If You Are a Marketer, You Need This Tool

Marketers, freelance marketers, CMOs have a problem that is they keep getting fired. And the reason they're getting fired, I think, is because people are unable to tell what you're doing, the value that you actually offer. We are going to solve that problem today. The second problem we're going to solve is your marketing just isn't working. If you're a business owner, for example, and you have to do the marketing yourself, your marketing just isn't working. And it's probably because your message isn't clear and you're not following a specific strategic campaign that actually get a customer's attention and convert that attention into sales. With that, let's get started. You're listening to the Story Brand podcast based on Donald Miller's bestselling book Building a Story Brand. The Story Brand framework is made up of seven key elements, all of them anchored in one powerful idea. Your customer is the hero and you are their guide. Each week on the podcast, you'll get exactly what you need to craft clear messaging that connects with more customers and grows your business. Now let's dive in with your host, Donald Miller. Did you know the average tenure of a CMO is about three years? That's crazy. Not only that, but 90% of CEOs do not trust their CMO. The same problem trickles down. If you are a freelance marketer, you get one-off jobs doing websites and then people don't trust you anymore. They blame you for their problems. You get created a new website, the sales didn't go up all that kind of stuff. It's a real issue and I think the main issue is not that you're not getting results because you are getting results. The main issue is that not that you're not working hard, you are working hard. The main issue is the CEO cannot tell what the heck you're doing. That really is unfair. We have solved that problem. That is a problem that we're going to solve with a system that I'm going to teach you in this video and by the end of it you're going to have your entire marketing and messaging plan on a single sheet of paper. It is a revolutionary tool. In fact, we just work with one of the largest companies in the world. This is a $150 billion a year company. We're under a non-disclosure agreement, so I can't tell you what it is. But they are actually replacing their marketing tool with this tool. With that, let's get into it. The first thing is every human being, especially in America, is seeing approximately 4,000 ads a day. What that means is they're ignoring you. In fact, the average person notices about 100 of the 4,000 ads a day. People don't like marketing. They don't want to look at it. They don't want to hear it. They don't want to be sold to. They feel like it's a transactional relationship. They feel like all you want from them is their money. We're going to solve that problem today. How do we get attention? It obviously begs the question in small business, in medium business, in enterprise. How do we actually get attention? The way we solve all of those problems is this. It is called the Story Brand Messaging Canvas. I created this to solve these problems, so that CMOs can keep their job forever. Freelance marketers can go to the businesses that they work with and show them exactly what they're doing. They can create a Story Brand Messaging Canvas with your client, with your CEO, with your marketing team, even with your sales team, and get finally get some clarity around your messaging and marketing effort, and it's all on one page. Let's talk first about why the brain is ignoring so many marketing messages. Human beings have a brain. The dominant objective of that brain is to keep you alive, keep you on the planet. The brain is designed to keep you alive. It's designed to help you survive and thrive. The brain is always looking for information for products, yes, products that help it survive and thrive. Therefore, if you are not associating your products, the products that you are marketing, with the survival of a human being, they are going to ignore it. The dominant job, the first job of the human brain, is to keep you alive. It's to help you survive and thrive. You have got to associate your products then with survival. I'm going to talk about how to do that in a second. The second objective of the human brain is to conserve calories. Human beings don't like to think, and it's really not that they don't like to think. They don't like to overthink. The brain burns 20% of its calories per day, are burned by the brain, and if you burn all of those calories and expend all of that energy, just processing random information, your life would be unmanageable. You'd walk into a coffee shop, pick up a pound of coffee, study it, wonder if it was glue-sealed or stitch-sealed, wondering why the paper kind of looks like metal, but feels like paper. Three hours later, you're still studying information you don't need. That is not what the brain does. The brain ignores almost everything, except for that which helps it survive and thrive, because it's always trying to conserve calories. If you can only burn four to 600 calories a day by your brain, your brain is rejecting everything in order to save expenditure for survival assets. It's only looking for survival assets. I am always looking for things that help me survive and thrive, and I'm always trying not to think. The only thing that's going to get through my brain, in terms of a marketing message, in terms of a tagline, elevator pitch, brand story, header on a website, lead generation title, the name of a webinar, the name of a YouTube video. The only thing that's going to peak my interest are things that help me survive and thrive, so how do we get through? The way we get through is as CMOs, marketing directors, freelance marketers, small business owners. We actually position our products as survival assets in three phases. Phase number one is the curiosity phase. The curiosity phase is when your