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Articles filed in: Storytelling
Done Right Is Better Than Perfect
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Last week, someone—a person with a business, a living to make and maybe mouths to feed, took time to find the contact form on my website to send me this message.
Hello
Are you an online marketer, do you own a business or businesses?
I was just looking at your website.
Do you want real visitors to your website or SEO for social marketing?
-Visitors Come From Facebook
-Real Traffic Will Come From the USA and Europe 24/7
-This Is Lifetime Traffic
==Just for reference, you can see our work here== [hyperlink removed]
Behind this message are business goals, hopes and dreams that have little chance of being realised because the sender opted to take a shortcut.
You’ve probably heard Sheryl Sandberg’s sage advice to entrepreneurs; ‘Done is better than perfect’. I think we need to qualify those words. Done right is better than perfect. If you haven’t got time to do the groundwork to tell the right story to the right person, then that’s a wasted opportunity. Your work is worthy of the effort it takes to go the long way around.
Image by US Embassy
Attention Is A Byproduct Of Affinity.
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
The truest words ever spoken about storytelling were those of one of the greatest storytellers of our generation. J.K. Rowling once said—’No story lives unless someone wants to listen.’
As people who are anxious to change the world, what we try to do is make people listen. But there’s another equally important truth about storytelling that’s often overlooked. No person listens unless they care about what’s being said. Our job then is to tell stories that help people to care first so that they might listen later.
We can’t tell stories that resonate unless we understand the worldview of the people we’re hoping to help or change. We do better when we remember that attention is a byproduct of affinity.
Image by Dima Barsky
Should You Simplify Your Sales Script?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
There’s a shop half-way down Smith Street that sells just about everything. Whatever you might need from a hammer to a cigarette lighter, a birthday card to an egg slicer they’ve got it. It’s the kind of shop that usually encourages browsing more than buying, where people wander around aimlessly ‘just looking’. But in this shop, an unusually high percentage of people are converted from browsers to buyers.
The shop owner stands behind the checkout at the entrance to the shop making a point of greeting every customer. This is nothing new. We see that happening every day in retailers around the world. What’s different in this situation is what happens next, partly by accident, rather than by design. Because English is her second language, the owner has to choose her words carefully so she can get a response that helps her to understand how to help prospective customers. The indirect approach typically used in other retail environments won’t work for her. She simplifies her script using a more direct approach, asking every person the same question as they enter the shop.
‘Are you looking for something?’
The question elicits a more useful response than the typical, ‘How can I help you?’ It focuses the customer on his original intention and enables the shop owner to help him navigate the Aladdin’s cave of products.
Good salespeople help customers to do the thing they wanted to do. Often in our desire to empower the customer to make the right choice we prevent them from choosing at all. In some situations, the direct approach is the right one.
Image by Brian Yap
The Empathy Profession
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
When I was growing up (and maybe when you were too), careers like medicine, nursing and teaching, were regarded as being part of the ’empathy profession’.
Today, every one of us, from accountants to designers, CEOs to Astronauts, are in the ’empathy profession’. No business or brand can thrive without understanding what it is their customer wants. No leader can create meaningful change without seeing the world through the eyes of her colleagues. No innovator can create relevant solutions unless he understands the challenge his invention helps someone to overcome.
It’s hard to empathise with someone unless you know their story. That’s why the software that gets used and the cafes that stay open were created by people who started with their customer’s story.
Whether you’re a designer at Google or a chocolate maker at Pana—it’s only possible to make things that people want by figuring out how those people want to feel in the presence of your product. You tell better stories by understanding the story the customer wants to tell herself. Caring is part of every job description now.
Download and use this Empathy Map PDF to help you get started.
Image by Hernán Piñera
The Hallmarks Of Good Marketing
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
A real estate agent can generate more interest in a property by listing it well below the expected selling price. Underquoting is sometimes used as a marketing tactic to create a heightened sense of urgency in prospective buyers who don’t want to miss out. When the property sells for 30% above the quoted price range, the agent can fool himself (and his vendors) into thinking that this was simply the result of a good marketing campaign. Disappointed buyers don’t see it that way.
Good marketing attempts to inform, not deceive. A good marketer sets out to help buyers, not to confuse them. Good marketers add value. They don’t just close the sale. Good marketing is not a short-term sales tactic, it’s part of a long-term business building strategy.
Our job is to leave people feeling better for having worked with us. Good marketing starts with the intention to do just that.
Image by Robert Bell
Marketing Forwards
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Lachie was a half-decent painter and decorator, but what he really had going for him was his youth and enthusiasm. He’d been in business long enough to reap some reward for his efforts, but not so long that he’d experienced the bust that inevitably followed the boom in Western Australia. Lachie had an easygoing nature. When other tradies ominously shook their heads and pursed their lips, Lachie just smiled and said nothing was a problem. It was no wonder that he’d talked himself into building a thriving business.
