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StoryBrand is a communications blueprint for engaging the psychology of your customers and is used to clarify your message and get more conversions.
Let's take a look at how it works.
Marketing becomes about the brand or the product and not the person buying the product. Yes, a customer is interested in your business but only in what they can get from it. How many times do you see websites that are all about them selling themselves and trying to impress their customers? Take a moment and think about it — the funny thing is it's not just small and medium businesses that waste marketing dollars in this way. Millions are being wasted in the top end of town as well.
But what is high-quality marketing, visuals, and written communication that uses psychology to influence the customer's decision? The decision that you want them to make.
It's about being clear and engaging, it's about making you the business or coach the guide and your customer the hero. It's about not wasting calories figuring things out and making it simple so that even a caveman knows in seconds what you do and is tempted.
Marketers for many years have referred to the power of stories to engage their customers. Instagram is all about story and imagery to tell that story, not that I'm a user, but the general population knows the power of telling stories to engage the audience. They often just don't do a very good job of it. I could tell you my story and put you to sleep because it's about me. Or I could tell my story and invite you into it in a way that has meaning.
Then theirs the persona of a customer, one story will be engaging to one person but not the next.
My mum doesn't care that I love to develop websites in Oxygen until I tell her I build websites so that it makes it easy for her to buy her hair products online.
Let's review a general outline of what should be included as a Storybrand website:
1. Communicate how your product or brand makes your customer's life better
2. Stakes - what if your hero doesn't engage your product or service - People psychologically don't fear the idea of losing something. What's the impact look like, will you go to more lengths to not lose one hundred dollars compared to earning one hundred dollars? Think about this the next time you shop for the best deal online and the hours it takes you to save that ten dollars.
3. Points of your service provision and what your customer gets if they engage with your brand.
4. Introduce the business or you with customer logs and/or testimonials (wow, your number 4) — Establish authority.
5. Price choices - Your customer is sold on the idea, but the last question is always a price. Making it easy to buy and easy to figure out.
6. Your customers plan to engage with your product and services - Simple 3-4 steps
7. Explainer - A one-liner and then expanding on this
8. Lead generator - Catchy title, sales line that will get an email address.
Further Strategies for the StoryBrand idea:
While I haven't seen the author Donald Miller go through the ideas of Product Launch Content (PLCs), I know that these are important in nurturing and selling to your customer if the website alone can't do it. They offer anticipation and touchpoints to get them over the line by providing free offerings before a product launch.
For more information on "Product Launch Formulae," PLF have read of the book by Jeff Walker called "Launch" which set's out the different phases of a sale using free Prelaunch Content. PLC. I see this playing an integral part in the lead generator.
Back to StoryBrand
9. Junkdraw - FAQs and other detailed information that contains the stuff you wanted to include elsewhere is important to SEO.
I'm not a writer, I'm only ok with words. I'm a developer, and I always, always overcomplicate everything in my life. It's a curse, my brain is so mixed with thoughts and emotions I need a structure to clarify my thoughts to make things simple so that I can repeat them over and over again.
About a month ago, I came across StoryBrand while involved in a digital mastermind with some other marketers. They looked at this website and said, "Jase, I don't know what you do; it takes me way too long to figure it out". This also reinforced the feedback I had from a couple of RWD members "I think it's a great idea but it took me a while to figure it out." Thanks, James and Leah.
Storybrand was developed by an American writer by the name of Donald Miller and became popular around five years ago in 2017 when he wrote his StoryBrand book.
What is interesting is that Australia has only dribs and drabs of marketers using this to its true effect. Donald's story is engaging, and his book is a must-buy in my opinion. I'm also enrolled in his course at "Business Made Simple". I'd love to go down the certified provider route. 10k US is a lot of cash, and I do not doubt if I were a writer, this would be more than worth it. But I'm not.
I was recently involved in another mastermind where one of the participants had to run a mock sales call, and we provided feedback. He did well, but it was interesting how others in my group reviewed his sales pitch.
Do customers care that you use StoryBrand? Really do they want to know the details of what you're going to do with the strategy, or do they want to know the numbers? How many more sales will I get if I use this thing?
It took me some searching, and of course, this is going to be not clear cut, but one case study provided suggests they saw up to 800% increase in conversions.