tagline, elevator pitch, something like that, peaks my curiosity. You've got to peak your customer's curiosity with some sort of little sound bite that says, "Hey, I've got something here that's really going to help you survive." I've got something here that's going to help you thrive. I've got something here that's going to help you save money, make money, get a better night's sleep, attract more people, be more respected, be a better leader. That's why when you look at self-help books, they're all sort of survival assets put into a book title, you've got to peak somebody's curiosity. Only after you peak somebody's curiosity, do they move to phase two, and that is enlightenment. Okay, tell me more. Now, that is where we have white papers, lead generators, YouTube videos, all that sort of stuff. You need to organize your messaging and marketing campaigns into those three phases, curiosity come first, enlightenment comes second, and then commitment. Only after you have peaked my curiosity, and I have been enlightened, am I willing to commit, but only if you give me incentives to commit. Those are the three phases that the brain goes through when it considers whether or not to buy a product. So, you are going to need survival soundbites, curiosity soundbites that peak my interest, this only takes a second, and then if you peak my curiosity, I go into enlightenment. Now, let me just let the cat out of the bag here. Most marketing and messaging campaigns do great with enlightenment. They do decent with commitment, they are horrible about curiosity. They're horrible about that initial message that makes me want to pay attention to you. Once you give me that survival soundbite, these are subject lines for emails, names of YouTube videos, the name of your lead generator, the name of your webinar, the first 20 seconds of your webinar. There's a thousand examples of where you can put a curiosity soundbite, but if you get that wrong, you're enlightening and moving people into the enlightenment phase less and less. And I'm talking about get that curiosity soundbite, right? You may see a hundred, a thousand percent increase in the people who move into enlightenment. So, if you have a white paper, YouTube video, all that kind of stuff, but you're not peaking somebody's curiosity, they're not moving onto enlightenment. After you peak their curiosity, you need due diligence marketing materials. What do I mean by due diligence marketing materials? Give me some stuff that helps me research your product. What you're building here is trust over time. So the more familiar I am with your brand, the more time I spent with your enlightenment material, the more likely I am to trust and be familiar with your brand. If you've ever bought something expensive like a car, I remember seeing a Porsche Macon. It's kind of the soccer mom car to be honest with you. It's one of the lowest priced Porsche's that you can buy. It's a little SUV. I remember seeing it on the road. And I remember liking it. I remember thinking that would be really fun and it's much more affordable than a 9/11. I'm a middle-aged guy. I'm a total cliche. And I remember liking that car. Whatever, kind of expensive, I don't know if I want to be the guy driving around in a Porsche. But I really want it, but I'm conflicted. What do I do? I go look at YouTube videos. And I probably watched, I don't know, 20 hours. I don't think it's an exaggeration of reviews of Macons, different kinds of Macons. I knew more than the sales rep at this point. Only then after about six or eight months and talking to my wife and kind of show you some of these videos. By the way, she was like, go buy it. You deserve it. But I couldn't make myself to, finally after about 20 hours, I was so familiar. That the resistance had lowered because I'd been in the Enlightenment phase and they had material for me to spend time with. Some of you need more material on YouTube and social media and white papers and case studies and webinars. You need more material. You're not dating your client long enough. Create that stuff so people can spend a little bit of time with you and become familiar. And then they're more likely to trust you. Only after I spent that 20 hours or so, I went down to my Porsche dealership and sat with a sales rep. They had the Enlightenment stuff that got me to the commitment incentive, the clear call to action with an incentive, with some sort of low risk barrier of entry. And only because there was an incentive, did I actually purchase my comm. What was the incentive? It was $1,000 down, non-refundable, but without the commitment of actually having to buy the car. I put $1,000 down, I designed the car that I wanted, and they ordered it, and it's gonna be about four months before it came in, just kind of the way Porsche does things if they don't have something on the lot for you. That gave me some low commitment time, and by the time the four months was in, I was so eager to get that car. By the way, I've had the car for four years. I've got, I don't know, 40,000 miles on a frickin' love that car, I just sold you a Porsche. Now, you can do this in an impulse buy as well. I remember, let me go back. I remember having a clogged up sink. You were talking about a $100,000 Porsche versus a $5 liquid plumber. It goes in front of the liquid plumber out, and there's like, I'm not kidding, there's like 25 different brands and bottles of stuff that all does the same thing. I'm looking at 'em, I don't know which one, and I see two words. I see the words dissolves hair. That is a curiosity sound bite. It is zero cognitive load. I know it's going to solve my problem. I didn't have to think. I grabbed it, put it in the cart, walked away, and then I realized what I'd done. What, you just made a decision. Why did you make that decision? I went back. As a messaging guy, I went back. Why did I do that? Dissolves hair was the curiosity sound bite. I did not need to get enlightened