Brand Storytelling and Sales Funnels | STOP Throwing Hail Mary's
Question: What should you do with your brand film after you make it?
For most of my clients over my career, the default answer has been: “We’ll put it on our website.”
I’m not saying that’s a bad idea. I want to challenge you to ask if that's the best strategy. Are you doing everything you can to make sure people watch your film so it’s out there doing work for your business? The last thing you want to do is invest resources and budget into an incredible film, only to release it to crickets…
The misconception I often see, is that people tend to treat their brand film as if it’s a “marketing magic bullet.” There’s a strong “if we build it, they will come” mentality. I need to burst the bubble here. That results in a very passive approach to getting your message out which will generate meager results.
Is there a better way to get more mileage out of your brand film?
Quick answer: YES.
Instead of passively posting it on your website and hoping it will be found, let me offer a suggestion: guarantee that it will be found by putting it in a funnel.
In this article, I discuss how to get more eyes on your brand film and structure your funnel around what already works in your sales process. If you already have a brand film, you’ll learn how to make it work harder for you. If you’re thinking about making one, this will inspire you about how to leverage it for the largest reach. Either way, you’ll learn to stop throwing Hail Mary’s with a single piece of marketing content; instead, you’ll become a strategic thinker who knows how to make your brand film work for you.
Your Story Must Work for You
To begin, you need to think about your brand story in a different way. I began to outline this in my previous article “What’s the purpose of your brand story.” Your story isn’t simply a marketing message. It’s a marketing strategy. And to do this right, you’ll have to use it in both capacities.
To do that accurately, you must understand your sales process.
Great marketing is salesmanship at scale. So in order to scale up your salesmanship, you have to understand:
Who you’re selling to
What you’re selling
How you’re selling it
It’s important to pause here and remove the stigma around sales and selling. Because we usually associate sales with dishonesty, trickery, and thievery. We see “salesman” and immediately imagine a grease-haired, plaid sports coat wearing schmuck trying to push a car on me that I don’t want.
Now, to me, that’s not sales. That’s an awful situation.
To me, selling is happening all the time. It’s natural and human. And it applies to every organization, even nonprofits. If you need to convince somebody to embrace your idea, vision, or mission, then you’re selling that idea to them. Salesmanship is guiding someone in need to the best possible solution that's going to solve their problems. It's being helpful and providing the necessary guidance, support, and assistance that someone needs when they need it.
It’s those conversations, and that process of building relationships with our customers/clients/donors that we need to focus on, meditate on, and reverse engineer so we can map out our sales process. Because that will become the strategic framework, both messaging and structure, for our funnel.
Strategy Gives Focus to the Creative
In recent client conversations, I’ve run into the same question: “What's the benefit of doing strategy first?” Instead of making a strategic plan, everyone’s very eager to just jump into the creative and I can understand why.
One: It's fun!
Two: It looks productive. It has the appearance of actually being productive because you're making something happen.
Three: People don’t understand the benefit of having a really strong strategy before jumping into the creative.
A strong strategy provides focus around the creative. If you immediately jump into the creative without an underlying strategy, you’ll end up spinning your wheels, wasting time on things that don’t matter, and creating content that doesn’t add true value.
For example, you could systematize your content production by taking time to figure out your brand look and create templates. Now you’ve freed up time to focus on building up other creative assets. Without taking time to make this strategy, you could end up with a bunch of content that doesn’t help your business move forward and wastes your time.
The strategy you need here is the market place portion of your brand story (I review this in full detail in “Narrative Positioning”) which is, in essence, your customer journey. To review, the marketplace story is the value your organization provides in the marketplace. It’s how your customers encounter and experience your product or service.
The Customer Journey
A customer journey explains how your customers find your business and how you lead them through your entire sales process. Basically, it’s how a customer arrives at your business, journeys through it and gains value.
Here’s an example of a customer journey:
Bill has a problem. He wants to be able to quickly brainstorm, but he also wants to breathe and keep clean. His chalkboard leaves his clothes a mess and the dust aggravates his asthma, and also makes his office perpetually dusty. He needs a solution. Enter: dry erase board. Not only does it solve his asthma/dust issue, but he’s having a great time with all the new color choices.
