How Storytelling Can Change Your Business Fast

The most important thing you can do to grow your business is use the right words to talk about your business and to talk about your products. If you use the wrong words, you will confuse customers. their eyes will glaive glaze over and they will pass you up and they will go to your competition.

The words matter more than anything. Now listen, in the age of artificial intelligence, you have artificial intelligence tools out there that will wireframe your website for you, will make lead generators, but if you don't tell artificial intelligence how you want to communicate about your products, it will probably get it wrong too. If you are vague, if you are elusive, if you are confusing, if you do not talk to your customer uh understanding their needs, if you try to tell your story rather than invite your customer into a story, if you don't use repeatable, memorable sound bites, your business is probably not going to grow.

My name is Donald Miller. I wrote a book called Building a Story Brand. That book sold over a million copies and it is a book that teaches people to come up with memorable repeatable sound bites to talk about their business and to talk about their products.

We've heard stories of businesses 400% increase in IBIDA, 500% increase in revenue uh only by changing words. I had one business that went from 100 million to $200 million a year just by coming up with a really good tagline. Why?

The reason is people are only giving you a few seconds. They're listening to you talk about your product, listening, going to your website, reading about your product. They're only giving you a few seconds to figure out how you can help them survive, how you can help them thrive, how you can help them get ahead, how you can help them make money, save money, ease anxiety, get a better night's sleep.

And if they can't figure out how you can help them, and in my opinion, in less than two seconds, they will bounce and they will go to somebody else. They are only looking for what you can offer that will help them survive, thrive, get ahead, experience more peace, all that sort of stuff. And if you don't come up with sound bites that say that, they don't want to know anymore.

And so they bounce off your website. If you own a business, if you run a business, you've come to the right place because I'm going to give you a framework that helps you come up with those sound bites. And this framework is based on 2500 years of storytelling.

At the end of this video, you will know how to use the framework to come up with those sound bites. And at the end of the video, I'm gonna give you a tool and I'm going to give you a rough draft on your personal sound bites for you if you go to this tool. If you stay till the end of the video, the reality is most businesses are wasting enormous amounts of money on marketing.

You're not wasting enormous amounts of money on marketing because your website doesn't look good or the style guide doesn't look good or the logo doesn't look good. We usually get that stuff right and it is important. However, it is not as important as the words that you are using.

For instance, if I go to your website, you probably say something like, uh, trust is the commodity we exchange. Sounds so sophisticated, sounds so nice, means absolutely nothing to anybody, right? If you would just say, uh, we can put a roof on your house on budget, on time, uh, within the next 14 days, you would sell way more product.

There's something that's really crazy. It drives me nuts that business owners, business leaders, they feel like when they talk about their brand, they have to sound sophisticated. They they feel like they have to sound clever.

They feel like they have to say something cute. You don't. What you really need to do to grow your business is you need to be very very clear.

You need to communicate very very clearly about what you offer the customer. What problem can you solve? How can you make their life better?

And specifically, what is it? Is it a kitchen utensil? Is it, you know, whatever it is, you need to say what it is.

As soon as you start trying to sound sophisticated, what you're actually doing is you're starting to be confusing because people now they they look at your words and it seems like a puzzle and they're like, I don't have time to figure out a puzzle. I'm I'm I'm looking around for something to buy here. So, be clear, not clever.

And the words matter. Almost everything that you have bought in your life, you bought because you read or heard words that made you want to buy those things. We think when we think about branding and marketing, we think about color schemes and logos and style guides.

And I want you to stop for a second. More important than anything else are the words that you read. Almost everybody watching this video has bought something on Amazon.

com in the last couple weeks. Amazon. com is a notoriously ugly and busy and cluttered website, which proves something.

It proves that you do not need a beautiful website to make more money than God. You can actually do very, very well with a cluttered, busy, maybe even ugly website. What you read though when you bought that product, you might have read a couple of reviews, you read a description of it, you read the the specifics to make sure it was the right thing that you were looking for.

