Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #69: Use the Power of Story to Drive Your Business Growth

Chris Raines: Hey there, welcome to the Dodgeball Marketing podcast and video podcast, if you're watching us on YouTube. Hi there. This is episode 69 and Michael, today we're going to talk about using the power of story to drive your business growth.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: I feel like the word story is a little bit, I don't want to say overplay, but it's been used a lot in the past four or five years in marketing. But there's a reason it's been used a lot because we're wired for stories ever since we started writing drawings on cave walls, and from that to symphonies and movies and TV shows and music. We're kind of wired to hear about a person who wanted something but they couldn't get it, and there was a villain, and that whole hero's journey. So this works because it's embedded in who we are as people, as humans. And so it works in marketing. Surprise, surprise.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: So we're going to give you five ways to use that power of story, the hero's journey, to affect your marketing.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Yeah, and shout out to StoryBrand and Donald Miller. I think this idea is bigger than just StoryBrand or Donald Miller because he did such a good job of articulating it.

Chris Raines: Yeah, they did a really good job of contextualizing it.

Michael Utley: I would go so far as to say that what he did with that impacted the entire industry permanently.

Chris Raines: Oh, for sure.

Michael Utley: I don't think anybody will ever do marketing again without at least touching on story and the hero's journey in the way that he means it, which is different than what went before.

Chris Raines: For sure.

Michael Utley: It's resonant with what was there before, but he articulated it better, packaged it up better, and made it easier to explain to a lot of different types of marketers and people.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: So yeah, number one, real easy. Tell your story well. Your homepage, your social channel headers, and other first impression touchpoints are good places to share an emotional and narrative hook. So deciding what that hook is step one. And then populating that hook across all of your first impression touchpoints is a separate step, that's step two. So when you decide what is our hook, we have a company that we do marketing for here in middle Tennessee. They are a painter, they paint houses and they paint commercial buildings, interior, and exterior. So what do they really do? They could either have a website that says, "We are a painter," or they could say something like, "We make homes beautiful."

Chris Raines: Yeah. It's the outcome.

Michael Utley: Yeah. What it's really doing is it's positioning them as the guide and the homeowner as the beneficiary or the one that wants to be transformed.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Talking about the transformation.

Michael Utley: Transformation, yeah.

Chris Raines: And the emotional benefit. It's the pain and the emotional benefit. Before, pain, is, "God, I hate looking at the side of my house. It looks so bad. I'm embarrassed about it," to the emotional benefit of like, "Oh man, this is my house. I'm proud of it." So that elevates that, "Hey, we're painters. Do you live in Nashville? Need paint? We'll paint ..."

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: It elevates it.

Michael Utley: "Do you want to hang out?"

Chris Raines: Yeah. "You up?"

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: It elevates it to something more.

Michael Utley: Yeah. But separating those steps of, first off, list off all your first impression places, hero area of your homepage, your business cards, your trucks. If you're a medical practice, what does your front door look like? What does your name look like on the directory for the building? Does it have Incorporated or LLC? Is that helping advance your warm friendliness? No, that's sterile and corporate.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Everything that you control. List all those first impression touch points out and decide what your hook is and populate it across all those. And then Chris, take us to the next one. But talk to us a little bit about this next item that builds on that.

Chris Raines: Yeah. And this is a huge shout-out to Donald Miller and his framework, but it's making your customer the hero of your story, not yourself.

Michael Utley: As opposed to yourself. Yeah, really big shift, yeah.

Chris Raines: That's right. And when we're building our websites, we're building our pages, it's only natural to think in terms of, "Well, they want to know about me. They want to know about me. So I'm the hero that comes in and saves the day and helps them paint their house." You need paint, you need a hero that's going to come in with paint. In that scenario it would be like, no, the customer's the hero, they're out to gain a sense of pride in their home and they're struggling to do that. So the framework is, the customer's a hero, you are the guide or the mentor. You're not the center of the story, you're the person that comes alongside them, gives them what they need at the right moment in the story so they can slay the dragon. So in the painting example it's, you come in, you offer them a service that gets them to that place of pride in their home and pride in what they built, that sort of thing.

Michael Utley: Yeah, it's a real shift in perspective, because I think traditionally with marketing it was all about, to use the hero example or metaphor, it was all about showing yourself as the person showing up with the sword ready to fight. And, "Get me to help you. Let me be the bully who's on your side." But really what you're doing is turning it around and saying, "No, no, no, this is the hero's journey." My favorite movie, when I was a kid was the old school Clash Of the Titans, the one from the '80s. What a great movie. This guy goes through a classic sequence of being given the weapons that he needs to face the monsters. And it's just a pure example of the hero's journey. Because he literally has an encounter and gets a shield, has an encounter, and gets a sword.