Bill’s story is a simple one and follows a format similar to StoryBrand’s SB7. In reality, it’s a sales script or lean product story:
“Here’s a person with a problem. Our solution can solve that problem, provide these benefits and ultimately transform his life.”
But the full customer journey is also the journey your customer takes to and through your organization. It’s the actions they take. How they find you. How they’re treated. How they experience your solution, etc.
Plot Your Sales Process
Really, there’s two layers to this story: the customer’s internal arc and external plot.
Internal arc: This is the emotional/psychological layer. It’s the internal journey your customer is on: how they’re changing, what’s frustrating them, and how their identity is being challenged and changed. It informs your sales copy and language regarding the promise of transformation.
External plot: This is the actual steps and events your customers experiences as you take them from cold to customer. To figure this out, ask these questions
How did they catch wind of you?
Where were they when that happened?
What's the inciting incident that starts their whole need for what you do?
How do they then find you?
How do you call them on this journey with you?
What are the steps that you’re taking them through that get them excited?
What ultimately pushes them over the threshold to decide to become a customer?
That is the customer journey. That’s your marketplace story. And as you’re mapping that out, you naturally reverse engineer your sales process as well.
Your sales process is the steps you take to establish trust so that you can convert a prospect into a lead, a lead into a customer, a customer into a happy one, and ultimately into a brand advocate.
Content Mapping
A term I neglected to mention in the episode is “content mapping.” But that’s essentially what we’re doing here. Because once you have your customer journey/sales process mapped, it’s time to put that at scale.
Leverage that entire journey to create content that parallels this process. The goal is to build trust as fast as possible. By understanding what works to build trust one-on-one in person, you can use that same approach through your digital marketing materials. You're condensing this entire journey and streamlining it, which allows you to provide needed and necessary materials at the appropriate times to your customers.
You’ll see patterns and notice specific questions buyers ask at each stage. Think FAQ. A frequently asked question is a friction point. Let’s you know there’s a common point of ambiguity that needs to be solved, and requires a piece of content to held you do that.
When you have a really good grasp of your sales process, you can automate the entire process within a sales funnel.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel is a digital marketing sequence that a potential lead moves through in order to get on your email list or purchase your offer. It follows the AIDA model:
Attention
Interest
Decision
Action
A simple funnel could involve these steps:
Ad - Someone sees an ad
Page - They click and land on a splash page
Purchase - See a call to action to purchase the offer.
Funnels can be vastly more complex with lead magnets, automated email sequences, upsells, downsells, retargeting ads, etc.
The level of complexity depends on your business and how sophisticated your process is. What you want to have is a turn-key system of content and digital marketing tools that puts your sales process at scale. Instead of creating a single piece of content and hoping it works, you’ll know it does.
Brand Film Funnel
You can use this strategy with a brand film and leverage it’s full value.
After people watch a brand film, they want to do something. They are compelled, inspired, engaged, and they're ready to take immediate action.
What could this look like? Include a call to action at the end of your brand film. You can even place a clickable one at the end so people will move through your funnel, like I’ve done here with my company’s intro video.
In my case, Vimeo allows me to add a button which sends them to my site’s contact form. But you could have someone directed wherever you want, e.g. a landing page with instructions to sign-up, donate, purchase, request more information, or provide their email, etc.
That way, you don’t lose out on that moment when your audience is ready to move.
It's adding an additional opportunity to move someone through your funnel. And it removes the volunteerism that most video CTA’s have, where it’s just “visit our website.”
GUT PUNCH: no one responds to that CTA.
It’s just too passive and ambiguous. That’s what I mean by treating a brand film as a Hail Mary. The film can’t fulfill it’s full promise if it’s passively sitting on your website waiting to be seen.
A brand film does inspire action and create trust, but people must watch it. It needs to be in front of people to make something happen.
But if you place it in a funnel and build that around what already works with your business, now you’re leveraging your story on multiple tiers. The video communicates your story and the whole journey the goes customer goes through in the funnel is their story.
It's following their natural steps. It's going to feel like, “Oh, this is what I'm supposed to do. How did they know that I wanted to know? This is exactly what I wanted to know, right?”
That is super powerful.