April 21, 2022
If you’re a business owner wanting to uplevel your marketing in ANY way, YOU HAVE GOT TO LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE. Because today’s guest is none other than The Heart Conference’s keynote speaker…. DONALD MILLER.
Today we talked about one of our favorite books of his: Building a Storybrand. It’s one of the most powerful business marketing books we’ve ever read and is on our annual repeat-read lists.
In this episode, Don shares the biggest mistakes small business owners make in their marketing and the solution you can begin to utilize NOW. We discussed how to speak to your ideal customers and get their attention and stand out, how to communicate clearly and eliminate the confusion in your brand messaging that’s costing you big time, and he shared some powerful mindset shifts and business advice that you need to hear.
This episode is a firehose worth of information and tools and you DO NOT want to miss it.
Donald Miller is the CEO of StoryBrand and every year helps more than 3,000 business leaders clarify their brand message. Combined, Don’s books have spent more than a year on the New York Times Bestsellers list. His books include Blue Like Jazz, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Scary Close, and his newest release Hero on a Mission. Don is widely considered one of the most entertaining and informative speakers in the world and his thoughts on story have deeply influenced leaders and teams for Pantene, Ford/Lincoln, Chick-fil-A, Intel, and thousands more.
A message clarification framework. If you’ve ever struggled with how to talk about your brand, your products, your ideas, vision, or if you’ve struggled to explain in such a way that people lean in and want to hear more? That is what the framework does, it helps you filter the ideas that you have through a system that spits out at the end a series of sound bytes that makes everyone super interested.
You then use those sound bytes when you are giving elevator pitches, a keynote, on your website, and in emails. You can explain what you are offering in such a way that people can see the value in it. That of course translates into sometimes millions of dollars or votes. It translates to being heard and understood. If you are a leader, to people following you and getting on board with your message.
Whenever you are addressing an audience the first thing you want to do is talk about whatever problem it is that you are there to solve. The audience is asking one question, what problem can you help me solve? That is the only question they are asking and unless you tell them what that problem is within about 8 seconds they are going to tune out. That happens to be the first thing that happens in any story. You have an antagonistic that shows up on screen and there is some sort of problem the hero has to overcome.
The only reason anyone pays attention is if you know what problem you are going to solve. The people that we believe are valuable are people who solve problems. If we want to be respected, admired, and followed we need to be people who are known to solve a problem.
It starts with a problem.
You then position yourself or your product as the solution to that problem. We are then presented with the solution and we know where the story is going. If it gets there it’s going to be a comedy if it doesn’t it’s going to be a tragedy.
There is a formula that you present information by that will keep people interested and if you don’t use that formula it will not. People will lose interest very quickly.
The hero is the character in the story who has the problem and trying to overcome it to win the day. They are trying to win the karate tournament, get a raise, win the court case, etc. The story is really about the hero. There is another character in the story that pops up which is the guide. The guide is Gandolf in Lord of the Kings, Mary Poppins in Mary Poppins, etc. The guide is the character who has already conquered the heroes’ problems in their own back story. They’ve won those court cases or karate tournaments. The guide begins to help the hero win the day.
Brands make the mistake when they position themselves as the hero. The hero is weak, unwilling to take action, ill-equipped, and in desperate need of help. The guide on the other hand is the strongest character in the story. They have already conquered the fears that the hero is up against and know how to get them out. Subconcilsy all of our customers are looking for a guide and not another hero.
When we talk about ourselves as heroes, our accomplishments, and how we’re trying to grow our company. The customer senses we are a hero and they think to themselves “I am a hero and they’re a hero. I hope their story turns out but I need to go find a guide who can help me win the day”.
Most of us as small business owners don’t realize we are positioning ourselves as the hero and turning the customer off when they are a few things we can do to position ourselves as the guide. Be the person, be the brand and product that they have been looking for.
Two of those things to position yourselves as the guide are empathy and authority. Empathy is “I feel your pain and understand your frustration”. And authority is “I know exactly how to get you out cause I’ve done it for a lot of other people”.
In terms of authority, the photographer wants to show that they have done 100 weddings and they have all gone well. That will come out in their portfolio and photos. That is a box that gets checked, the next thing is counterintuitive, the customer will never articulate it but they feel it and that is “Am I going to be special to you?”. Will you put out the effort as though this is your daughter’s or friend’s wedding? That is a subconscious question. For them to say something like, “We know your wedding day will likely be one of the top three most important days of your life”, that’s all they need to hear.
The more so empathetic, “We never want to miss that shot” and “You will always want to look back and remember how much fun people had at your wedding”. Those sorts of things are strong empathic statements. People will often choose empathy even over competency. You will also pay more for it. When we are choosing empathy we are choosing survival because subconsciously every person feels as though they are in a life raft adrift at sea and they are looking around for people who won’t throw them at. When we position ourselves as that brand, we see you, we hear you, they cling to you.
They are confusing. They speak in such a way that you had to be in the room to come up with it. Cute and clever don’t win the day, clarity does. Especially if you don’t have a billion dollars to educate people.
Find two hours of your day, every single day, at the same time and set aside the most important things you could work on. For Don, it is writing. It’s a habit and if you establish that habit you will succeed.
Mistakes and failures, if you metabolize them and learn from them, they are more valuable than successes. They are such massive gifts, if you learn from them, you will be the most successful person you have met. Most failures shut people down. We all make mistakes, we never get it right all the time.
The Heart Conference: www.theheartuniversity.com/conference
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WASSUP FRIENDS. We’re Evie + Lindsey, co-founders of this wild partayyy called The Heart University. Our goal is to empower entrepreneurs to kick freaking BUTT in their businesses, dive down into the heart of their why and how, and serve you with all possible tools you’ll need to up-level your business game and CRUSH those goals of yours.
Whether you’re coming to an in-person workshop, joining our online course, or soaking up all the strategies via this blog or our podcast, we’re STOKED you’re here + can’t wait to see you out there kicking butt.
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