What is Storybrand, and How can it Revolutionise your Brand's Marketing Strategy?

Meet Donald Miller.

Don is an author, film fan, cycling analyst, marketing consultant, and overall smart person.

After writing a bunch of “memoirs”, he wrote the book that kickstarted a whole movement: “Building a StoryBrand”.

The first chapter of this book is a must-read for most (all?) of my clients, as it explains so well what many companies do (wrong) with their marketing…

4 Things Most Companies do (Wrong) with their Marketing

1. “Company-Centric” marketing: making your marketing about the company, not the buyer
2. “You Confuse, You Lose”: confronting followers, website visitors, potential buyers with too many options, too many words, and a general lack of clarity. So they end up scrolling past, clicking away, and taking all the actions you don’t want them to take
3. The “Curse of Knowledge”: being so close to your own business that you’ve got a hard time explaining to others why what you sell would benefit them
4. Making it really hard for people to get on your email list or buy from you. Sometimes by not telling them WHY they should do that (yes, people need a reason to give you their money or email address) - often by not even giving them the option to buy (easily).

The Storybrand framework gives every entrepreneur the insights and the tools to fix all that.

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How Can you "Storybrand" your Marketing?

1- All Entrepreneurs: Read "Building a Storybrand" (or listen to it) 

Our first recommendation to any business owner out there is to read the book, “Building a StoryBrand”. Or at least, reading the first chapter.

That first chapter made a huge impact on every single business owner we know who read it. (if you’re a business owner, we know you, and it didn’t make an impact - get in touch, happy to change this one sentence!). That number is probably in the hundreds by now - the book came highly recommended by other entrepreneurs, and we’ve been recommending that book for years.

The book helps you see the structure, understand the principle, and realise what you’re doing wrong.

The next time you’re writing a piece of marketing copy, you will remember the Storybrand book - and tweak it so it reads more easily, flows better, and people actually follow your call to action.

BUY "BUILDING A STORYBRAND”

2- Marketers: Marketing Made Simple

If you’re a business owner doing their own marketing or if you’re a marketer, the next step is the next book - “Marketing Made Simple”.

MMS (as we affectionately call it) teaches how to take the Storybrand principles, and take it to the next level: turning it into a lead-generating funnel, into a website, into emails, ebooks, presentations, all the things.

BUY MARKETING MADE SIMPLE

3- Business Owners: Business Made Simple University

If you’re not really into “dry” books, the StoryBrand team offers everything that’s in the books + way more in their learning platform, Business Made Simple University (or BMSU).

BMSU offers a variety of mini-courses, from marketing-related ones (like writing your brand script or structuring your website) to business-related courses (e.g. “proposals made simple” or “mission statement made simple”) to personal development and productivity.

BMSU also hosts regular members-only workshops and webinars on all kinds of topics - from leadership and team management to marketing for non-profits.  

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT BUSINESS MADE SIMPLE UNIVERSITY

4- Take Action Quickly & Efficiently: Storybrand's 2-Day Live Workshop

While there’s a lot to be said for reading the books, taking the courses, attending the webinars, it all takes a bunch of time - and even then, you’re on your own, you’re still too close to your business to catch your own mistakes (even if you are a marketer yourself!) and it’s just a LOT.

Enters the Storybrand Workshop: a 2-day workshop where you watch the Livestream (or attend the event in real life) and get direct feedback and directions from a Storybrand Guide in small groups (on Zoom or, again, in real life).

The workshop is a bit of a time investment; even though you might still have extra hours left in the day before or after the actual workshop, you might not have the brain space for a lot of productive work. However, it’s time well spent: most attendees leave the workshop with full clarity on their business’ messaging, an outline for their sales funnel, lead magnet, website homepage, and more.

SIGN UP FOR THE WORKSHOP DIRECTLY AT STORYBRAND

FIND OUT HOW WE CAN GUIDE YOU THROUGH THE WORKSHOP

5- Work with Us: Clarify your Message & Supersize your Marketing

I’m Sandrine Coosemans, I’m an online business strategist, and I’ve been a Certified Storybrand Guide since February 2021.

I work with clients to help them create a killer marketing strategy - and the SmartAlpaca team helps us make things happen.

First, I take clients through the 7-step messaging framework. This helps us not only clarify the actual message, but also get clear on who the target audience is, what problems they're facing, and how we can position your brand as the solution to those problems.

We also use the proven framework to outline your website so your visitors are led on a journey, create sales pages that convert, create email sequences and sales funnels that get results.

And further on in the journey, we apply Storybrand to your social media, content marketing, and other marketing collateral.

As each brand is different, the exact path we take and how we apply the method will be different as well; however we are proud to say using these methods is allowing us to get results for our clients, time after time.

I'm a Marketer - How can I Use Storybrand for my Clients?

1- Read the books (all of them) + apply your insights to your work

It will help you write copy that converts better.

