“Tell me a story.” It’s a phrase we start saying in childhood that grows with us throughout our lives. The key to mastering brand marketing that’s effective and personal is to tell a story.
One of the best ways to do this is by using the StoryBrand Framework to help ensure your story resonates with your target audience. Building a StoryBrand is easier than it sounds, so consider this your StoryBrand guide to summarize the tactics you need to get started.
StoryBrand has grown beyond a simple book describing a marketing tool and blossomed into a coaching and learning mecca for marketing. To save you some time and effort, we’ve compiled the top tips you need for building a StoryBrand brandscript as well as incorporating the StoryBrand Framework into your marketing strategy.
5 Tips For Using the StoryBrand Framework
1. Make Your Marketing a Conversation.
Instead of droning on and on at your customers about your brand, format your sales pitches as a collaborative conversation that includes customers. In fact, making the customer the central focus of your marketing strategy is key to helping audiences trust your brand. Using a StoryBrand guide, evaluate the current state of your website’s copy and your calls-to-action and notice how often it mentions the brand instead of the customer. While it is important to showcase why your brand is an ideal solution to a customer’s problem, there is more to the story than a well-written monologue of how awesome you are.
It’s Not All About You.
Taking the focus off of touting your brand’s achievements and instead focusing on the needs of customers and how your brand fits into that narrative is the hallmark sign of what is considered StoryBrand marketing. Instead of making your brand the hero of the story, your customer is the hero. Your brand’s role as trusted guide in the story means fostering human connection is the best tactic your brand can use to boost sales. Your brand’s humanity is what sets you apart from the competition eager to showboat how spiffy they are.
2. Focus on Connection.
Instead of rallying behind your brand’s harrowing origin story or announcing epic conquests and achievements, sharing things like this in relation to customers is the ideal way to connect. Building a StoryBrand is all about using those true elements of backstory and achievement to relate to someone else and bring them into the fold. Connection is why social media even exists. Connection is vital to life. By focusing on this universal human need, you instantly create a launch point for your customer’s journey with your brand.
Connected Audiences Can’t Help But Engage.
Social media is so successful because it encapsulates the human experience of connecting and sharing life with others and translates it into a digital format. By the same token, connecting to the humanity of customers and engaging with them on a unique, personal level prompts response and engagement. StoryBranding is all about creating a brand script that is distinctly human while also leveraging all SEO and marketing tools to help get your interesting brand story in front of audiences.
Humans love talking about themselves, so encouraging feedback and showing that customer participation is valued by your brand will automatically encourage audiences to get plugged in.
3. Clarify Your Message.
The StoryBrand Framework is all about creating a story, but this doesn’t mean you need to craft some sort of epic quest full of side stories and details. In fact, distilling the vital elements of how your brand relates to your customer is the only reason this marketing tool works. Clarifying how your brand is a support to a customer’s life journey should be done with wording that relates to your audience directly. Don’t worry about fabricating engaging or specific details about your brand that you think will impress audiences. Simple authenticity will work wonders and help the real customers in need of your brand find you.
Revise Until It Resonates.
Having too much story can be just as detrimental as scant detail within your story. Focus on the communicating the most important elements succinctly and with clarity. It’s important to avoid bogging the reader down with too much information at once. While some concepts, services, or products may need additional explanation to prompt customers to convert to sales, consider editing ruthlessly and pacing the information into easy-to-read, memorable units instead of an onslaught of ideas. Story structure really sings when the rhythm of the content matches the voice and overarching concept you’re relaying. Sometimes it takes time to find the right messaging, but patience and dedication will go a long way in this regard.
4. Take Audiences on a Journey
All great stories follow a similar structure. While diverting from this framework can still work for telling stories, to reach the most people most efficiently, follow the same patterns of fairy tales, movies, and other epics that have stood the test of time. Fantasy stories do so well because they follow the same formula: a character has a problem, meets a wise guide who has a plan (provided the character heeds the call to action) and the hero lives happily ever after. In relation to your strategy, your brand is the sage advisor to your customer/hero rather than swooping in to save the day. It can be hard to readjust the spotlight, as it feels counter-intuitive. However, gearing your branding toward a support role rather than the lead, you offer audiences the opportunity to envision themselves leveraging your brand to attain new heights, making your product or service indispensable to them and making you an integral part to their story.
Once Upon A Time…
While you don’t need a saga’s worth of backstory and characterization to make a sale, consider your ideal customer’s trek through your marketing funnel and materials. Your StoryBrand Framework will prompt you to look at the signposts you place along along the way help customers feel supported to press on to the next step. Is there sufficient interaction and reward for customers to continue? The encouragement can be small, like a bonus discount code for their cart or a well-timed exclusive contest, but said encouragement may just be the ticket to keeping the adventure alive for a customer.
5. Equip Your Team.
Telling a story, especially in marketing, is a team effort. In order to keep the story compelling and consistent, the team’s level of engagement needs to be equally compelling and consistent. Any disconnect or lack of clarity at this step can lead to leads getting lost along the way. Taking a StoryBrand Framework approach means spurring team investment in your brand’s story, making sure everyone has access to all pertinent information, and allowing the story to develop collectively and collaboratively.
Encourage Reviewing Team Feedback Promptly
The members of your team that engage directly with customers will have the most valuable insights regarding what works with customers and what is falling flat. Don’t underestimate the power of observation in this arena. Both successful sales and missed opportunities can be evaluated as learning experiences to grow from and improve upon for the next encounter.
Where To Next?
Storytelling is an art, and it can be difficult to know where to go next as you craft your masterpiece. Luckily, you don’t have to go it alone. We here at ULS are experts in telling brand stories and reaching audiences through a dynamic, innovative mix of web-savvy tactics and real-person creativity. Connect with us today to see what story we can write together.
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