Building a Story Brand (pt 1)
Do you have a great product or service but find it hard to talk about? I know what it’s like to put your heart and soul into something and still feel shy to talk about it with your target audience. What if I told you creating a clear and concise message is the first and the most important part of selling your offer in a way that resonates with clients that want/need your offer. Aka attract your dream clients.
I want to share a review of Donald Miller’s book ‘Building a StoryBrand’. I might be giving away all of my strategy secrets, but I’m not into gatekeeping — this book changed my process as a designer and guiding my clients to clear messaging, I’ve read so many marketing books and this one stands out because it’s simple and easy to implement. It’s all about how to hook clients (or customers) with your story brand, it’s full of useful information you’ll want to reference it again and again. The brand messaging and techniques in this book result in higher audience engagement, more services sold and purchased products.
Think of your clients as the protagonist in your brand’s story. In every great story, a hero encounters a problem to be solved and a challenge to be won. You’ll engage more clients when you position your brand as the guide to help the hero (your client) find the tools and confidence they need to succeed.
I’ll go over the wonderful StoryBrand 7 step framework and I’ll share my main takeaways and examples I use as a brand designer.
StoryBrand lets you show your clients that you truly understand their problem and want to help. Empathy is essential because it helps clients connect with your brand. Think about your favourite businesses, ones that you're happy to recommend to others. They probably place you as a hero that evolved into greatness and their brand is the beloved guide.
This book sets the stage as to why most marketing falls on deaf ears and successful marketing examples that help prove their method. The author lays out his StoryBrand BrandScript framework, describing in detail each of the seven elements of a winning client story and how they work together.
Not only does this book break down your client journey into a story format it also help you incorporate it into all of your marketing assets from your website to lead nurturing email campaigns and presentations so that your message is clear and consistent and attracts and retains dream clients like a super magnet.
The reason I love this book is because it helps me work smarter, not harder and I hope it does the same for you too.
Why Most Marketing is Overlooked
Often, the problem is not with the product or service offered, but rather with the way in which it’s communicated. When you confuse your client, they lose interest. Think about most websites, if a website is not laid out properly it results in fewer clicks because clients don’t know how to engage, they don’t have a clear, compelling message that makes them want to listen and take action.
There are two key mistakes most businesses make when talking about their brands:
— Fail to focus on aspects of their offer that help people thrive
— Make clients tax their brains trying to understand their offer
The reason most marketing misses the mark is because it’s too complicated. Our brains can’t process the information. The more simple and predictable the message, the easier it is to digest. Telling a story is effective because it makes sense and puts our mind at ease. It makes music out of noise. It keeps clients engaged. All stories have the same flow — and we’ve been hearing them since we were babies, a story puts everything in order for us so our brains don’t have to work to understand what’s going on. Section 1 does a great job at giving examples of message that works and messaging that doesn’t with examples for both.
In section 2 Donald goes over a 7 step framework on how to build your Story Brand. This will help you clarify your message, develop quality websites, engage on social media, build incredible presentations, create emails that get opened and sales letters people respond to. aka work smarter not harder. In today’s world, quality products and services on their own are not enough. As entrepreneurs, we’re not just trying to get our offer in front of our audience; we’re also trying to communicate how our offer will make their lives easier.
The clarity of our offer is what creates successful businesses.
Building Your StoryBrand
In Section 2, Donald defines and explains in detail his 7 Step Framework. Here’s the flow of nearly every story, and how you want to create your own brand story:
A CHARACTER who wants something encounters a PROBLEM before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a GUIDE steps into their lives gives them a PLAN, and CALLS THEM TO ACTION. That action helps them avoid FAILURE and ends in a SUCCESS.
Nearly every fiction book you read and every movie you see contains these predictable seven elements. The further we move away from these elements of story, the harder we make it for audiences to engage with our brand. There are three questions visitors engaging with your brand must be able to answer within the first few seconds of reading in order to be motivated to engage with your brand:
What do you offer?
How will it make my life better (What’s In It For Me)?
What do I need to do to buy it?
