Why Knowing Your Backstory is the Strongest Brand Foundation for Everything You Do Next

When I was pregnant with my first son I had a job sourcing shoes for the high street. They told me “We’d love you to come back full time but part time? That won’t work.”

At the time I shrugged my shoulders. Today hindsight tells me it was a pretty disgraceful ultimatum. Nowadays, looking to collaborate with freelance mothers who need flexibility is part of my brand foundation as I try to go some way to redressing the balance. 

I didn’t go back to that job. Instead I came up with a game plan of my own to be creative and take care of my kids at the same time. 

With nearly a decade of experience sourcing shoes and products I poured everything I had into designing and making embroidery kits to sell online. In between, I looked after two tiny kids, got very little sleep and ran the entire show at home. 

Long story short, it didn’t work out. 

Beautiful product - and profitable. But I knew nothing about marketing or getting found in the vast sea of the internet and that feeling of invisibility led me to the edge of despair. 

That’s what set me on the track to learn everything I could about content, SEO and digital marketing. I decided that no creative maker or business builder should ever have to feel invisible online when they’d worked so hard to create something brilliant. 

My vision at The Stitch Writer is to write the best stories for the best creative brands so they can get found online and show the world who they are. 

My backstory is what created it. 

So what is a backstory?

A backstory is the journey from then to now that compels you to do what you do. 

Take the James Bond film Casino Royale. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading. Here comes a spoiler…

Bond’s love interest is called Vesper. 

And she dies. 

That’s why there’s a lot more to Daniel Craig’s Bond than rippling arm muscles. 

Orphaned by his parents and abandoned by a devious lover, he becomes a suave, single-minded killer, getting through women faster than you’d get through a bag of crisps. 

Your backstory is about the reason you started and became who you are. When it’s right, it’s honest, vulnerable even and it creates the connection to build a bridge to your target audience. 

When you use it as your brand foundation, backstory can be an incredibly powerful force, motivating buying behaviour and creating a loyal army of fans. 

How to find your backstory

According to Stephen King:

“The most important things to remember about backstory are that a) everyone has a history and b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are and don’t get carried away with the rest.”

Reassuring, because it means everyone has a story to tell. Not reassuring because it’s hard to pick the right bit. 

This great book by Bernadette Jiwa, the queen of story-driven marketing, sets out all kinds of questions to ask yourself on the road to finding the significance of your backstory. 

What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?

What did it teach you about yourself?

Which people have had the biggest impact on your life?

Having worked with countless global brands, Bernadette insists that virtually all of them began by trying to change something that mattered or by trying to solve a problem. 

Maybe there was a lightbulb moment when you decided things had to change. Ask yourself how that’s influenced what you’re doing now and why you feel so strongly about it.

Consider too that people’s most compelling stories are often the ones they don’t want to tell. 

A while ago I worked with a gift brand that was a family-run enterprise based and inspired by the countryside. Everything was quietly beautiful, gentle and perfect in its simplicity. 

As it turned out, the business owner had suffered what she considered to be a huge failure, having grown the company, taken on many employees and then having had to scale back and lose them. 

She told me this situation had given her a yearning for simplicity and to spend time with the people (her family) that mattered most. Looking at the product, that made perfect sense and yet, she refused to tell the story because she thought it was cause for shame. 

I thought that was a shame. How many people resonate with a story of failure and re-birth?

Unspoken things shared or uncovered can strike deep in another person’s heart. 

The thing you don’t want to mention that has defined and shaped you could actually be the key to a deep connection with your audience.

How to use your backstory 

First of all, stories have to tell the truth. 

You can’t tell people the story you think they want to hear. We live in 2020 and everyone sees through fakery at the drop of a hat. 

Be REAL.

The second is that just writing down your backstory, then sticking it in a drawer, is pointless. 

Let that story fuel your ‘why’. Let it be your motivation and influence your decisions. Use the journey of where you’ve come from to lead you to where you want to go. 

A truthful backstory can be the underpinning not just of a really strong message but the basis of a culture that sets out how you write emails, spend profits or decide what product to launch next. 

How backstory became my brand foundation

Unlike lots of freelancers I didn’t become a copywriter to write for mega brands. I did it because I care madly about the kind of people I write for. 

They are often parents like me, or people who felt stifled by traditional careers. They are risk-takers and big thinkers. They innovate and reinvent and want to create brands laden with personality. 

I really, really, really want their businesses to succeed so that they can be captains of their own destiny and decide for themselves if part-time is an option or not. I want them to be found because I wasn’t.

All of this has a big influence on how I work. 

Lots of time spent reading up about SEO, trying to figure it out so that I can make sure other people get found online. 

Time taken getting to know people on the phone before I write their ‘about’ page because I genuinely want to tell the truth about who they are. 

Less seeking out big name jobs with agencies and more investing in my own website so that the right kind of independent client will know me when they find me. 

I’m here to create stories that matter, for brands that matter and I want to inject as much colour and soul into the process as possible. 

People are the point. The words and stories just move us all in the direction we need to travel. 

So are you ready to get to grips with your own backstory? 

I’m soon going to be running an email series to help uncover your story, then use it as your brand foundation. Just sign up below to get on the email list and be a part of that. No charge, no hassle to unsubscribe, just me and you working out the truth. 

And telling it.