because it's a low barrier purchase. I knew that it would work, and I committed to buying it. So regardless of if it's a $5 product or $100,000 product, the mind actually goes through these phases lightening fast or really slow, depending on the barrier of entry that is cost, risk to maybe my job. Like if I'm on-ramping some software and I have to change software out and I'm the chief technology officer, my job is on the line. I'm going to get really enlightened about whether or not this is going to work. I'm going to make absolutely sure that I don't lose my job for making this decision. That means heavy on enlightenment material and then give me some sort of free installation and coaching for the first year you use the software. Great, I like that incentive. I'm going to commit. You've got to have all three phases of these phases of buying decisions. You've got to have them reflected in your messaging and marketing campaign. Again, you need survival sound bites. You need due diligence marketing material. You need very clear calls to action that also create incentives. All right, here's the tool that you can use to create a messaging and marketing campaign that works. It's called the Storybrand Messaging Canvas. You can get it free at messaging canvas.com, but it organizes everything that I just said for you on one sheet of paper. You can then hand this to your CEO, hand this to your client if you're a freelance marketer, or better if you're a freelance marketer, create it with your client for $5,000 or something like that, so that they have a strategy to go to market with a specific product or a brand. I want to zoom in on aspects of this messaging canvas, and while I'm doing that, I'm going to teach you to create a messaging marketing campaign that is really fantastic. That $100 billion plus company, this is the tool that they are now using, replacing their old tool. I mean, company-wide, this is the tool they are using. Do you ever wonder why some marketing instantly grabs your attention while other marketing you just ignore? It's not about luck, it's not about a bigger budget, it's that the marketing that works actually follows just a few simple principles that actually makes it easier to understand, makes it memorable, and most important, impossible to overlook. That's why Storybrand has a free guide, the four rules of messaging that will teach you those principles in just a few minutes. You'll have a simple framework for evaluating every message you create from your website and emails, to your ads and sales conversations. Download your free copy of those four rules today by clicking the link in the show notes. The very first thing is your campaign or project name, the start date, and a reminder of the four rules, the four rules of messaging that everything has to filter through, are make it zero cognitive load, link it to survival, make it memorable and repeatable, and make the customer the hero. I've got free stuff out there on the internet. I think if you go to messaging rules.com, you can get the four rules right there for free. Zero cognitive load though, just to summarize, means don't make people think. If somebody has to think in order to figure out what your offer is, how it'll make your life better, how you can help them survive and thrive, they're not gonna buy it. Stop making people think. There are a lot of sins that you can commit as a marketer that make people think. Being elusive, vague, talking over people's heads, giving them too much information. It's amazing how your curiosity sound bites. It's amazing how far you can dumb those down in order to win in order to get the client to agree with you. Second, we've already covered, link it to survival. You've got to tell me in zero cognitive old language, exactly how you're gonna solve my problem and exactly how you're gonna make my life better. That has to happen, your messaging, your sound bites have to pass that test. Next, make it memorable and repeatable. And then next, make the customer the hero. If you've read my book, building a story brand, you know that is the foundation of everything we do, make your customer the hero, you play the guide. So we remind you, right there on the messaging canvas of the four rules, then we start getting into it. These are the five foundational sound bites that invite your customers into a story. So on the messaging canvas, you have the four rules, and then the foundation of your campaign are going to be the five sound bites. Before you even begin introducing your product to the world, make sure you know what the story is that you're inviting customers into. These five sound bites force you to invite the customer into a story in which they have a problem, you position yourself as the guide, then you answer that problem with a product, then you offer them a personal transformation, not just a life transformation when they use the product, but a personal identity transformation, and then a happy ever after ending, this forces you to do it. Why do these five sound bites work so well? And again, this is not your campaign. This is the foundation of your campaign. I'm going to get to your campaign in a second. There's a reason that these five sound bites work so well, and I've already hinted at it. It's because you are using these sound bites to invite customers into a story. What is a story? Let me give you a truncated formula for a story. Every story usually starts with a hero at peace. Their life is fine, their life is stable, and then immediately they fall into a hole, literal or metaphysical or metaphorical, metaphysical or metaphorical for that matter. This is your problem sound bite. Your problem sound bite starts with your current software, all the software you're using is not talking to each other. And because of that, you don't have good data points to make decisions. That's a hole. Your sink is clogged because you shave over the sink. That's a hole. You start with the problem