And the difference is you're putting the sword in the hands of the customer and making them the hero. It's a real mental shift from, I would say, everything that came before StoryBrand. I think it's a real shift in perspective. And so sometimes it takes companies a few steps to get into that mode.

Chris Raines: Yeah, and all your communication, especially on your homepage and what your core value proposition is, think in terms of, "My customer's the hero, I am the guide or the mentor that will give them what they need at the right time to get to their future desired state."

Michael Utley: Yeah. It's a fundamental shift. And for companies that are stuck in that old way of thinking, it's a real hard thing to transition to.

Chris Raines: Yeah. Just take the next one, Michael.

Michael Utley: Next step, turn your customer's stories into content with video, email, social, and webpage formats. When your customer has a before and after experience with you, they have a need, they come to you, you meet the need, and they come away transformed, needs met, whether it's a product or service. If you can capture that, and you may not be able to do this for every single customer. Depending on the type of business you do, you may have to pick particularly good examples or whatever and develop a strategy for how to get these out of people. But if you can do it, this is going to be some of the most compelling and powerful material that you can associate with your brand.

All these formats, if you can get, let's just start with video. If you can get a customer testimonial on video, suddenly you have something that can be used in a number of different places. You have a piece of content there, let's say it's a 60-second video or a two-minute video. You can take that video and publish it to your YouTube channel with a full transcript, and that's going to be possibly a lead generator on its own. You can have your URL and your phone number right there in the description. You may generate leads, we've done this before with a big campaign nationwide, where we generated substantial leads right from the YouTube channel. So that's format placement number one. Next up, your own website. A landing page on your website with a video embedded, and then the full transcript as text below. That could even be your first place that you publish so it gets indexed first, but that's a good one.

An email, sending out an email where you say, "Hey everybody, we're going to share this really great story we're really excited about. This could go out to prospects that you're talking to who don't mind getting an email from you. And you can push an email out to a list with maybe a thumbnail. You can now have a video in an email for Gmail users or whatever, but I would say use a format that you know is going to work for everybody and push them to the web page. But use a thumbnail image that looks like a video image with a play button. Just go ahead and throw that in the email, cheat it.

Social content. You can either, if it's a longer-form video you can clip it up and do shorter social media posts, like a 15-second clip of somebody saying something particularly poignant that you contextualize with the rest of the post so they don't have to get the whole video. Or, I think a one-minute video in social is okay. And it could even be a promoted post. So there are all these different formats that you can use with video if you get it. And it's just a great way to tell a story of transformation.

Chris Raines: Yeah. The power of video for, customer story videos. My company runs ads for a weight loss center in the US. And one of our primary pieces of content that we're always producing is customer stories. So people want to know that someone else that's like them, had the same problems that they have, had the same desires as they have, walked through that and the company came along as the mentor to help them get to their future state. And those are really powerful sales assets. They're good advertising assets. And so yeah, and you can do this, all of your customers have that same journey that you've helped them with. So just tell the story.

Michael Utley: Yeah, ads are yet another format, another publishing format. That's right.

Chris Raines: Sure. Yeah. All right, next here, speak to your audience with stories that work for each stage of the buyer journey, from awareness to need to comparing options to purchase. So, Michael, I'm going to be honest. I actually didn't have anything pre-prepared to say about this, so we're just going to kind of wing it here. So in terms of, what story does ... So people are different stages of the buying journey, right?

Michael Utley: Yeah, yeah.

Chris Raines: So let's take an example and just work through it live here.

Michael Utley: Oh, yeah.

Chris Raines: What kind of stories do people need to hear when they don't know about you versus when they know about you and they're not sure, they're comparing options, versus down lower in the funnel?

Michael Utley: That's right. Yeah, I think any time somebody's doing a pretty generic orientation type of search, for example, in a search engine, they're often looking for definitions and educational content.

Chris Raines: I have an example.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Go ahead.

Chris Raines: I interrupted you, I'm sorry.

Michael Utley: No, that's all right.

Chris Raines: We're literally working this out live.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: But so for weight loss, take the weight loss, like medical weight loss. A lot of people are, they're not ready for that kind of heavy service yet, but they're doing maybe searches around weight loss apps or shakes. So telling ...

Michael Utley: Or, "Am I overweight?" Or, "Am I obese?"