And then you probably read something like overall pick and four and a half stars and you clicked. You were doing a little bit of research to find out if this indeed was going to help you solve a problem. When I go to your website, you've got your story about how the company got started.

Your grandfather started the company years ago. You've got some elusive vague language. You don't have hardly anything on your website that gives you the information that gives the customer the information they need.

That's the reason Amazon is so successful. They put words on every landing page, product landing page that gives you the information to find out whether or not this product is going to solve my problem, whether it worked for somebody else, how much it costs, um, you know, the specifics of the the the actual number of inches it is and whether or not it's going to fit where I need it to fit. All those sorts of things.

All that is on that landing page. It's clear information and that's how you sell something. and give people clear information so that they can figure out whether or not it's going to solve their problem.

The reason that the story brand framework works so well is because the human brain is always doing two things. When your customer goes to your website, your landing page, reads your emails, sees your advertising on a meta ad or something like that, their brain is actually doing two very important things. The first thing the brain is tasked with is keeping you alive.

The brain wants you to survive. It wants you to thrive. So it is always looking for information that is going to help it survive.

Now listen to this very very carefully. If you want to sell more of your products, position your product as a survival asset. What do I mean by survival asset?

I mean it is in some way going to help your customer survive. So, it's going to help them make money, save money, ease anxiety, get a better night's sleep, feel better, uh have a higher status, uh create better social connections. Listen, if you're selling anything at all, you're selling survival.

If anybody is buying your product, they're associating it with their survival. When I mean survival, I mean, you know, the ability to thrive, right? And so, you've got to explain how this product helps people survive and thrive.

otherwise they will ignore you. The second thing that the human brain is always trying to do is conserve calories. It takes calories to process information.

The average brain burns about 20% of the the calories you burn with your body. 20% of those calories are burned with the brain. It is the number one organ in your body for burning calories.

There's nothing in your body that's burning more calories than your brain. It is a supercomput. However, the brain doesn't want to burn a lot of calories.

It wants to conserve calories because it's trying to make it through the entire day without getting exhausted. Therefore, it is rejecting most of the information it encounters. It goes, you go to a website, you drive by a billboard, you're rejecting it.

You're rejecting it. You're rejecting it. The only thing that that can get the brain to stop and actually burn calories to process the information is a short sound bite that lets it know this is going to help you survive.

And when it reads that sound bite or hears that sound bite, it says that's very interesting. For example, let's say you're at a cocktail party and you meet two people who do the same thing. They have the same kind of company, same product, same value, same price, exactly the same.

You meet the first person. You say, "What do you do? " And they say, "Well, I'm an at home chef.

I come to your house and cook. " You would say, "That's very interesting. Where'd you go to culinary school?

And what's your favorite restaurants in town? " All that sort of stuff. You'd make conversation.

You'd be friendly. You go to the next person an hour later and you say, "What do you do? " And they say, "Well, you know how most families don't eat together anymore?

And when they do, they don't eat healthy. I'm an at home chef. if I come to your house and cook so that your family can actually connect with each other, right, over a meal and not have to think about cooking or cleaning up afterwards.

I sell connection. Who's going to do better? Chef one or chef two.

Everybody listening to me knows chef two is going to sell way more than chef one. In fact, at that particular party, if there's two options, chef one and chef two, chef two is going to do 100% of the business. It's the same business, same product, same value, same price.

Why is chef 2 going to do more business than Chef Juan? Chef 2 is going to do more business than Chef One because he positioned his service as a survival asset. It solves a problem.

It solves the problem of family connection, which is a survival asset. It's helpful when you connect with a family and a tribe in intimate connections. It's a survival thing.

It helps you and them survive. So, that's why we do it. And that chef associated cooking in somebody's home not just with cooking but with the family survival.