Build websites that lead the visitors on a journey.

Create social media content that people can’t help but like, share, comment on.

Help your clients think differently about their brand’s stories.

But you can’t tell people you’re “applying Storybrand” or anything like that: you can only use the names Storybrand & Marketing Made Simple (or Business Made Simple) if you’re officially certified by Storybrand.

BUY BUSINESS MADE SIMPLE

2- Get Certified as a Storybrand Guide

Before I was a Certified Storybrand Guide, I used to think I knew how it worked, and applied it to my client work like described above. My work made a huge impact, clients were super happy, it was a huge improvement to what they had done so far - but in hindsight, I cringe when I remember how I thought I was doing it right, just didn’t have the fancy certification to prove it.

I honestly thought the certification was just a way for them to get people to pay for using the name.

Which it is, of course, but it’s more; the certification comes with training.

1. Certification training: a 3-day super-intensive training teaching you how to guide clients through the framework, catch the most common mistakes, and optimise your own marketing so it works better.
2. Small group coaching for new guides: biweekly Zoom calls to help you (re-)organise your business,
3. Workshops, round tables, summits etc - Storybrand certification comes with so many opportunities for learning. Some are directly related to coaching your clients through the SB framework, others are about growing your own business. Some opportunities are hosted by Storybrand HQ (Don Miller & others broadcasting from Nashville, Tennessee), others are unofficial and hosted by fellow guides.

Because the most valuable thing (in my eyes) about Storybrand Certification is the community. In all the online courses and trainings I bought and went through, I have never met a group of people as generous, laid back and supportive as that SB Guide community. With exceptions of course (every apple tree will have a couple of rotten fruits) but in general… this has been an amazing ride. And not because official Storybrand activities aren’t absolutely awesome (HQ goes above and beyond to make being a guide a great experience), but let’s face it: it’s the people that make an experience.

APPLY TO GET CERTIFIED HERE

Frequently Asked Questions about Getting Certified as a Storybrand Guide:

• Does being certified bring in more clients? —> I was already fully booked before I got certified, and I kept growing my business since. I am getting regular referrals from the website (clarifyyourmarketing.com) as well as fellow Guides though. Many (newer) guides get fully booked just by subcontracting to other (more experienced) guides through the #outsourcerequest channel on the SBCG Slack workspace.
• Does being certified make me a better marketer? —> Yes, I truly believe it does. I’m amazed at how much easier and faster I can get to the root of the issue during client conversations, and how the extra tools and resources help me create better work. Plus, the #peerfeedback channel on Slack gets me great feedback and suggestions when I’m stuck on a client project.
• How hard is it to get certified? —> I’m sure there are workarounds that allow you to slack through the certification training and wear the badge of certification without much honour. However if you apply yourself it’s pretty intense… but so worth it.
• Can anyone do it? —> Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Most fellow guides are copywriters, (web) designers, video creators, social media strategists, or work for (or own) a marketing agency.

SCHEDULE A CALL WITH ME TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT GETTING CERTIFIED

Does Storybrand work for Any Brand, Anytime, Anywhere?

It could (the framework can be applied pretty broadly!) - but in reality, it doesn’t.

Remember the shortlist of 4 mistakes companies make in their marketing?

1. “Company-Centric” marketing: making your marketing about the company, not the buyer
2. Making it really hard for people to get on your email list or buy from you. Sometimes by not telling them WHY they should do that (yes, people need a reason to give you their money or email address) - often by not even giving them the option to buy (easily).
3. “You Confuse, You Lose”: confronting followers, website visitors, potential buyers with too many options, too many words, and a general lack of clarity. So they end up scrolling past, clicking away, and taking all the actions you don’t want them to take
4. The “Curse of Knowledge”: being so close to your own business that you’ve got a hard time explaining to others why what you sell would benefit them

Getting past 1 is fairly straightforward - stop making it all about yourself (or your company), and you’re 50% there.

Solving 2 is a matter of paying attention to the details, and has a huge impact on actual conversion. Let’s say that’s 30% extra.

3 & 4 are HARD to fix on your own - or even with your own team. Even after going through the Storybrand training and knowing about all the pitfalls, there’s a general lack of perspective - which is why I hired a fellow guide to write my homepage copy.

Prospects often come to me saying they did their own “Storybranding”, and all they need from us is a website; in most cases, they’re 80% of the way there… but we still need to go through the process to get it to 100%.

There’s more, of course; not every element of the framework can be applied to any type of business, or to any element of any business.

• E.g. the “homepage” framework (in its purest form) doesn’t work if you don’t have something to sell
• Creating a brand script gets confusing if you have very different types of products to sell, are targeting more than one audience, or even one and the same audience at different levels
• Lack of understanding of the instructions can lead to a brand story that lacks a controlling idea
• Etc.

Want to know more about applying Storybrand to your brand?

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Schedule a call to discuss how it can work for you!