storytelling process.
The heavy lifting happens in the strategy work: aligning storytelling with your marketing or fundraising goals, understanding every audience you’re trying to reach, and planning distribution before you ever shoot a frame.
If your organization is looking to build out a real storytelling strategy – or you’re not sure where to start – that’s exactly where a brand storytelling agency (like us!) can help.
Whether you already have a strategy in place and need to layer storytelling into it, or you’re starting from scratch, working with a storytelling agency that understands both the strategic and creative sides of the process means you get more than a pretty video.
You get a tool that actually works for your organization, reaches the right people, and shows the real impact you’re making in your community.
We’d love to talk about where your organization stands today and what the first few steps toward a stronger storytelling strategy could look like. Contact us and Let’s Chat!