because the problem is interesting. Human beings massively over index on negative messages versus positive messages. I get this all the time with my clients. They say, Dom, we want to be a positive brand. We don't want to be so negative. They want to be optimistic and positive. I say, look, it's just not going to work. There's ways that we can structure your campaigns so that you come off as positive, but you have to address the survival threats that they're not going to pay attention. But you identify the hole that you want to own as a business, and you talk about the problem customers are struggling with because they are in that hole. That peaks their attention. That gets them curious. The next sound bite is an empathy sound bite. So this is where the guide comes along and says, "Hero, I know your pain." Hey, I've been in that hole. I've had thousands of customers in that hole. I've dealt with that hole. I know that hole very, very well. I've been in there myself. And you should not have to struggle with that. I feel for you because you struggle with that. Mayor Bill Clinton, I feel your pain. You are the guide out of the hole. You're no longer in the hole. Maybe you used to be, but you're no longer the person of authority, and you're saying to the customer, "Hey, man, I hate that you're down there. You deserve a better life. Let me help you fix that." And what that does is it positions you. When you make an empathetic statement, I feel your pain. You shouldn't have to deal with that. You immediately become the authority in the relationship. Because if I say to you, gosh, I heard your story, and I'm so sorry you're dealing with that, and you just shouldn't have to deal with that, I'm immediately positioned as two things. One is I'm immediately positioned as a survival asset. And that's what the customers are looking for. Somebody who can help them survive and thrive. Remember what the brain is designed to do? Keep you alive and not think. So that empathetic sound bite positions me as the authority in that relationship, and also it positions me as the empathetic caring survival asset that the customer has been looking for. The empathy sound bite accomplishes that. Then I throw a rope into the hole with my answer sound bite. What do I mean by a rope in a hole? A rope or a ladder is the tool that you're going to use to get out of the hole. That, of course, is my product. Now notice I didn't start by talking about my product. It's not the place to start. In a good messaging and marketing campaign, you want to start with the problem. Because nobody cares about the product that you offer unless it helps the customer solve a problem, that's what gets them interested. And then I say, look, this is going to help you solve this problem. And at this point, the customer now sees incredible value in my product. They might test the rope a little bit, you know. I'm kind of nervous, I hope this works, I've been burned before, regardless though you have effectively positioned your product as a solution to the customer's problem. Then they're out of the hole and you say, "You know what? You're not the same person that you used to be." You are a much more capable, competent human being than you used to be. Why do we have the change soundbite in there? Human beings, one, they're designed to transform. We're always becoming better versions of ourselves, better looking, feeling younger, better sleep, better parent, enjoys my family, the master of the family vacation. Those sorts of identity transformations are extremely attractive to a customer. In this previous soundbite, we threw a rope into the hole. That's our product, but why not stack value on top of our product and say, "Not only will your situation be fixed, you will be a better version of yourself." Now you've added even more value to your product because you're offering transformation, and then finally, your end result soundbite paints a picture of the happy ever after life that your customer can experience if they buy your product. Five soundbites that invite customers into a 2500 year old story structure that the human brain absolutely loves and responds to, that is how your messaging canvas begins. You've got your four rules and then you write your five soundbites. Next, you take your five soundbites and you do three things with it. You actually summarize the soundbites three different ways. The first is your tagline. You need a tagline. Your tagline is the controlling idea of your campaign. It needs to be an offer in just a few words. We saw a company see a 99% increase in sales in a test market, Tetra. The brand that makes fish food, aquariums, all sorts of stuff about fish. We just put kids love aquariums all over their aquariums, all over their fish food, all over their marketing and pet smart and pet co. They saw a 99% increase in sales immediately. It's a tagline, kids love aquariums, that is an offer to me. If I'm walking in as a dad and we're about to get a cat or a dog and I see, "Well, you don't really want a cat or dog, hey kids, come over here. What do you guys think of this?" Also, I was just in an aquarium in Seattle with my five year old daughter. She's actually really do love aquariums. They love fish, they stare at them, they're mesmerized by them and you don't have anything pooping in the house. Pretty good. Kids love aquariums. Next is your elevator pitch. Your elevator pitch is your problem sound bite, your answer sound bite and your end result sound bite. You leave two sound bites out. You keep three. You put them together, smooth them out as an elevator pitch. This becomes the e-mail signature on everybody on your team. They use it as the e-mail signature. It becomes the way you start a webinar. It becomes your social media beginning and ending. The elevator pitch can go anywhere. It can even be painted on the side of your retail business wall, all sorts of place to use it. Then your brand story, your brand story