It wasn’t until Lachie started work painting our kitchen that I realised just how much he loved to talk. I quickly learned working from my home office was a bad idea if we wanted the job finished on time. Before the smartphone, Lachie had talkback radio for company while he worked, but the iPhone opened up a whole new world. Now he could simultaneously paint a ceiling and chat with a friend on his phone. I will never forget the morning when he spent an entire hour telling a friend about the new accounting software he was using. He waxed lyrical about how much time it saved him on invoicing. But not only that, he’d increased his customer conversion rate by using this new software for quoting. He was getting better at following up on overdue accounts, and his cashflow had improved as a result. Lachie had become a walking, talking advert for Xero overnight. He even made sure his friend noted the correct spelling. ‘Zero with an ‘x’, not a ‘z’.
As marketers, we spend a lot of time on the story we tell. We obsess about what we can say to convince more people to buy our products and services, often forgetting that the best marketing is about giving the customer a story to tell. Your marketing doesn’t happen once the product is ready to stack on the shelf. It can start by being clear about the story you want a prospective customer to tell and then working backwards to create that result.
What will your future customer tell his friend about how your product or service changed his life or worldview tomorrow? Design for that today.
Image by David Meurin
Ten Benefits Of Backstorytelling
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
Since the explosive growth of the advertising industry that began on Madison Avenue in the 1920s, marketing has been about creating a story to make people want something. Conventional wisdom dictated that if you wanted to sell more of a thing, you appealed to a customer’s desire to improve his situation in the moment. Then when you needed to sell the next thing you did it again. Marketing became a game of rinse and repeat.
On the way to competing for attention and building brand awareness, companies neglected the opportunity to develop an affinity with their customers. A hundred years on we’re re-discovering the benefits of truthtelling and building deeper relationships with our customers. That journey to prioritising resonance begins by embracing and sharing our backstory.
Embracing And Sharing Our Backstory….
1. Connects us to our purpose and vision for our career or business.
2. Allows us to celebrate our strengths by remembering how we got from there to here.
3. Deepens our understanding of our unique value and what differentiates us in the marketplace.
4. Reinforces our core values.
5. Helps us to act in alignment and make values-based decisions.
6. Encourages us to be responsive to customers instead of being reactive to the marketplace.
7. Attracts customers who want to support businesses that reflect or represent their values.
8. Builds brand loyalty and gives customers a story to tell.
9. Attracts the kind of like-minded employees we want.
10.Helps us to stay motivated and continue to do work we’re proud of.
One of our most effective career and business development resources is hiding in plain sight. History, heritage and hindsight are powerful teachers. But we’re in too much of a hurry to reach higher ground to learn from them. Don’t be so busy trying to get from here to there, that you forget to embrace how you got from there to here. If you want to get better at connecting the dots between your past and your future, start with your backstory. My new book Story Driven shows you how.
Image by Marcel Schewe
Start Setting Your Brand Storytelling Goals
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
We expect brand storytelling to do a lot of heavy lifting for our business. We want our story to engage prospective customers and communicate the value we create. We rely on storytelling to create a sense of belonging and encourage people to believe in our brand. Ultimately we expect that our story will convince and convert people from browsers to buyers and then later compel them to become raving fans. We embark on the storytelling journey with this huge set of expectations often without having clearly defined goals for our story strategy. Where should we begin?
Start by choosing a single, simple outcome that you can test and measure. Begin with that outcome and work backwards.
What’s the story you need to tell if your goal is to encourage people to sign up to receive more information? What message will resonate with existing customers you want to inform about your new product line? What’s the internal narrative of the new customers you’re trying to attract and how will you ensure your story aligns with what they care about?
A story is only as effective as the insight we have about the audience and our intention about where we hope to take them.
Image by Krystal K
The Difference Between A Weak Brand And A Strong Brand
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The biggest mistake a brand can make is to try being all things to everyone. Weak brands settle for doing what’s easy or obvious. They appeal to the market of everyone, avoid the edges and thus become interchangeable with their competitors.
Strong brands know they are this and not that. They intentionally aspire to be something to someone and so become irreplaceable to their customers.
Who’s your someone? What do you want to be to them?
Image by Nathan Makan
The Choice
filed in Storytelling, Strategy
We know how the trip will pan out even before we get on the tram. The driver is agitated. He uses his bell accordingly. He repeatedly ‘dings’ three times, announcing his tram’s presence on the road. His bell is warning system—reflecting his mood. Everything becomes an emergency. How the driver operates the bell changes his attitude and the way he drives the tram. It also changes the posture of the passengers on board. We collectively become jumpier.
Contrast the ‘treble ring’ warning system with the way most Melbourne tram drivers use the bell. They ‘ding’ in a potentially dangerous situation—to alert a cyclist and distracted pedestrians or to let passengers know the tram is about to start moving. Often their bell signals a friendly greeting to other tram drivers as they pass each other on the road. I can empathise with the ‘treble ring’ tram driver. Perhaps he’d just had one of those days? But he has more power than he realises.
We each get the chance to, as author Neil Gaiman says, ‘make the world better for our having been here.’ How we show up to do that is a choice.
Image by Edward Blake