Remove all the extra facts and focus in on those aspects of your offer, it’s the key to helping your clients thrive. If it doesn’t precisely serve the plot — solving your clients problems and making their lives better — then cut it.
Let’s take a look at Donald Miller’s magical StoryBrand Framework for messaging that sticks through the use of storytelling, in 7 steps:
1. A Character
Position your client as the hero of your brand story.
First, you must define something your client wants. If you truly understand your target audience, you will have successfully planted a story question in their minds. This invites them into the story because their brains now want to resolve the plot to find out if you can really help them get what they want. It’s crucial that you define their need, be sure to narrow down their needs to a single focus so that your solution is clear and specific and you become known for helping people achieve it.
Choose a desire or need that is relevant to how they thrive. In other words, your solution helps people feel confident, safer, healthier, happier or stronger. This could mean saving them money, giving them success, etc. If you want clients to listen, you need to tell them with clarity where it is you want to take them, i.e. to help them create a social media following that develops them into an influencer in their niche.
If you’re just starting your business and you’re not crystal clear on exactly who your customer or client is and what they want, then I recommend you survey your prospective audience and clarify their needs. This will inform your decisions about what products/ services to develop and sell based on what they’ve told you.
2. Has a Problem
Companies tend to sell solutions to external problems; clients buy solutions to internal problems.
The more you talk about the problems your clients’ experience, the more they feel as if you know them and the more interest they will have in your brand. So, instead of just selling them on how you will grow their Instagram following, speak to how that will elevate their authority within their niche and how that will translate into more sales, booked clients and increased revenue that will help their business thrive.
Every engaging story needs a villain to create some sort of conflict to be overcome. It’s as simple as vilifying your clients’ challenges. If you can personify the problems your clients face, you’ll capture their imagination and give their frustrations a focal point. This motivates them to seek a tool (your offer) to help them defeat the villain
The three levels of a problem you, as the guide, help your clients, the heroes, solve are:
External — a physical, tangible problem
Internal — a backstory of frustration the external problem generates
Philosophical — a story bigger than just the client that adds meaning
If you can resolve all three levels of problems in your clients’ story, you create the scene that allows for relief and closure.
3. And Meets a Guide
Clients aren’t looking for another hero; they’re looking for a guide.
In the stories of our lives and our clients, certain events occur that mark the beginnings and endings of various chapters of their lives. If we look carefully, we notice that throughout this journey, we often see someone who steps into our path to help guide us through these challenges. That’s the role you want your brand to play for your clients, a trusted guide that offers them wisdom, tools, and encouragement to help them overcome the problem defined in the previous step and achieve their hearts’ desire.
You, the guide, are the one with the knowledge to solve their problem. However, you must also have the empathy and humility to see the story is not about the guide, but the hero. Focus your messaging on your client’s success, not your own. It may seem counterintuitive, but when your client wins is when you truly win. When you express both empathy for your client’s problem and knowledge in knowing the way through it, you create a bond of trust that moves them to take action and achieve success.
4. Who Gives Them a Plan
Clients trust a guide who has a plan.
Pretty common sense here, but even when you establish yourself as having legitimate results driven knowledge, clients generally don’t feel comfortable making a commitment to buy unless you clearly lay out a plan for them. You want to create a series of steps to help guide them down the path to the ultimate solution. This helps decrease the feeling of risk and increase their comfort level in doing business with you. This plan forms the bridge that helps transport your client to a place where all their problems are resolved and they’ve achieved their hero goal.
Once you’ve captured their attention and established yourself as a trustworthy, empathetic and knowledgeable guide, you don’t want to leave your hero hanging and wondering what to do next. If you don’t give them a clear plan of next steps for how to place an order and immediately engage with you, they’ll wallow in confusion and fall into inaction. Even if the steps seem obvious to you, your client will still want to hear them. It builds their confidence in moving forward and affirming their decision to buy.
5. And Calls Them to Action
Clients do not take action unless they are challenged to do so.
