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The brain seeks clarity. Our marketing messages have to be simple, relevant and relatable – easy to grasp in a world where too many complicated things are competing for attention. Increasingly, brands are finding it handy to craft their message around stories.
Those stories help potential buyers make sense of the offering. The story formula puts everything in order so the brain doesn’t have to work hard to unravel what is going on.
But be careful: That story must not be about you and your company.
“Customers generally don’t care about your story; they care about their own. Your customer should be the hero of the story, not your brand,” consultant Donald Miller writes in Building a Storybrand 2.0.
“Marketing has changed. Businesses that invite their customers into a heroic story will grow. Businesses that don’t will be forgotten.”
A story, he explains, identifies an ambition or objective the hero wants to accomplish, outlines the challenges that are keeping the hero from getting what they want, then provides a plan to help the hero conquer those challenges so they can survive and thrive. In essence, the story creates a mental map customers can follow to engage with your products and services. It sounds fanciful but he insists it’s an age-old formula that still works by getting people’s attention.
“The key is to create a message that reveals how we help our customers survive and do so in language so simple that they can understand the message without having to burn too many calories,” he writes.
And it can be very succinct; it need not be elaborate. You don’t have to spell everything out. People fill in the blanks from their own buried stories. He helped Spectrum aquariums expand sales beyond fish enthusiasts and hobbyists with just three words added to their signage: Kids love aquariums. Sales increased 99 per cent.
“You just need a few sound bites customers immediately understand so they quickly realize you have a solution to their problems,” he notes.
A big mistake brands make is not focusing on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive and thrive. They bombard people with random information, much of it extraneous to the concerns of the messages’ recipients. “All great stories are about survival – either physical, emotional, relational or spiritual. A story about anything else won’t captivate an audience,” he says.
Your story must answer three crucial questions:
- What does the hero want?
- Who or what is opposing the hero getting what they want?
- What will the hero’s life look like if they do (or do not) get what they want?
Working with companies, his team has reviewed thousands of pages of marketing copy that has nothing to do with the customer’s story. His message: Anything that doesn’t serve the plot has to go. That includes photos on the company’s website and tag lines that just make noise – don’t further the story. He believes customers should be able to answer those three questions within five seconds of looking at a website or marketing material.
Vancouver-based content marketer Steve Pratt, co-founder of Pacific Content, the world’s first consultancy that prepares branded podcasts for companies, argues that publishing world-class content is the perfect way to give people positive brand touchpoints.
“Everyone in content and marketing wants attention. With so many options and having been hoodwinked one too many times, consumers don’t just give their attention away to anybody. The problem is that most of us don’t know how to earn it. And so, we default to stealing, hijacking, capturing, bragging, interrupting and buying attention,” he writes in Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers.
Advertisers are usually proud of their work. But conversion rates are low: 2 to 5 per cent for e-mail marketing, less than 3 per cent for social media, less than 1 per cent for those pre-roll ads on YouTube. “If advertising works so well, why are ad blockers so popular?” he asks provocatively. And he answers: To avoid annoying, interrupting and intrusive ads.
Internet browsers are also offering private and incognito modes to evade tracking. People are paying multiple streaming services for an ad-free experience. And while your company may have concrete information about who you are trying to reach, you probably don’t have information about what this group would value content-wise.
He also applauds the power of stories. But his podcast team found in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies executives would confuse a topic or an interview or a white paper with a story. “We all love stories as audience members, but as marketers and content creators, we don’t tell enough stories and we don’t tell them well enough,” he says.
He advocates publishing top quality content on a regular schedule for prospects and customers, be it a newsletter, a video series, live events or podcasts. A plumber might want to be known for being helpful and understanding customer needs and can send that message through helpful content. It might involve 30-second plumbing lessons on TikTok, or a podcast on the worst and weirdest plumbing emergencies, or a how-to plumbing book for homeowners. The plumber could spice up the content by presenting everything as a game show or a historical documentary – or even get a rapper to send out the message.
Don’t be boring, he stresses. Be unconventional. Tell stories that help your customers survive and thrive. Find a way to hit audiences in the heart, mind and wallet.
Cannonballs
- Productivity expert Cal Newport is fascinated that best-selling science fiction and fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson has built a 70-person publishing and merchandising company where everyone and everything is dedicated to letting him focus on writing. He believes we need a world where many organizations have, at the very least, a handful of such positions – employees with super high-value skills who are left alone to apply them in a focused manner.
- New research suggests customers will pay more for products that are featured in ads that stress diversity. In one study of a city exploration map, those who saw an ad with models of different ages thought the app offered a greater variety of experiences, rated the brand as more creative and indicated they would pay more to purchase it.
- You undermine your leadership, says time management specialist Elizabeth Grace Saunders, when you ask for help at the last minute for things that you actually knew about in advance, creating unnecessary emergencies.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.