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Many brands struggle to figure out how to tell their story. Part of this struggle is how to make yourself heard in a world that is noisy with information, distractions, and cute cat videos that never end.
It’s not that we don’t know the story we want to tell -- rather we don’t have a way to tell our story to all the different people who might interact with our brand, at the different stages of our relationship with them.
This is super important when you launch a new product, service, or company. That's why we took a hard look at the launch process and figured out the biggest problems was getting your story straight so that you don't blow budgets, annoy customers, and add features that don't matter. That process is called The Story Funnel.
Hooking Prospects, Building Customers, and Paying Off Advocates.
At its core, the Story Funnel concept is how to tell a brand’s story depending on what stage someone is in -- all why not straying from the brand’s core values. This is what we mean by keeping the story straight and it’s an essential part of building a brand.
In addition, the ultimate goal for any brand is to create an army of advocates that love what they do, tell their friends and family, as well as buy more products.
The importance of a clear, concise, and compelling story throughout a person’s journey from prospect to customer, and hopefully to an advocate is at the core of the Story Funnel.
If you do this, then you'll naturally be able to know what features customers want, not waste your money on worthless digital ads, and have your developers work on features that will grow your brand.
There are three stages and nine phases, which are briefly explained below:
Hooking Prospects -- Getting above all the Noise with Emotional appeals
- Scan -- Catching a prospect’s eye quickly
- Read -- Creating an engaging story that helps them do a job
- Action -- Simple actions to take to learn more.
Building Customers -- The sale is just the start
- Buy -- A compelling offer that the right prospect can’t refuse. It gets their job done.
- Onboard -- How quickly a new customer can start using your product
- Using -- Helpful ways to use your product or service + continuing to use
Paying Off Advocates -- Part of your Brand’s Team
- Productive -- Does the “Job to be Done” easily and repeatedly for the customer
- Fan -- Tells friend and family about how great your brand is
- Advocate -- Actively promotes and gets rewarded.
Each one of these stages is fed by the previous stage which means that someone can’t buy from you unless they have first scanned your materials, read your copy, and then took action (e.g. gave an email or even bought).
It’s important to realize these dependencies because what we want to do is make it Sesame Street simple to know what our brand is about, like the message, and trust that we’ll deliver on our promises. We’re going to go through each of these stages as well as the work needed to ensure that each stage and phase does what you want.
Those who are familiar with storytelling will notice that the macrostructure of the Story Funnel follows the traditional three-act structure. This is no coincidence and it’s actually borrowed from the Story Grid, which is a way to analyze stories to see if they work. More on that a little later.
The Pathos, Logos, and Ethos of Persuasion
In 350 BC, Aristotle wrote in On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse about the 3 Rhetorical Appeals – Logos, Ethos, and Pathos. This has formed the basis of persuasion techniques ever since. It’s also no surprise that it’s commonly used in the best nonfiction writing as well as some of the best brand messaging.
Research on persuasion and buying reveals that prospects buy on emotion (pathos) and justify the decision based on logic (logos).
The Story Funnel uses the same method to build the story at each stage of the funnel.
For the prospecting stage, the appeal to emotion (pathos) is used to get the content read -- essentially to “buy in”. The customer stage can then use a combination of facts and figure (logos) and credibility (ethos) to justify the purchase. Finally, the advocate stage relies on clear gains to the customer (logos) as well as the emotional appeal to be part of the team (pathos).
Every Brand’s Dilemma
Every brand has the same dilemma -- how to hook prospects, build customers, and create advocates. Most sales and marketing professionals focus on the process from prospecting to the sale. After that, the level of interaction and investment tends to fall off. This traditional mindset is based on the strong sales incentive process where an entire set of employees’ sole purpose is to sell since they get paid to do that.
Now, this does not mean that customer retention programs like reward cards and perks are not widespread and even effective. What lacks is the full story of the journey. The sale is literally the start of the 2nd act and who does not want to know how the story ends?
Story Principles Meets Branding Conventions
It’s pretty much universal that brand marketing is about telling a compelling story to your PCAs. The brand or company that tells the best story usually wins -- all other things being equal.
As humans, we have been telling each other stories for as long as we could grunt. In fact, each and every one of us is alive together because our ancestors told the best stories. The reason for that is simple -- stories teach us valuable lessons about how to survive.
If you apply this universal to brand marketing, you’ll start to see that telling a clear, concise, and compelling story makes all the difference. If branding is all about stories, then it’s only natural to look at story structure and methods to gain some insights into how the story must change as we bring our PCAs down our story funnel. There is no better framework for the analysis of a story than Story Grid.
Core Values, Big Ideas, and the Persuasion Power the Story
Let’s review quickly where we are at and how we’re going to build a Story Funnel for your brand.
First, we must formulate our Brand Core Value to figure out what we stand for. There are about ten we have identified to choose from for most brands.
Second, we must figure out what our big idea is and how our Brand Core Value fits into that. This may seem out of order but really, what we’re going to have to do is iterate between the BCV and the Big Idea until we settle on something that works.
Finally, we need to use persuasion techniques at each stage and phase of the story funnel to shepherd prospects, customers, and advocates along the story funnel journey. Our ultimate goal is to make brand advocates that love what we do and share it with the world.
Whew.
What to Expect (and Not) on the Story Funnel Journey
That’s a lot of work and I’m sure more than a little intimidating if you look at it on the whole. Don’t worry. We’re going to take you step by step through what we did at Sutro in the next several blog posts to not only build a Story Funnel of your own but also what metrics to track and what to expect as people travel through it.
Yes, we said metrics.
It might seem odd that you can put metrics on a person's journey through your Story Funnel but that’s an important part of measuring if your story is resonating with people. The fact is that in today’s digital marketing world, there are a lot of metrics that get measured but never understood. It can be downright frustrating to waste countless thousands of dollars weekly on running A/B ads on hunches, “shotgun” creativity, and creating yet another landing page. All those are fine and good to do once you understand the journey you want to take people on.
Setting up the Guardrails
What we want to do (or at least attempt to do) is measure what matters and the act on it within the entire framework of your brand's story.
The goal is to be set up for success where you have done 70-80% of the work before you start spending money on narrowing in on the other 20-30% of your marketing efforts. We also want to create some guardrails in which to operate. These guardrails will be driven by both time and collected metrics so that we can gage if we’re “off the rails”.
We’ll also use standard metrics and tools that you’re familiar with to simply and accurately measure where people are at in the Story Funnel.
Building a Growth Flywheel
Once these basics are setup, we can then start "launching" offerings and see what happens. The measures and metrics we will use will then tell us how successful our offerings are. The most important aspects of these measures and metrics are when a customer buys and whether or not the offering have achieved Product Market Fit via a Product Market Fit Survey. We'll dig deeper into that later by going through all the pieces of the graphic above so that you'll be able to repeatedly launch offerings people will pay for.
One other thing.
We’re not going to talk a whole lot about what content to create or what might work for this or that product. There are a ton of great content generation methods and we’ll leave it to you to pick one you like. We’ll provide some recommendations along the way but the goal of the Story Funnel is to be able to tell your creative folks the values and big ideas you want them to create stellar content around.