is all five sound bites, massaged and edited so that they read like pros. You use this whenever somebody says, "Tell me about your business." You recite your brand story again. You can also use it to begin a keynote address, maybe end the keynote address, lots of places to use your brand story. Your tagline elevator pitch brand story work like curiosity, enlightenment, commitment in some ways. It slowly introduces yourself to your audience. They need to know why you matter in a short sound bite. Okay. Tell me more. Elevator pitch is a pitch. It's a little bit of a sales pitch. Without the tagline, I might not have ever gotten interested in the elevator pitch. Even the brand story is where I'm becoming much more familiar with you. Three, we call them cornerstone marketing tools. You need business owner, a tagline elevator pitch brand story. Your freelance marketer, your CMO, should be providing for you, tagline elevator pitch brand story. Otherwise, the marketing is not going to work because this is how you get somebody interested in your brand in the first place. Then and only then, with these cornerstone tools created, will you actually create a marketing campaign? Now, on the messaging canvas, we've got five curiosity tools, spaces for curiosity tools, and in our workshops, we teach you what curiosity tools work. Then five enlightenment tools and five commitment tools. The truth is, you probably need way more commitment tools, way more enlightenment tools, way more curiosity tools. We give you a space for five so that you can see the gist of the campaign that we are going to build. We like dividing them out to make sure you actually do have curiosity tools. We can then analyze your top five enlightenment tools, analyze your top five commitment tools, such as pitch decks, proposals, loom videos, those sorts of things where you're asking for the commitment. All of that is there. If I get one of these messaging canvases filled out, then I can see on a page how we're going to launch this product, why this is going to work, and I can also analyze it. I can, as the CEO, say, hey, I really like this white paper idea. Is there a way to turn that white paper into a YouTube video, animate it, have some fun with it, capture even more attention while we're building familiarity and trust? We can actually analyze a messaging and marketing campaign by looking at it on one sheet of paper. A fantastic tool, a tool that the market has needed for a really long time. We've got it for you in the story brand messaging canvas. What does a messaging campaign actually look like when it unfolds? Well, those curiosity and enlightenment and commitment tools need to be listed on that messaging canvas. You might start with a brand script. Your controlling idea is your tagline. Your one-liner is your elevator pitch. Social media posts, landing pages, notice there's more and more words as we move down from curiosity into and around the corner of enlightenment, video scripts, advertising copies, sales rep, talking points. We're moving around enlightenment, getting closer to commitment, email and text campaigns. Keynote presentations can be created. A mini book. We're big fans of mini books here at Story Brand. Books, obviously, huge fans of books, I love writing books. That's a big, you know, but notice a lot more words as you're moving past enlightenment. Story videos, pitch decks, we're getting into commitment material now, proposals, surprise and delight collateral, brand evangelist collateral. After somebody places the order, let's not stop. Let's blow their minds with how much we care about them as customers, newsletters and ongoing communications on and on, all of it captured on the messaging canvas. This is why so many CMOs lose their job so quickly because it's all caught up in a spreadsheet. The CEO doesn't understand what they're getting. That changes with this canvas. If you're a freelance marketer, this is the very first thing that you need to create. You need to actually fill out a Story Brand messaging canvas with your client, charge for it, charge five grand for it because it's the most clear they're ever going to get. It's extreme value. And then start creating the collateral, the curiosity collateral, enlightenment collateral and commitment collateral. On behalf of your client, you either do this on a retainer or you do this per piece of collateral, it's a fantastic way to structure your marketing business. This is the tool that solves the problem of unclear messaging and marketing campaigns, unclear copy that you're using in those campaigns. And ultimately, it solves the problem that customers are ignoring you. That's what we're all trying to solve as professional marketers. Customers are ignoring our clients. We need to do something about it with a strategic campaign that makes sense that we can fill out together. I hope this is super helpful to you if you're a CMO or if you're a business owner and you're having to handle all the marketing yourself. If you want to know more about it and you want the tool, the tool is free. Just go to messaging canvas.com, download the tool, start using it and you will see results if you do so. We are obsessed with helping you grow your business the only way to do it, clarify your message and map out and execute on a messaging and marketing campaign. Just go to messaging canvas.com. Thanks for listening to the Story Brand podcast. No matter where you are in your marketing and messaging journey, get the tools, the training, and the support you need to start clarifying that message at storybrand.com and don't forget to follow and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcast so you never miss an episode. If you're watching on YouTube, hit that subscribe button and then leave a comment letting us know what resonated with you and what we can impact to help your business grow in a future episode. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next week.