STORYBRAND MARKETING 101
StoryBrand helps thousands of businesses grow their company every year. They’ve got multiple books, they’ve got a bunch of courses in Business Made Simple University, a lot of things that can help you grow your business with StoryBrand marketing.
But that also means at this point, it can get a little bit confusing. There’s some overlap, there’s some things that might not be clear as you travel across the StoryBrand landscape today, we’re gonna go back to the basics.
My name is Ryan Toth, the CEO of ClearBrand. I’m a StoryBrand certified guide and in this video, we’re going to go through StoryBrand marketing 1 0 1. What are those simple foundational principles that you can use to set your marketing apart using StoryBrand as the core let’s jump in.
StoryBrand Principles
Thousands of companies have used StoryBrand to increase their revenue and I want you to be one of them. Big companies like Chick-fil-A, Johnson and Johnson and Charity water have all relied on StoryBrand to clarify their message and their marketing. But over the years, StoryBrand has produced a lot of content.
That also means that things can kind of get a little convoluted. So today we’re going to go through the three most basic, most foundational principles that you can use in your marketing to grow your company.
Your customer is the hero, not you.
The first principle is this. Your customer is the hero, not you. Most business owners have spent years creating their product or services, refining what they have perfecting it for their customers and they want to tell their customers how hard they’ve worked to serve them. And while this is an understandable way to go at your marketing, the problem is it doesn’t work.
Here’s why.
For you, your customer begins to exist the moment that they enter your ecosystem. So it’s easy to think. Well, now they’re in my ecosystem so I need to talk about me. I need to talk about us, how we created this thing and why it’s the best thing ever for them, how we created this thing and why it’s the best thing ever, but that’s not your customer’s experience.
Let Your Customers Be The Hero
You see, they have already spent decades being the hero in their own story before they ever heard of you before they had any problem that you might solve. They’re walking around as the hero in their story. They are the main character. They’re the ones who in a variety of ways want to solve their problems and win the day.
When they encounter your brand, they already have all this experience being the hero.
In fact, in a story, the hero is the one who has a problem that needs to be solved when they’re coming to you, they’re not just looking for someplace to spend their money.
Be The Guide
They’re looking to solve a problem. They are the hero in their own story and when they come across your brand and you’re talking about how awesome you are and how hard you’ve worked to get where you are, that actually positions you as the hero.
Now you’re in conflict with them. We do not want that. This is why StoryBrand very clearly makes your customer the hero in the story that you’re telling.
So notice how this shifts a couple things.
The story is no longer about you. You’re not sitting here talking about how hard you worked to create your product.
It’s about your customer.
And instead of talking about your journey, what we want to do is talk about your customer’s journey. This problem that they have, that they are experiencing and how you can help them overcome their problem and win the day, and that sets you up to be another character in this story called the guide.
Understanding Your Role as The Guide
Think about it this way, in Star Wars, Luke is the hero. Luke has a number of problems that he is trying to solve to win the day. Yoda and Obi-Wan are the two guides in those initial three star wars episodes in four or five and six. Those two come alongside Luke to equip him, empower him, give him what he needs in order to win the day. That’s you, your products and services.
That’s like Batman’s utility belt. The story’s not about the tools the Batman uses to win the day. The story is about Batman actually solving the problems of himself and the people around him and winning the day.
Your products and services are the tools that the hero uses to win the day. And when you position yourself as the guide and your products and services as equipment for your heroes, they immediately understand how you help them win, how you help them thrive and they want to buy from you. They want to engage because now it’s about them and that’s what the hero wants.
Make your customer’s journey easy
The second basic StoryBrand marketing principle is this. We want to make your customer’s journey easy.
StoryBrand is based on ancient storytelling techniques. We can look at people like Joseph Campbell, who really is one of the first people who wrote about the hero’s journey. Donald Miller pulled a lot of StoryBrand principles from a screenwriter named Blake Snyder.
