10+ digital storytelling tools & platforms for your brand story
It's dangerous to tell your brand story alone! Take this.
Storytelling is as old as time. As long as people have been walking on two legs, they've been telling each other stories about how they outran the local mammoth. And while the concept of storytelling is timeless, how we tell stories has evolved dramatically in the handful of years that followed. No longer do we etch our stories onto cave walls. Now we break them up into teeny chunks and send them into the world as Twitter threads. Whether or not this is an improvement in storytelling is debatable, but I digress.
Brand storytelling is no exception. Your brand has a message to get out in the world, and these digital storytelling tools will help you tell that brand story. In fact, many of these tools are what we at Prezly use daily to tell our brand story.
Brand storytelling is:
- The way your brand communicates across platforms
- The personality and priorities of who you are as a company or agency
- The tone and energy of your branding
To learn more about how to tell a brand story, we wrote a whole thing about it.
Keep reading for tools to make the whole storytelling business that much easier.
Every good story starts with words. I suppose you can tell a story without words if you are a Pixar lamp, but most of us will need at least a word or two.
These are our top tools to make your words shine so you can tell the best brand story possible.
Ok, hear me out. No, you absolutely should not ask ChatGPT or a ChatGPT spinoff to write your work for you. (In fact, search engines have started penalizing bot-made content.) But what you CAN do is use an AI like ChatGPT to explore different takes on what you wrote, for example, by giving it a paragraph of your writing and asking it to tweak it to show different tones, or shorten it.
🤖 Related article: The best 10 AI tools for public relations →
Price: $0 for the free plan, $4 /user per month for pro, $8 /user per month for professional
We love a good collab. Notion is a great way to organize your projects, house an exhaustive company manual and style guide, and work synchronously (or asynchronously) with your team. Plus you can use it to build a style guide for your story brand and make sure your cheeky interns don't go embarrassingly off-message.
Notion also happens to be one of the many tools that's jumped on the AI bandwagon, and now incorporates Notion AI into its editor to help you do helpful things, like shorten text, and less helpful things, like lengthen text (why why why would this feature exist) on the fly.
Price: $0 for the browser editor, one-time $19.99 for desktop app
Want to tell a strong story but don't feel like a strong writer? Hemingway App is a great virtual assistant. It will shout at you if you make your sentences too long, verbose, or confusing (and by "shout" I mean "highlight your text a little bit"). That passive voice will be trained- I mean, it'll train that passive voice right out of you. Plus, its is robust enough that you can get a good grasp of whether it works for you before you buy.
Okay, calling this a tool is a bit of a stretch. But fortunately, I did my warm-ups this morning so I'm fully prepared to reach.
MarketingExamples.com is a great resource for brand storytelling because it helps you glean inspiration from people who are doing it differently than you. And by differently, I mean better.
Just kidding! But truly, a few minutes of scrolling on this page will get those brain juices all a-flowing, and that's what we all want, right? Juicy brain flow.
Price: $0 for the perfectly adequate free plan, $30 /user per month for professional
Nothing kills a good story like a spelling mistake or an unsightly grammatical error. Grammarly follows you around the internet, correcting your mistakes as you go. Sort of like your sixth-grade English teacher, but… as software.
Grammarly will not do the writing for you, but it will ensure you don't split infinitives or finish sentences with a preposition at.
Price: $0 or $2.49 for pro subscription
Do you ever find yourself saying something like, "our brand is really great and really fun, we promise you'll have a really good time"? Then you need a thesaurus. Power Thesaurus is a really great and really fun time because not only is it free, it also comes with its very own Chrome extension, making it super simple to access from pretty much anywhere.
We're no longer printing out our stories or sending them by fax. Things are all digital, baby! This means we have plenty of bandwidth to tell beautiful, engaging, visual stories with a little help from these nifty storytelling tools.
Price: $0 for the free account, $12 for pro account, or $45 per seat for organization accounts
Consistency in brand storytelling is important. Think about some of your favorite brands and how they conduct themselves: is it haphazard and chaotic? Or controlled and consistent? Unless your favorite brand is Duolingo, chances are it's the latter.
Figma is excellent for collaborative visual storytelling. Your whole team can work together (or maybe just one or two overworked designers), leave notes, give feedback, and share assets for beautiful designs.
Price: $0 for free, $119.99 annually for pro, $149.90 annually for teams
Canva isn't just a way for travel bloggers to create beige-and-tan Pinterest graphics anymore. It's definitely useful for that too, but Canva can also do so much more. Brands can even create dedicated brand kits and brand templates. Teams can collaborate, and there are even tablet and mobile phone apps for some cheeky graphic design on-the-go.