Chris Raines: "Am I obese?" So doing storytelling, doing content around that kind of upper-funnel sort of need, wants, desires would be that kind of story. You don't need to know, they don't need to hear like, "Hey, check out this customer that had good success with medical weight loss." Well, they're not ready for that yet.

Michael Utley: Right.

Chris Raines: They want to hear about other things.

Michael Utley: Yeah. It's not superficial content, it's just content that gets you oriented to some of the things so you can go further and then start to ask some more specific questions to maybe even compare and contrast paths you could go.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: Yeah. So yeah, I think having a content strategy, I think of content as a matrix, and you have all of your different services on one axis, and then you have all the different stages in the buyer's journey on another axis. And I think a good, robust content strategy covers all of those. And the way that we back into that pretty comfortably without overthinking it is doing keyword research. And so keyword research is naturally going to fall across all these different service categories and it's naturally going to cover a lot of different spots on the buyer's journey. And some content's going to apply to multiple steps in the process.

And so you can just go in with a strategy of content and say, "In this flow of content, every month we're going to do 10 pieces that are high in the funnel and five pieces that are low in the funnel, and that's going to be our vertical for that service set." So keyword research is naturally going to take you down this road anyway. But if you have this mindset of an XY axis, all of our services everywhere on the buyer's journey, you're going to cover all the bases.

Chris Raines: Love it, love it. Last one, Michael, I'll let you take this one.

Michael Utley: Yeah, last step for this episode. Think of what makes a good story and let that pervade your marketing content. Make an emotional connection first. People really have to know, really do have to know how much you care to care how much you know. Open with a bit of empathy. Yeah, we've used a lot of examples about how companies that are doing a really good job with products or services are doing something transformational in the lives of their customers. Well, you need to understand and meditate on what the pain is that they're solving. And if you meditate on what the pain is, you can find out very quickly that we all carry every day a set of things that are on our to-do list that cause us a little bit of drag, a little bit of friction, a little bit of anxiety. And it would really benefit us in our lives to have those things resolved. And this is true even for things that are fairly commoditized. I'll use house painters as an example.

If someone is doing a search online to find a house painter, and this is pretty common, we see a bump in interior painting going into the holidays every year, because maybe someone's hosting Thanksgiving or Christmas and maybe their parents are coming to their house. And maybe they feel a little overwhelmed with work and they don't have time to do something themselves and they need help.

Chris Raines: And there's the emotion, there's the emotional buying trigger right there.

Michael Utley: And my goodness, what a heavy thing to do the show and tell of parents coming to the home of the 20-somethings who are busting their butts just trying to survive and make ends meet.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And they need help, and they're trying to find somebody who can come in, get a few rooms painted, hit the high spots, and make it not excruciatingly embarrassing to receive the criticism of the parents coming in and judging everything.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: That's a hook. That's a hook.

Chris Raines: It's so good. The emotional trigger. So one of the things I've learned from other really great marketers I've absorbed over the years is this idea that people always buy, they buy for emotional reasons only, solely. They buy for emotional reasons. And then after the fact they justify it with a rational reason. So my wife and I just bought a few ...

Michael Utley: That's a great breakdown.

Chris Raines: My wife and I just bought a few guitar lessons for our son. And so the reason we bought is because we want for him to experience, he's already got a little bit of a talent from music, we can tell, so we want him to fully get into that. We want to see the joy on his face when he can get the chord right. We want that emotional benefit of like, "My son is growing and developing and there's joy." That's the reason we bought because the person that we bought it from gave us that picture. Now, retroactively we'll justify the purchase by going like, "Oh yeah, they've got a music degree. They're a Nashville guitar player." And that's not why we bought, though.

Michael Utley: Blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

Chris Raines: We weren't looking for that. That's why we justify after we've already emotionally committed to make that purchasing decision. It's always the emotional trigger. The buying triggers are always emotional, especially with consumer purchases.

Michael Utley: That's good. That's good. I like that breakdown. We buy for emotional reasons, we justify what we've decided [crosstalk 00:16:23].

Chris Raines: It's the way our brains work.

Michael Utley: Yeah. We tend to market, I think in the past we've tended to market, everyone has tended to market with rational. We're trying to argue people, we're arguing people into the kingdom.

Chris Raines: We're all smooth-brained apes.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: And we just walk around trying to get emotional. Buying triggers are always emotional.

Michael Utley: That's good. All right, I think you introed. You want to take us out?

Chris Raines: Yeah. Thank you so much for watching or listening. This is the Dodgeball Marketing podcast. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. We're on all those places providing content, marketing content for you. Thanks so much for watching.

Michael Utley: Awesome. Thanks, everybody.