Even after you’ve gotten this far, you must clearly and boldly ask them to place the order or book your service. If you’ve ever noticed in stories, heroes are often plagued with some self-doubt and avoid taking action on their own accord. They have to be challenged to take action. Your calls to action must be clear and repeated often to move clients to action. For example, the same call to action should be repeated above the fold and front and center on your website, and again and again as people scroll down the page.
You’ll want to use two types of calls to action throughout your marketing materials:
Direct — calls a client to place an order or book the service
Transitional — “on-ramps” a client toward an eventual buy
Miller describes the difference between these as a transitional call to action being like asking your client on a date, while the direct call to action is asking them to marry you.
Direct calls to action are obvious ‘book now’ ‘buy now’ but transitional calls to action come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few you may want to consider, it’s all about offering more information in the form of freebies, kind of like a taste of what working with you is like:
Newsletter
Podcast
Blog posts
Testimonials
Free mini course
Free trial to your subscription
6. That Helps Them Avoid Failure
Every human being is trying to avoid a tragic ending
These are the high stakes that make stories and our lives interesting. And you may know just in observing your own nature that all humans tend to avoid pain (or failure) before they seek pleasure (success). Thus, the first goal that motivates us is always avoiding a tragic ending. Explain how you will help your client avoid pain and failure with your offer.
At every step along the plan you’ve provided to your client, you want to remind them that following your plan will help them to avoid disaster. The reminders we give to our audience in our messaging that lay out the negative stakes of failing to act provide the sense of urgency typically needed to propel them forward. No need to be an overbearing fear-monger, but do remind them of what could happen if they don’t take action. All while emphasizing that you have a clear plan to help them avoid such pain.
7. And Ends in a Success
Never assume people understand how your brand can change their lives. You must tell them!
The resolution must be specific and clearly defined so your client knows exactly what to hope for. Think about what your client’s life will look like if their problem is solved, how that resolution will make them feel, and why that ending makes the world a better place for them. Everybody loves a happy ending ☺
There 3 ways good storytellers bring about a happy ending, by satisfying three central psychological desires. They enable their heroes to achieve one of the following:
Achieve some sort of success or position/status.
Experience some self-realization or transcendence
Be unified with somebody or something
In Miller’s Building a StoryBrand, he goes into further detail about how you can position your brand to satisfy these basic human desires.
My Key Takeaways
What did you think about the 7 step framework? It’s so much information so stay tuned for part 2 of this article coming soon — in part 2 I’ll go over the implementation of all this juicy storytelling when I go over section 3 of building a StoryBrand. For now, start creating your BrandScript with the 7 steps framework listed above, I hope this has a positive impact on your messaging.
I’ve read a ton of marketing books as a designer. I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever read a more practical, step-by-step guide to implementing clear, concise, emotionally engaging messaging that has the ability to capture and hold your audience’s attention in a noisy world. Most of the advice is timeless, based on the psychology of how human beings perceive and relate to our offerings through story, so if you’re like me, you’ll reference this again and again. That makes it well worth the time is takes you to implement the framework into your strategy. And the good news is that you’ll see success from the very first step.
Let it soak in, pay attention to your marketing habits, compare the StoryBrand strategy to your current strategy and I will continue my review with ‘Implementing StoryBrand BrandScript’. In the final section of the book, the author talks about how to implement the StoryBrand Framework now that they’ve completed their BrandScript with the guidance in seven steps above. So go out get the book and check out the bonus content that comes with it, you can get free preview graphics by going to storybrand.com/graphics and get an easy to fill out chart for your StoryBrand by going to mystorybrand.com
If you need a guide in your process check out my strategy services, this is how I guide my clients in every project and it almost always results in higher engagement and brand growth. I take all the ideas floating around in your mind and guide you in refining it down so we can craft a clever message with a clear call to action — It's what transforms design into a beautiful business asset and brings joy to you both.
Did you find any similarities to your current strategy, did you have any ‘aha’ moments while reading my review or the book itself? — be sure to share it with me via email or send me an instagram message, discussing StoryBrand’s strategies always brings new insight and understanding, it’s the gift that keeps giving.
Now go sell your wonderful offer — Happy Marketing beautiful people!
