At this point you should have completed exercises 1-5. If you haven’t, start here, read the posts, complete the worksheets and only then come back to this post.
6 steps to bring your brand to life (Step 6: The Power of Story)
At this point you should have completed exercises 1-5. If you haven’t, start here, read the posts, complete the worksheets and only then come back to this email.
And before I get to Step 6, I want to let you know I’ve created a worksheet so you can easily follow along with this series:
For the worksheet, go to our 6 Steps to Bring Your Brand to Life Worksheets and click on “6–Brand Story Worksheet”.
Step 6 to brining your brand to life is telling your ongoing story.
Truth: Telling your ongoing story is one of the most important things you can do to advance your brand and grow your business.
From blogging to video, there are so many ways to reach your audience through a brand story done right. Only you can decide which is the best platform for you, but the most effective way to stand out, build authority, and find your ideal customer is through storytelling.
If you deliver a consistent, helpful, engaging narrative, with a core message and a specific audience in mind, you’ll gain traction and truly move the needle in your business.
Of course you will. But where do you start? Well that’s Step 6—telling your ongoing story. And here’s how to do it…
You first need to understand how powerful a good story can be.
It holds your attention, brings forth emotion, and sticks in your memory.
And if you run a business and need customers, you must bond with them. A consistent and engaging narrative is how you bond with ideal prospects.
Think about your story this way: Someone who might buy from you is on a journey. You are their guide, and your valuable, engaging brand story creates a connection, and earns you the right to sell your products or services.
And know that a prospects’s pain is your foundation for a brand story that actually works.
Whatever it is that a prospect needs help with is the focus of your story. This means that you must start thinking and acting like an instructor not a marketer. It also means that you are never the hero, your customer is.
Have you ever heard the term “servant mentality?” In your case it means that a successful business owner is a highly-compensated servant. And to be a well-paid business owner adopting the servant mentality is very important.
You serve them with a solution.
Your solution is geared to their long-term success.
Your product and/or service is precisely what they need.
But before you do this, you have to develop a trusting relationship through storytelling.
Remember, your plan should be to make them the hero, so they get to like, know, and trust you. And they can’t wait to tell everyone about your solution to their problem and how good it is.
Now it’s time to get into the nitty gritty on how story will bring your brand to life.
That ideal prospect you seek—they want to be pursued in a way.
A practice like blogging is about romancing prospects and you do this by educating them over time. Love them. Education them. Build trust over time. Then, they will come to love you.
Today start building a framework of educational content.
Brian Clark over at Copyblogger calls this practice cornerstone content. Cornerstone content helps support your brand. Site visitors will keep coming back to it, so work to build a library of educational content. Work to build and highlight your most valuable archived content.
Help your audience by teaching them (vs. always trying to sell to them).
Learn everything you can about your ideal customer and go deep into their world. This is how you best position your business to truly help them cure their ills, continue on their path, and actually grow.
One of the biggest lessons: Think more like a teacher and less like a marketer, every step of the way.
Realize that all good things take some time.
Developing your brand story is the best way to describe the problems of the people who might want to buy from you. This is how you communicate with them, get them to like and trust you, and then create and/or improve the best products and services designed to help them.
Selling through storytelling is an iterative process that takes time, and thinking with an education-first mindset makes this much easier.
So when it comes to bringing your brand to life, focusing on your ideal prospect’s pain becomes the bedrock for your story.
What is a pain point: It’s what’s vexing your ideal customer. Their pain is the thing they must get past.
When you figure out what this is, start to craft and deliver educational, engaging, trustworthy content that focuses on their pain. This is the best way to turn readers into customers and maybe even brand advocates.
What is the enemy? A thing you are helping client’s get past? Their pain. You just need to do this better than the competition.
So, how do you learn all you can about your customer’s pain, tell a story around it, and help them get past it?
Get feedback: Ask them questions through email, blog comments, online surveys. An ongoing system of customer feedback is how you craft a brand that truly resonates with your ideal customer.
Be the customer. Live in your ideal customer’s world. Continually work to figure out how you can make their world better.
Convey that you know about their pain and how to solve it through story. This is exactly how your content becomes so powerful and engaging.
Enter your ideal customers’ world. Find their pain. Then show them how to eliminate this enemy. This is your narrative.
Keep listening to your customers.
Learn all you can about what ails them.
Then the story will flow.
So, Craig, earlier you mentioned this “customer is the hero” thing. What exactly does that mean?
In the movie “The Karate Kid?” Danielson is the student. Mr Miagi (wax on, wax off) is the teacher.
When it comes to telling a story you just need to see yourself as an instructor like Mr. Miagi.
You’re Miagi. Your customer is Daniel. And as much as you would love to be Daniel, or Luke Skywalker, or even Simba, you are not and never should be. You are Miagi, Obi Wan, Mufasa.
What are your first steps to bringing your brand to life with story?
Start to flesh out the pain points. Then craft topic ideas (blog posts, video, webinars, etc.). Craft a series of titles for the next quarter. I love Marcus Sheridan’s technique for an almost unlimited source of ideas for content marketing—write out all the answers to the top questions your customers ask.
If you brainstorm this technique it’s not that difficult to write out a list of 20 or more questions right off the bat. Your answers are the titles of your posts, videos, etc.
Write answers as long-tail keyword titles that turn into in-depth blog posts.
Write out a detailed white paper that answers these questions and put it on your website for download.
Consider short videos that answer these questions.
Just get started on the following…
Detail your prospect’s pain.
Develop topic ideas around this pain. (Use the worksheet I’ve linked at the end of this post.) Then pour every ounce of your energy into helping your ideal customer fix that pain.
Be the teacher. Tell an engaging story that instructs. Make their world better by continually teaching through the power of story and see what it does for your business.
Today is the day you outline your story. Download my Brand Story Worksheet and get busy.
For the worksheet, go to our 6 Steps to Bring Your Brand to Life Worksheets and click on “6–Brand Story Worksheet”.
These are the 6 steps needed to bring your brand to life. But we are certainly not stopping there. My next post will have a few final steps to keep your train chugging along.
Do you want to bring your brand to life? Taking a few minutes to complete our brand audit will help you think about your current marketing efforts and what might need to change. It will also help me suggest several ways to improve your branding and marketing now: Brand audit.
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