Building a Story Brand (pt 2)

Are you looking to attract your dream clients? Do you have a great service or product but find it hard to talk about? You’re in the right place — Creating a clear and concise message is the key to selling your offer to attract your dream clients. Use this easy to follow framework of how to organize your brand message so the right people see that amazing service or product you put your heart and soul into.

I want to take everything you already learned in part 1 of this post and create an action plan. I walk you through the implementation process for building your own story brand/brand script and implementing all that juicy info to all of your marketing assets from your website to nurturing email campaigns so that your message is clear and consistent attracts and retains dream clients like a super magnet.

How to Create a Story Brand to Attract your Dream Clients

Once you’ve planned, designed and developed your new story brand, the first thing you need to put it to work for you by engaging new clients and growing your brand by implementing all that juicy info to all of your marketing assets from your website to nurturing email campaigns so that your message is clear and consistent and attracts and retains dream clients like a super magnet.

The effort will bring you double the benefits: it will refine your website for a more impactful visitor experience, and it will help you (and your team) get super clear on the key talking points of your new and improved message.

With an elevated message on your website for a better client experience, the next step for business growth is to implement the StoryBrand Marketing Roadmap. Whether your brand is just starting out or you’ve already built substantial growth, implementing these five powerful marketing and messaging efforts will go a long way to getting you there. Besides that, they’ll save you money in marketing because each of these five tasks will make communicating to your designer faster and easier.

1. Create a Brand One-liner.

2. Create an attractive ‘client on-ramp’ and Collect Email Addresses.

3. Create an Automated Email Campaign.

4. Collect and Tell Client Stories of Transformation.

5. Create a Referral Incentive System.

Creating your Brands a One-liner

Before you can communicate your brand message clearly, you must be able to articulate it in one powerful statement so that anyone can easily understand. Your one-liner is essentially a new and improved way to answer the question, “What do you do?” It’s not just the tagline or slogan on your logo. It’s more than that. It’s a single statement that helps people realize why they need your offer. You want your one-liner to intrigue potential clients and invite them to do business with you. When you get it right, your one-liner essentially goes viral as once engaged, clients go on to use it to share with others and become passionate brand loyalists.

So by now, you’re probably asking, well how the heck do I come up with a powerful one-liner. It’s simple…use a distilled version of the StoryBrand Framework you’ve crafted. The following formula works every time.

The Problem + The Plan + The Success = Compelling One-liner

Don’t get hung up on thinking your one-liner has to be one sentence. Think of it more as a statement that communicates the three ideas noted in the formula above, using the fewest words possible while still achieving unmistakable clarity.

If you’ve already done the work of creating your story brand script in part one, then this effort is simply a condensed version of that. For example, if you’re like me and you sell design solutions, your one-liner might be: “I help businesses get clear on their brand strategy and design so they get noticed by their ideal clients and maximize their earnings.” Businesses in need of clear brand messaging will be able to hear that statement and immediately relate thinking “That’s me!”

Often, when asked the simple and inviting question “What do you do?” we create complexities, layers and unnecessary backstories in our response that only serve to confuse and bore our potential clients, before they’ve been able to see your full offer.

So before you go off to that next networking event, nail down your one-liner party favor. Write it out, recite it in front of the mirror, share it with family, friends and a few clients, refine it, memorize it and you’ll crush it at the next gig. I guarantee when you get it right, you’ll be like a magnet that draws the crowd.

I wrote a more in depth article about Crafting your Brands One-Liner because I really see a big difference for myself and my clients.

Create an Attractive ‘Client on-ramp’ and Build an Email List

If you can get a direct line to clients through an effective email marketing strategy, with their permission to contact them in this personal way, it’s invaluable to your success. Despite how many Pintrest, Tiktok and Instagram followers you have, none of your social platforms will convert offers as well as your email list. In most clients minds, email is simply a closer, more trusted relationship so your likelihood of converting sales with email is much higher.

To create an effective lead magnet, it must provide real value to your client while also establishing you as knowledgeable in your field. For Miller, when he first started up his StoryBrand marketing company, his lead magnet was a downloadable PDF called “5 Things Your Website Should Include.” More than 40,000 people downloaded it! This then became the basis of the lead generation funnel for Miller’s StoryBrand Marketing Workshops. Following that initial success, he created a more sophisticated lead magnet, a free video series called The 5-Minute Marketing Makeover, which catapulted his business success to an even higher level.

