The Formula for Content Marketing Success

“So, what does your company do?”

Have you ever felt like people are falling asleep when you try to answer that question?

Your success in attracting new customers is dependent on your ability to boil your complex business down to an extremely simple brand story.

Our brains are seemingly hard-wired to hear stories in a certain way. We can turn on the television or go to a movie theater and get fully engaged in a story without getting bored because the writers of those shows and films understand the formula inside out.

But if the age-old formula is broken, people quickly tune out.

When it comes to marketing our businesses, we must learn to understand and leverage what great storytellers have known for generations.

Best-selling author, Donald Miller has uncovered a formula for how ANY good story is told and how brands can tell those stories.

And here’s a hint.

Even when companies attempt to tell a story about their brand, they mistakenly position their company as the main character. But to tell a compelling brand story, it should probably be your customer who’s the main character. Your company is the guide who understands their needs and helps them.

In other words, if your brand’s story were Star Wars, your customer should be Luke Skywalker. You are Yoda. Not the other way around. Got it?

You want to focus on your customer and his or her needs. And your brand’s story should revolve around making the customer the star of that story.

This takes work, especially when trying to discover our story on our own.

In other words:

A hero (your customer) has a problem, who meets a guide (your business), who lays out a path to follow and then tells the hero what to do through actions that end in either a success or failure. 

I’ve helped hundreds of other small business leaders make focused decisions about their marketing. But when it’s time to look at my own brand, I’m often too close to it to see clearly.

That’s probably why we struggle so in telling people what we do. We see all the complexities and nuance of what we do, for for the listener, it must be simple and clear.

So take time to learn from great storytellers, past and present. Then get some outside perspective from others who can often see your story unfolding more clearly than we ever will on our own.