While stories are timeless, the mediums we use to tell those stories are ever-changing. We used to write our stories on cave walls, now we almost never do. Most stories are told through blog posts, landing pages, TikToks, and email.
Price: $50 /user per month for Starter, $90 /user per month for Core, $140 /user per month for Premium, plus a dedicated PR agency plan
We would be utter fools not to include our own product in an article about brand storytelling. Because that's kind of our whole thing. We help brands tell their story through a variety of awesome tools like sites to house stories, press releases, and updates related to your brand. Plus, you can send campaigns to reach out with a special personalized touch, and track analytics to see how your story is doing with audiences. All from Prezly's clean and user-friendly interface.
Not only that, but you can track coverage and manage all of your clients and media contacts straight from the software. This is fab for maintaining branding consistency and building media relations. Prezly can also be integrated straight into your website or used as a stand-alone site with plenty of theme options for you to tell your brand's story.
Sign up now for a free, 14-day trial 👇
</ shameless self-promotion over >
It may sound obvious, but creating your own brand website is the first and most important place to tell your brand story. In fact, it's inadvisable to have a business without having a full, complete, and updated website these days. Relying too heavily on social media or other platforms to tell your story is a risky game because algorithms change, platforms close down all the time, and you don't want to lose your whole brand identity just because you thought Clubhouse would really take off way more than it did.
Your brand is always telling a story, whether actively or passively. That story might be, "we simply could not be bothered to figure out how to make a website so, good luck getting in contact with us." And that probably isn't the story you want to tell.
For an easy way to get started making a site, whether that's going to be a blog or an online newsroom, try a free trial of Prezly – no strings attached.
As much as we may try and avoid it, social media is a necessary evil in today's brand storytelling landscape. Have you ever tried looking up a brand on Twitter or Instagram and saw that they last posted in 2017, so you just assumed that the company was defunct? Same.
What kind of social media you choose is entirely up to you but will largely depend on your audience and the type of content you want to be making. If you're a law firm, for example, you may not want to advertise on Roblox.
Some good old-fashioned audience research can tell you where your target audience hangs out. You can also try out different platforms and see which resonates with your fans. It may, in fact, be Roblox.
Here are a few social media platforms to consider:
- Medium – Long-form storytelling with an emphasis on text and blogging
- Twitter – For more professional/traditional niches and networking
- TikTok – Short video formats, ideal for visual storytelling and BTS content
- LinkedIn – Perfect for Very Business-y networking
- Facebook – No.
- Instagram – An aesthetic, albeit dying, visual medium
- Pinterest – Perfect for lifestyle, travel, and cooking content
The good news is that most social media platforms are free or free-ish. The bad news is that the social media algorithm continues to be a real hellscape for those trying to tell meaningful brand stories, as clickbait and engagement-baiting often seem to be given algorithmic priority, forcing brands to engage in weird tactics to garner engagement or simply pay for ads – which is precisely why so many brands are turning to influencer marketing to get their message out.
On the topic of great tools, we recommend skipping a few tools when it comes to telling your brand story.
While we at Prezly are fans of automating the boring stuff, writing your brand story and communicating your personality is not for the robots. And there are some cases where you have to churn out a ton of dry content, and AI writing may benefit your project. But it's definitely not useful for cultivating a distinct brand voice.
While there IS a way to use AI to help you on your writing journey (see the section above ☝️), asking an AI to write your entire brand story is not it.
Google's August 2022 Helpful Content Update indicates they are penalizing content that is aimed specifically toward search engines and not towards people and that relying too heavily on automated content generation will negatively impact search rankings. Plus, it often just sounds insane, and that is not the energy to bring to your brand's voice.
Don't get me wrong. We at Prezly have used Unsplash a time or two, and stock images can be used quite creatively when done right. But they can also make your content look terribly generic. How often have you seen this image as the header for a blog post about startups/investing/pensions?
The answer is too many. You've seen it too many times.
Images can spice up your content, but make sure you're using them right.
We went through this growing pain here at Prezly. After deciding to create a visual brand story through our PR Academy articles, we went from this:
To this:
Taking your story brand from something generic to something that really pops can take time and energy, but it's often worth it. Having a cohesive visual or narrative identity makes your brand really sing (like a Brenda).
What are your thoughts? What tools would you like to add to the brand storyteller toolbox? Drop us an email or connect with us on Twitter!
Katelynn Sortino
Published September 2022; updated April 2023
Social media