As we’re engaging in your customer story, we need to remember that they are on this journey themselves. That journey is already full of pitfalls. It’s already full of problems and issues that they need to overcome and when they come to your website, the question is this, are you adding problems and pitfalls to their journey? Or are you making it super easy for them to progress, to move forward and to get to that climactic scene where they get to solve the problem, defeat the enemy with your products and service and win the day.
On your website, there’s a few easy principles that you can keep in mind to make your customer’s journey easy. I like to talk about this, like reducing friction when they’d come to your website, is there friction on that buying journey?
Reduce Friction On Your Website
One of the easiest ways that you can reduce friction is by making sure that a call to action button is visible, easy to click, easy to find at all times, two easy ways to do that.
One, put call to action buttons all over your website. I suggest having one call to action button, one word, one phrase, “schedule a call”, “buy now,” and you put that same button all over the place. That’s going to make it easy for your customer. The minute that they decide that they want to buy, they don’t have to go on a treasure hunt to find your button.
Another easy way to do this on your website is to have your header bar, that navigation bar up top, stay present and visible as a viewer scrolls down in website lingo this is called a sticky header. That’s going to mean that that call to action button up in the top, right corner is visible at all times. This is what Apple does. So they don’t have the buttons all over the place. They just have that button of the top, top, right? Follow you down the whole website.
Another question to ask is, well, what happens when the person clicks that button?
What’s that action that they’re taking?
Are you making it easy to schedule a call for them?
Are you making it easy to buy from you?
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes, go through that journey and reduce as much friction as possible.
We’re in a relationship with our customers and we want them to build a relationship with them
The third principle is that we’re in a relationship with our customers and we want them to build a relationship with them.
A lot of marketing these days focuses on screaming, “buy now!” at our customers and well, for the people who are ready to buy today, that’s a good thing, that’s reducing the friction, but not everybody is ready to buy at this moment. So what happens if they’re not ready to buy, you have no other options, they leave.
Chances are they’re never going to come back.
So what we want to do is acknowledge the stages in a relationship.
Think about dating. When you first meet somebody you’re not ready to marry them yet. Marrying is the same as buying. What we want to do is want to go on dates. We want to get to know them. We want to build trust. See if this is a person who we actually want to do business with.
How to build trust
In the business world, we do that with an email sequence and to get somebody’s email, you want to offer something for free in exchange for their email address that allows you to then send them emails to follow up, build trust, deliver a ton of value so that when they’re ready to buy, when they’re thinking about buying, you’re on their mind and they buy from you rather than from your competition.
We also want to make sure that lead magnet, that thing that you gave away for free in exchange for that email address is incredibly valuable.
That it also builds trust and contributes to your authority in your field. You should be sending emails at least weekly so that when the person thinks about buying, they’re thinking about you at that same time.
If you’re not sending emails weekly, chances are you’re going to miss that opportunity.
Conclusion
So there’s the three basic principles of StoryBrand marketing.
If you want the easiest way to create a StoryBrand website, click on the link below, or go over to clearbrand.com and click on DIY website. We created a fully pre-built website that follows the StoryBrand framework section by section.
It’s beautiful. It’s already optimized for speed. It’s mobile friendly. All you’ve got to do is put your content in there. You can change the design if you want. It’s not necessary. This also comes with a free online course to walk you through exactly how to change each section, fonts, colors, content, images, and on.
If you try to build your own StoryBrand website with a builder like Squarespace or WordPress on your own, this is going to take you weeks to wrestle with the templates that they provide, that don’t follow the StoryBrand framework and try to make them fit. But with this pre-built website that comes with five pages, including a homepage, a services page, about page, contact and blog page, you can go from start to finish and only a few hours. So that’s it.
Now go through your customer journey, your customer experience, make sure that they are the hero.
Make sure that you’re not adding pitfalls and problems to their journey, but you’re actually reducing friction and making it easy for them and make sure that you’re building a relationship with your customers so that they trust you when they’re ready to buy, they think about you and buy from you instead of your competitors.