And he did it with a sound bite. That's what you need. You need a sound bite or a series of sound bites that says here's how I help you survive.

Then you need to populate all your marketing and your advertising with those sound bites. We have a mantra around my office and it's this. If you confuse, you will lose.

Stop confusing your customers. All right, let's talk about this story brand framework and how it can help you come up with seven categories of sound bites that help you grow your business. It actually comes from ancient storytelling.

It comes from ancient narrative structures 2500 years old in the last 100 years, 120 years, been tested at the box office every weekend. We know how stories work. We know what makes money.

We know what people are interested in. The most interesting thing about stories is that it's the only tool able to compel a human brain for a long period of time. The human brain daydreams and drifts in and out of thought uh you know about 30% of the time you're walking around the planet.

But if you watch a story, you'll start that story and you'll plug in and you won't daydream for an hour, 90 minutes, two hours. You could binge watch Ted Lasso over a long weekend and you lose your whole weekend because you were paying attention to something else. That is an unbelievable ability that story has.

And so, how can we actually use story and story structure to come up with our seven sound bites and get people to pay attention to us? Let's look at that. Well, the first thing I want you to understand is that story is formulaic.

There are formulas that storytellers use in order to captivate people's attention. We can look at these story structures and say, "Okay, how can we use this to get attention for our brand? " And that's what we're going to do.

This is a plot structure and it's called the story brand framework. And there are seven different things that have to happen in the story. And every one of these things is really going to help us come up with sound bites that captivate our customers attention and draw them in.

When I say sound bites, I mean sound bites. Short little phrases or sentences that we repeat. So let's look at how story and story structure works to captivate our brain.

The first thing we have is a character. and the character wants something. The character wants to play for Notre Dame or destroy the ring and the Lord of the Rings, uh, you know, they they want something very very specific.

The two mistakes that people make in this sound bite are they are vague or they describe too many things that the customer could want. Again, if if you go to your website, if I go to your website and it says, uh, trust is the commodity we exchange, it's too vague. But if I say if you're looking for a roof on budget, on time, you've come to the right place.

That's not vague. What you want to ask yourself all the time when you're creating sound bites is, is it possible that this could be misunderstood? Is it possible that somebody might not know what we're talking about?

If it is at all possible you have the wrong sound bite, you need a more clear sound bite. So, you've got to define something that the customer wants. You can't be vague.

You also can't have 10 things that the customer wants. You need to come up with one thing that your company provides. You know, my friend Dave Ramsey employs the story brand framework really, really well.

He offers financial peace and he's got a thousand products and a thousand different ways to get financial peace, but he really offers one thing a thousand different ways. So, you need to figure out what is the one thing that we offer. What is the one thing that we help people do?

At Story Brand, the one thing we help people do is clarify their message so customers engage. You don't have to think very much about that. That's what we do.

So, don't be vague. Don't be confusing. And don't have too many things.

If I ask you, what's the one thing that your customer your your company provides for people? Do you have a sound bite that answers that question? When you do have a sound bite that answers that question, you can put it on your website, you can put it in lead generators, you can put it on your business card, you can put it everywhere.

You can populate it in a messaging campaign, which I will get to at the end of this video. The next thing that you need to do is you need to define the problem that your product or your company solves. If people are ignoring you and going to your competitor, we help you solve that with sound bites that get them to pay attention to you.

I just used a sound bite to tell you what Story Brand does. Do you have a sound bite that defines the problem? Now, of all the sound bites we're going to talk about, this is the most important one.

When somebody pulls out their credit card to buy something, they are pulling out their credit card to buy something and solve a problem. It's the only thing people purchase are the solutions to problems. Therefore, if I said, "What problem does your company resolve?

" or "What problem does this product resolve? " You should have a soundbite. And if you don't have a soundbite, you're losing sales.

It's a great opportunity for you. What is your problem soundbite? The next soundbite you need is a soundbite that positions you as the guide in the hero's story.