BrandScrits are short-to-point outlines, no more than a couple of sentences that come out of the StoryBrand framework and enable you to repeat a message in all of your marketing material being clear and consistent, customer centred.
While it could be compared similar to a mission statement, a company could have one that tells employees what the goals are.
As simply as possible:
A BrandScript is more customer-focused, and key it identifies their internal challenge. Finally, calling them to some action.
Marketing agency:
"We help clients get their product in front of more customers. So that they can grow and their customers get the benefit of x."
1. Coffee Hit UK The agency that built this website has some compelling stats on growth as a result of the use of Storybrand
3. Zen founder - I'd say almost my favourite example, given its simplicity.
4. Results and co. - An agency practising what they preach clearly identifies you as the hero, the product, the stakes and the process. A clear call to action is repeated throughout.
5. The Happier Sleeper - You see StoryBrand clearly at work here with a very simple structure. I also love their lead gen which wasn't in all of the previous examples but is clearly an easy win and a must.
ClearBrand
A fairly comprehensive list of 202 examples StoryBrand websites can be found at another American-based agency located in Colorado, Clearbrand. This one is endorsed by Donald Millar himself and is great if your looking for inspiration. Certified StoryBrand guide.
If you are interested and just getting started with StoryBrand, head over to My Story Brand, and you can use their tool for free to generate one Storybrand free of charge
Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller 2017
Marketing Made Simple 2020
This is a post for the SEO specialist or Web Developer who knows a thing or two about Schema. For those of you who don't know or think about what this is all about, I'll give a short intro.
Because Google uses it to help with creating better-structured search results. The problem with spending any time on anything website related like this is the customer doesn't see the results straight away so it's harder to justify. If your competition or your customer's competition is using it, though then you'll want to make sure you've got those boxes ticked and the configuration is done correctly.
Yes, partly this is truly good content as has always been the case but good content with the correct keyword balance and strategy will produce some results. Adding schema means you're most likely to be given featured rich snippets for your website results on Google which are far more likely to be clicked.
Sorry, the news isn't good. While they do produce some automatic schema markup it's far from correct most of the time. It's a super simple schema on these platforms and hardly worth them including it. The same as adding Alt tags to images if you've ever tried to do this with Squarespace. Oops, you can't.
SEOPress includes this under the structured data area where you can configure things by post type. You can therefore set your service pages as service pages and your blog pages as blog pages. Ever notice how some search results have a picture and an authored date. This is most likely coming from structured data included in the WordPress Schema.
SEOPress is relatively inexpensive for WordPress at around $50 per year for the pro version and can be used on unlimited sites. At a bare minimum, consider this as your go-to for structured data.
If you want to flex, then look at something more customisable like Advanced Local Schema by Rank Fortress or another excellent recommendation by the same people who make METABox(A custom field plugin) is SlimSEO which is an LTD for around $250 USD.
For the less popular Drupal users out there the free module schema will get you started along with the METATAG module. Not the options you'll find on the WordPress side of the house but you know the quality with any Drupal module is going to be good and well maintained by the community. Simply checking the uses of the module shows around 6k worth of installs and support for D9.
I use a Google Chrome Extension called Open Link Structured Data Sniffer which will give you an idea of what's been added for what pages on your competitor's pages. It's free but don't get too excited you'll probably find that most of them aren't doing squat. That's a win for you if you can sell your customer between one and three hours to setup. For more comprehensive work with keyword analysis and mapping, you should go for a 1k discovery at a minimum and look at their META for each page.
Each schema type has different fields available to be filled out and delivered via a linked JSON file. A full list can be found at schema.org but the main ones your look at are listed under the hierarchy of Creative work, webpage and article page.
Within these two you will find the expected about page, contact page etc. Now that you know where to go and given that these are changing it's best to go and have a look for yourself. I find using the tool to see what people are using than using the schema as a reference before trying to see what SEOPress has to offer. You can also hand-code your Schema for those of you that are hardcore but given the complexities here I wouldn't recommend it.
There's a long list and it's getting ven longer from Articles, people, video faq, events to name a few.
26th November Add-on - Currently working on owning this keyword for Albury SEO & Tier 1 with a low enough keyword difficulty I have also gone the extra step further and used FAQ and Video Schema data on the below link.
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