He found the following five lead generators to be most successful:

1. Downloadable Guide

2. Online Course or Webinar

3. Software Demos or a Free Trial

4. Free Samples

5. Live Events

Don’t overthink it or get stuck in analysis paralysis. As Nike says, “Just do it!” The best and easiest place to create a downloadable guide in PDF format. That’s what I did to create my first lead magnet, “3 simple tips to elevate your client experience!”.

Be sure to feature your lead magnet liberally on your website with a clear “call to action” button. If you’re just starting out with no list or following of any kind, you may want to use Google or social media ads to push people to a landing page on your website where you offer your lead magnet. I also recommend creating a pop-up feature on your site that offers your freebie resource to the user in exchange for their email address.

Remember in any lead magnet your providing valuable content that tells prospective clients why you do what you do, what exactly it is you do, and a bit of how you do it. Part of the point of your lead magnet is not just to build an email list, but also to establish trust, knowledge in your field and authenticity. So don’t look at it as giving away your offer for free. Think of it as transitional “on-ramps” a client toward an eventual buy.

We’re social creatures and learning is a social process. So when you set up your offerings to take them by the hand and walk them through the content at a deeper level to help integrate the actions into their lives or business, while holding them accountable for the results, you’ll be more likely to ensure their success. It’s also how you’ll expand the positive impact you have on the world.

Build an Automated Email Campaign

Now that you’ve accumulated some emails with your valuable lead magnet content, good placement and promotion of it, you want to leverage that list to start positioning yourself to generate sales. The best way to do this is to create an automated email campaign. Some call it a “funnel” or “auto-responder series”.

Either way, the concept is to develop a prewritten sequence of email messages that trigger once a person is added to your email list. Whatever term you like, the point is this — implementing it leverages your time because you can be taking steps to generate revenue while you sleep. And that, my friends, is the beginning of real freedom. You can be selling anything, anywhere, anytime to anyone while you are exploring the world.

After accumulating a list of emails from your lead generator, the best funnel to build is a lead nurture series. In essence, now that you’ve gotten your target’s attention and provided them something of value, a few days after they’ve downloaded the lead magnet, you want to initiate your nurturing campaign. This automated series of emails offer subscribers valuable content as it relates to your products or services. These emails should continue with the SB7 Framework style, positioning you as the guide and creating a bond of trust and reciprocity with potential client heroes.

A successful model for nurturing email campaigns entails weekly emails as follows:

Email #1: Nurture Email

Email #2: Nurture Email

Email #3: Nurture Email

Email #4: Sales Email with a Call to Action (CTA) to make their lives easier

You can repeat this pattern month after month. Do yourself a favor and queue up a couple of months worth of material at a time so you don’t feel like a weekly slave to content creation…because that wouldn’t be much freedom, now would it?

Collect and Tell Client Success Stories

Nothing draws a person in more than a story of transformation. Why are we drawn to it? Transformation is a core desire for every human being. We all want to be a better version of ourselves. And one of the best ways to demonstrate how we can help our clients transform is through sharing client testimonials.

The tricky part is getting clients to present their testimonial in a way that tells their story of transformation in a clear and compelling way. The best way to achieve this is rather than simply asking our clients to write a testimonial, we lead them down the path by providing them a form to answer with specific questions that, when strung together, create a natural flow illustrating a story of transformation.

Use these five leading questions to generate powerful client testimonials:

1. What was the problem you were having before you discovered my offer?

2. What did the frustration feel like as you tried to solve that problem?

3. What was different about my offer?

4. Take us to the moment when you realized my offer was actually working to solve your problem.

5. Tell us what life looks like now that your problem is solved or being solved.

Watch the beautiful testimonials roll in. Don’t forget to display them proudly on your website and on social media.

Create a Referral Incentive System

Here’s a step-by-step path for creating an effective referral system:

1. Identify your existing, ideal clients and target them directly.

2. Give your clients a reason to spread the word. For example, create a PDF or brief video of how you can help others like them that’s easily shareable.

3. Offer a reward, like a discount on a product or service, a special gift, or an affiliate program that pays them a commission when referrals sign up.

You can make life easier for yourself and really put your referral system on overdrive if you opt to automate the work by using your email marketing system mentioned earlier in building an email campaign.

Has your Brand Message been Transformed?

I really love this practical, step-by-step guide to implementing clear, concise, emotionally engaging messaging, it’s the framework I use with my clients. 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 be referencing this for years to come. That makes it 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.

In this final section of Building a StoryBrand, the author talks about how to implement the StoryBrand Framework now that you’ve completed the BrandScript from part one of this post. 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. Let’s clarify your brand message, 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, then create beautiful designs to compliment your message — It's what transforms design into a beautiful business asset and brings joy to you and your client.

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, build that email list and watch your brand grow.