You do not want the story to be about you. You want the story of your your company to be about your customer. For instance, if I said, "What's the uh origin story of your company?

Where'd it come from? " You would say something like, "Well, people have been struggling with this problem for a long time, and we are heartbroken over that problem. We don't think they should struggle with it.

Therefore, we created this product in order to solve that problem for people and we sell it for 1999. I just think that you told me the story of your company, but you didn't. You actually told me my story.

I am somebody with a problem. You've created a product to help me solve that problem. The guide in the story is the character that helps the hero win.

It is a massive mistake to position yourself as the hero in the story. You've got to position yourself as the guide that helps the hero win. Yoda is the guide.

Luke Skywalker is the hero. Uh, hey Mitch is the guide in Hunger Games. Katniss is the hero.

Mary Poppins is the guide and Mary Poppins, the father, the family. They are the heroes in the story. The guide is the character that helps the hero win.

You want to position yourself as a guide. Two reasons never to position yourself as the hero. One is the hero is weak.

Every hero in a story is illequipped, afraid, uh, doesn't want to take action, in desperate need of help. Why would you ever want to position yourself as somebody who is afraid, doesn't know how to take action, in desperate need of help? No, the hero is a weak character until the last nine minutes of the story.

The guide, however, Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, um Mr Miyagi, uh you know, on and on, Daniel in the King's Speech, helping King George, the guide is the strongest character in the story and the most capable to help the hero out of their hole. Position yourself as the guide. You need two sound bites when it comes to positioning yourself as guide.

One is empathy. If you struggle with this, we feel your pain. We understand how hard it is to struggle with X.

You need an empathetic statement that says, "I understand your pain and I feel for you. " Then you need a competency statement. You need a statement that says, "We have solved this problem for thousands of people.

We know how to get you out of this hole. " something that demonstrates you know how to solve the hero's problem and you will automatically be positioned as the guide. None of your customers are looking for a hero.

They're all looking for a guide. Let me tell you the stakes of this are very high. Hillary Clinton lost a presidential campaign with the tagline, I'm with her.

Right? She broke two rules. She made herself the hero of the story.

I'm with her. And she was vague already. Two rules broken.

Cost her the White House. If she would have just said she's with us, she might have won. But she didn't.

She said I'm with her. positioned herself as a weak hero in a story about a person trying to accomplish becoming president rather than inviting me into a story and giving me a reason to vote for her. That was a mistake.

Don't make the same mistake. The next thing you need to do is you need a sound bite that gives people a three-step plan. Your customer wants baby steps.

They want three baby steps they can take to get from their problem to your solution. Those baby steps can be as easy as, hey, let's do an intake session and let's figure out exactly what it is that your problem is and talk about how we can solve it. Second, let me give you a custom report on how we will solve that problem.

And third, let's start let's let's come up with a start date in which we will actually install this solution. That's a three-step plan. Uh if it's a very simple uh impulse buy product, you might say buy it, install it, have a happier life.

People like three-step plans. You need a three-step plan soundbite. Next, you've got to call the customer to action.

You've got to say to the customer, "It is time to pull out your credit card. If you don't like asking for the money, here's a great sound bite. If you are struggling with X, buying Y is the right decision.

If you are struggling with X, buying Y is the right decision. In fact, go on your website right now and somewhere on the website just say if you are struggling with this purchasing and then name your product is the right decision. Use those exact words, those exact words and watch your sales go up.

Why? Because the cognitive dissonance when I'm trying to decide whether or not to buy something is always the same. Will this work for me?

Is this the right decision? And when you use the magical words, this is the right decision. This product is the right decision, people say,"Great, that's what I was wondering.

" And they just buy it. If you don't use those words, they say, "Let me get back to you. " And what they really mean is, "I will get back to you when I have some epiphany about whether or not this is the right decision.

" But you don't leave and go with them and explain that it's the right decision. And you didn't say it's the right decision. Therefore, they never figure it out and they never call you back.

