If your marketing message is not generating measurable leads and sales, then you have a problem. We’re going to cover the essential elements your marketing story should contain so that prospects will understand who you serve, the problem you solve, and the results you produce.
Don’t read this as an academic list. Instead, ask yourself whether you have adequately called each element on your home page, brochure, or presentations. If something is missing, then let’s have a conversation about how to close the gaps.
Fundamentally, marketing is an exercise in getting your prospects to memorize the value you can create for them. That way, people turn to you when they have a problem that you can solve.
The following seven questions come from the StoryBrand Messaging Framework, for which I am a Certified Guide.
1. How Do You Identify The Audience You Serve?
If you’re targeting People, Businesses, or “You” on your site, the chances are that your audience does not see themselves in that set, even if they belong there. Those terms are too general.
Even if you do serve a large audience, you still need to drill into a specific problem or scenario that your audience experiences before they make a connection with your subsequent offer.
For example, I could have said I help “Businesses” tell their story effectively. I chose to identify “Leaders” instead for two reasons. First, people who own and run businesses see themselves as leaders. Second, leaders are people with an offer to make or something important to say. Leaders often need help creating a compelling offer for impact and enrollment.
I could have been even more specific by targeting speakers, trainers, authors, educators, or coaches, but those are things my prospects might do rather than who they are. So I chose an element of their identity instead.
2. How Do you Identify and Agitate the Problems Your Prospect has?
Your prospects have a problem that you can help them solve. Your task is to get them to recognize their situation in a context in which they are motivated to take action. Their default choice is “more of the same,” so you have to bring their challenges to the surface.
Elevating the impact of your prospect’s challenge means talking about the external problem (descriptive), internal problem (emotional), and philosophical problem (beliefs). We bring these up as a set, knowing that at least one should resonate with most prospects.
For example:
- If your business is not growing at the rate you want, then that’s an external problem. It’s measurable, and you can put a concrete goal to it.
- A probable cause is that people do not see your offers. The result is that you are relatively unknown in the digital world, and the challenge is to magnify your influence and status. Status hits on an emotional button.
- Lastly, I touch on a belief that you are losing opportunities because of the time and effort to convert them. I’m explicit here by saying that converting prospects is far more complicated than it should be.
3. How Do You Establish Yourself As a Guide, Rather Than a Hero?
Once you’ve agitated your prospect’s problem, they are (ideally) receptive to an offer for help. However, we like stories and great films because, on some level, we identify with the hero. In your messaging, your prospect must identify themselves as the hero. That means that you get to play the guide’s role, which helps the hero get what they want.
When you portray yourself as the hero, leading with your experience and credentials rather than what the prospect wants, they tune out. You require your prospects to make the mental leap that your awesomeness is relevant to them. Instead, they are thinking about themselves.
So even if your prospect sees themself in your messaging, and you’ve agitated their problem, they are still only interested in you to the extent that you can help them solve the problem they have. To keep the prospect as the hero requires that you establish empathy for their challenge and authority to guide them to a solution.
Yes, your expertise, credentials, and testimonials matter, but only to the extent that your prospect trusts you enough to be curious about your offer.
4. How Do You Show Your Prospect a Path Forward Toward Their Goals?
What you do takes skill, time, practice, and expertise. There’s no way to boil it down into just a few steps. Fortunately, you don’t have to. Instead, you need to show the first few steps along a much larger path that result in your customer getting the success they deserve.
Typically, the first step your prospect would take is to reach out and connect with you. That can be a phone call, an email, filling out a form, or downloading a document that you offer.
The second step is typically something that delivers immediate value to your prospect while not necessarily solving the whole of their problem. It’s about triggering a sense of gratitude and reciprocity. By providing value, your prospect wants to return the favor by doing business with you.
The third and fourth steps are about continuing that process toward a full engagement with you where your would-be-customer achieves success thanks to your guidance.
These “steps” are the tips of the iceberg. Your marketing message is not about your full process. Instead, it’s about getting prospects to take small, systematic steps toward engaging with you to achieve their desired results.
5. What Do You Want Your Prospect to Do?
One might think that we’ve got all of our bases covered at this point. It should be “obvious” that we want people to take the first step on our plan, right? It’s not.
We have to explicitly state the action we want our prospect to take, whether to contact us, schedule a conversation, or put our product into their cart. These are direct calls to action (CTA).
Often, however, the prospect is not ready for a conversation or to make a purchase, and they are merely looking for information. We need a second call to action for these prospects – a half-step – where we deliver something of value in exchange for their name and email address. We call the secondary CTA our “Lead Magnet.”
For example, you’re likely on this page because you clicked a button to see the “7 Elements of an Effective Marketing Message.” If this document is providing value to you, the hope is that you’ll be more likely to take my direct CTA and schedule a conversation when you are ready to move your marketing forward.
As a leader with a product or service to sell, the benefit of offering the interim step is that your prospect permits you to communicate with them by email. The purpose of this email conversation is to
- Follow up on their initial interest.
- Continue delivering value to the prospect.
- Educate the prospect so that they see you as somebody who can help them.
- Give the prospect additional opportunities to contact you.
- Keep your offering top of mind for when the prospect is ready to buy.
As a set, we call these follow-up emails a “nurture sequence” because they nurture a prospective client into doing business with you. If you’re here from an opt-in on my site, then you can expect follow-up emails from me as well.
6. What Do You Want Your Prospect to Imagine?
We started our prospect’s story with something they want by identifying their problem, gave them a plan, and called them to action. However, inertia is a powerful force, and they could still choose to do nothing.
To overcome complacency, we need to paint a vivid picture of success for them. Do not assume that promising to solve a prospect’s problems is the same as their experience of success. In our story, we need to bridge that gap for them explicitly.
The particulars of what success look like for your prospects will be unique to your business offering. However, if you’re going to work with Primary Goals, then I need to help you bridge your gap:
- From not growing at the rate you want, I have to paint a picture that you will be profitable.
- From the effort to achieve growth, I need you to see a scalable process.
- And from a lack of influence and status, I need you to see that we can repeat a series of small steps to achieve the reputation you deserve.
7. What Is The Cost of Doing Nothing?
In human psychology, the desire to avoid pain is stronger than the desire to seek pleasure. It’s part of how we survived as a species. It’s also why the final element of a compelling marketing story needs to highlight what’s at stake for your prospect if they choose inaction.
In business, unless you can reliably get new customers, your business is going to die. Despite being true, your task with this element of a marketing story is to make the stakes known without being overbearing. Like salt in a recipe, you need a little bit, but too much can ruin the whole dish.
Next Steps
Schedule a Conversation so that we can grow your business together.
Purchase Business Made Simple University to dive deeper into the StoryBrand framework and gain access to additional resources about growing your business.