Right? So, if you're struggling with X, purchasing Y is the right decision is the sound bite that you need to add to your marketing material. Finally, two more sound bites.

One is success. What does life look like if I buy your product or service? How will you make my life better?

Give me a sound bite that says, "This is what my life looks like after I buy your product. " For our chef, it was when you hire me, your family sits together at the table and actually connects. And you don't have to cook or clean up afterwards.

That's a sound bite that gives me a vision of what my life looks like if I hire you. You also need to give me a sound bite of what my life will look like if I do not hire you. A negative sound bite, a failure soundbite.

Our chef could say something like, "There are only so many dinners left before your kids go off to college. " Right? That's a sound bite that says you don't have a lot of time to connect because they're going to leave you.

Boy, that's a low blow, but a very effective blow. Right? What this does, the success and failure sound bites, is it gives us stakes in the story.

A reason to buy your product. If I buy it, I will win this. If I don't buy it, I will lose this.

Something must be won or lost based on whether or not I buy your product. Let's take a look at a general summary of what these sound bites actually are. What do your customers actually want?

That's soundbite number one. What problem is your customer experiencing? Category of sound bite number two.

Have you positioned your brand as the guide helping the hero win? Sound bite category number three. There's actually a couple sound bites in some of these.

Have you created a clear plan for the hero to win the day? What's your three-step plan? Have you affirmed that this is the right decision if you are trying to solve this problem?

The call to action soundbite. Have you given me a vision of what my life will look like if I buy your product? And have you given me a negative vision of what my life will look like if I do not buy your product?

These are the seven sound bites that you need. Now, if you pay attention to the end of this video, I'm going to give you a rough draft using artificial intelligence of the seven sound bites for your specific company so that you can actually look at them. I'll even give you sound bites for every specific product that you sell because when you start using these sound bites, you're going to see an increase in sales.

Before I do that though, what do we do with these sound bites? Well, what you do with these sound bites is you create a messaging campaign. You've heard of a marketing campaign, but what about a messaging campaign?

A messaging campaign are the words that you're going to use in your marketing. And I think the messaging campaign is more important than the marketing campaign. I think if you spend a million dollars on a marketing campaign and I spend a $100,000 on a marketing campaign, but I use the seven sound bites and you don't, I'm going to beat you in the marketplace.

In other words, my $100,000 are going to be more effective than your million dollars because I used the right words. Now, what is a messaging campaign? A messaging campaign is a series of ideas expressed in sound bites that position your products as the solution to your customer's problems.

A series of ideas expressed in sound bites that position your products as the solution to your customer's problems. Now, there are three levels of these sound bites and they go from very short to very long. The first level is curiosity.

You need what I call survival sound bites. These are sound bites that peak your customers curiosity and make them want to know more. Taglines, controlling ideas, oneliners, elevator pitches.

These are survival sound bites. Second, you need due diligence documents. When somebody understands that you can help them survive, they want to do a little bit of due diligence.

And especially if it's a very expensive product or something that's going to be complicated for them to install, you want white papers, you want lead generators, you want PDFs, you want webinars, you want live streams, you want YouTube videos. What you're watching right now is a due diligence YouTube video about the story brand framework. Next, you want calls to action that are extremely succinct and extremely clear.

And you want to repeat those everywhere in your emails, on your websites, in your lead generators. If you are struggling with X, purchasing Y is the right decision. Not very many of those.

You don't need them, but you do need them in pitch decks, in proposals. You need them in, you know, even in in cover letters to contracts. These are all calls toaction sound bites.

So, three different levels of sound bites that you need to cover in an effective messaging campaign. Now, the reality is most of us have really good enlightenment sound bites, but we have terrible curiosity sound bites and we don't have very good calls to action sound bites. So, we can improve on those.

Without curiosity sound bites, your business is not very inviting. It's almost like a house with steps, a front porch, and then a door to go inside. The steps are your curiosity sound bites.

The front porch is where people do due diligence and then they walk into the house when they make a purchase. Your business looks like this. It's missing curiosity sound bites and the calls to action are so elusive, it's almost like the front door is boarded up.

We have to make your business much more warm and inviting. So, what does a messaging campaign actually look like? Let me give you examples of pieces of marketing collateral in which you can put your new sound bites to get much much uh better result in your marketing effort.

On the curiosity side, we've got things like a brand script. A brand script are those seven categories of sound bites. It's the foundation for all your messaging.

After that, what I call a controlling idea or a tagline. That is one little statement you can make that sums up your offer to the world. A oneliner is an even shorter version of an elevator pitch.

The formula is what problem do you solve? What product solves it? And what's the result?

Next, you need social media posts that are well written. You need landing pages people can go to. Notice it's getting longer from the brand script to the oneliner.

Landing pages are a lot more words. And then we get into lead generators. even more words.

We're moving into enlightenment now. Video scripts like the one I'm presenting now. This is part of enlightenment.

Advertising copy that gets people to pay attention. Sales rep talking points. We're moving around the curve from enlightenment into uh toward calls to action.

Email and text campaigns. You need to figure out keynote presentations in case you haven't a chance to deliver a keynote about your product or your or your service. A mini book.

We're playing a lot with these right now. I really love these 40 to 50page little books that you can self-publish and send to customers for free or maybe charge a little bit for them. An actual book.

Notice how we're using more and more words now to enlighten people about our product. I've built my company on the backs of New York Times best-selling books. It's been very very effective for me.

Explanatory videos explaining how your products work. Pitch decks so that when you go to actually now we're starting to close the deal, right? Proposals need to be very strong and include these sound bites.

After somebody places an order, you might consider surprise and delight collateral, a thank you note, maybe an unexpected gift. If somebody places an order, you want to consider that another place to repeat very important sound bites. Brand evangelist collateral might be an event that people who have purchased your products can attend in which you would you would thank them using very specific language.

It might be another gift that you send. It might be a referral campaign, but you're creating now brand evangelists and then newsletters, ongoing communications, always offering constant value to your tribe or to people who love your product. That's 19 examples of what can go into a messaging campaign.

But there are a lot more. If you just did, if you did all 19 of these, you would be running an incredibly effective messaging campaign. Probably you probably don't have a competitor who's going to be doing better than you.

But you can run about half of these and get incredible traction and see incredible results literally in your bottom line, in your revenue. If you are overwhelmed with marketing options, what you need is a messaging campaign. You need to create one.

And if you need help doing this, you need a strategist to guide you in its creation and execution. And you can get that at marketingmadeimple. com.

At marketingmadeimple. com, we have a directory of people that we have trained to help you clarify your message and execute a messaging campaign. If you want to do this by yourself, go to storybrand.

ai. We can help you create every asset inside the messaging campaign. We're working on the minibook and book stuff.

that's not quite there yet, but every other asset is there and it will give you your talking points and it will fill those talking points into all those lead generators and and we'll even we'll even wireframe a landing page for you. We'll write your text messages, your emails, all of that inside of storyband. ai.

And by the way, that brand script, those seven categories of talking points, plus a tagline is free. It's in the free version of storybrand. ai.

So go to storyband. ai AI right now and play around with the words that you need to grow your business. I want to promise you this.

If you have a great product, you got good people on staff, you don't have any dysfunction, and you are ready to scale, you are ready to scale, but you keep hitting a ceiling every year. You see 5% growth, you see 8% growth, maybe you see 2% decline, maybe you break even, every year it's just kind of the same, you're probably getting the words wrong. And when you fix the words, your business will grow.

You need sound bites that grow your business. And you need to execute those sound bites inside of a messaging campaign. Go to storyband.

ai and I will get you started today. All right, good luck.