Part 3 - The Guide

Introduction

Now it's time to talk about ourselves. We're not the hero, but the guide. The person who has been there and solved that problem before.

In this third episode of our build-your-own brand story sprints, Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber continue our deep dive into storytelling and see how you should  position yourself as the guide in your story.  As a guide you need to show two traits, you need to show that you understand the hero, but also you need to make them feel confident that you will be able to help them solve their problem.

To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below): 

wantauthentic.com/brandscript

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Episode Transcript

Now it's time to talk about ourselves. We're not the hero, but the guide in the story. The person that's been there and solved this problem before. In this, the third episode of our build your own brand story sprints, we continue our deep dive into storytelling, and see how you should position yourself as the guide in your story. So let's get started. Hi there. I'm your host, Simon Harvey, and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice that will help you create marketing that works. So in the current series of special episodes, we've been running through the whole of the storytelling process that we use with our customers. In each of the episodes, we've been going through and guiding you through one of the individual steps. So far we started off looking at the hero, uh, and then in the last episode we looked at the problem that they've got and how you talk about that. Today's episode we're going to focus on you. So in storytelling what we call this as is the guide. So the guide is a character that's going to come into the story, much like Obi Wan Kenobi or Yoda comes in as Star Wars, and explains to the hero how to solve the problem. So they're not the hero of the story. They are the person that knows how to solve it. They've been there, they've done that before, and they're going to basically coach the hero through the solution and give them the answer to that. So that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about the traits that you need to show as a guide and how you can position yourself as a guide to your customers. So, as always, uh, Daniel's here with us. Hi there, Daniel. Hello, Simon. And, uh, yeah, we'll talk through how to guide people through. So, every hero needs a guide. Daniel, that can be you. How do you, um, talk about yourself as the guide? You know, give us some clues and give us some hints there.

Well, it's finally time to talk about myself now.

Ah, yeah, exactly. You know, you

know, I love to do that. Mm hmm. Um, yeah, you know, When you talk about yourself as the guide, your main goal is to create some empathy and also some authority on the other hand.

Yeah, so you're right. It's important. I think you need to show that you've been there before and you've done that and that you understand their problem. So the empathy is you understand their problem and the authority is that you've been there, done that before. Absolutely right. Yep.

Exactly. So, one big question that's floating around in my head, Simon, is how do I go about creating empathy?

Okay, so, as I say, empathy really is showing that you understand their problem. And I would say typically that there's two ways that I go about trying to empathize with other customers. If the company that I'm consulting with sells to large companies, often a very good way of doing this is by focusing on a pain that that organization has. And talking about the fact that you understand this pain, explaining the fact that you understand this pain and what this pain means to them. So that can be a really good way of explaining empathy, but say to an enterprise software company, you understand the complexities of managing large volumes of documentation. You know, that could be a good empathetic phrase that you could use in there. The other way that you can do it, and this way actually I find works really well when you're trying to sell at a more personal level, say you know you're a small business and you're selling to small businesses or you're selling to individuals in there, is by actually focusing on, for example, what you did for yourself. So maybe you formed your small business because you found a specific problem and you struggled with that problem yourself. So the other way that you could talk about empathy there is by saying we were once in your situation. You know, I was once struggling to find customers, and I found that the reason that I was struggling to get customers is basically because they didn't understand our website. They didn't understand what we did. So we learned a storytelling process, and we now consult that process to help other businesses. Understand how to explain what they do and inspire their customers. You know, that would be a perfect example of empathy to small businesses.

Okay. I see. So empathy is about showing them that we have a good understanding of what they are going through at the moment.

Yes, exactly that. So that's really what everyone needs to put into the empathy section. It just needs to be a paragraph or so, a couple of sentences that explains why we've been there and done that basically, why you should trust us, why we feel the same way as you.

All right, that makes sense. And now on the other hand, what about the authority aspect? How would you demonstrate this?

The authority aspect is actually something that most companies are pretty good at already. So this is where you find statistics, basically. So you've seen all the facts and figures that people put up onto websites. You know, how many customers do you have? How many revenue do you have? How much revenue do you have? What's your customer retention rates? How many API calls have you had in the last month? You know, all of those facts and figures just to prove how well you're doing. That really is the sort of thing that you want to pull into this authority section in here.

Okay. Well, and what do you think about customer stories?

Success stories. Yeah, I think again, this is another really good way of showing authority. I talked about how many customers do you have earlier? And I think actually including success stories on your web page or including success stories as part of your marketing communications, you know, little quotes from customers is absolutely the way to be going in here. You know, that shows really good authority in there. Another tip that I can give you. If you're talking about customer case studies, you know, why not use this whole storytelling process to generate those case studies, uh, you know, what the process you could follow when you're interviewing a customer. And again, we've got a script if you want this, let me know, but we've got a customer interview script that we use frequently when we're creating success stories that takes them through this storytelling process and says, Hey, Mr. Customer, what was the problem that you had? What did you want? How did you solve this problem? And ultimately, how did your business transform when you worked with us or with this company? And you can write a story for that customer in exactly the same structure as we're going through trying to create this sort of brand story now for our heroes. So yeah, it's a really good example, a really great way of showing authority there and using storytelling as part of that.

Okay. So, um, that would cover the empathy and the authority part of the guide section.

Yep. Yes.

So If those are the two elements that we need here or that we need to create here, there's one other important question that I have. Mm-Hmm.. And that is how long should the guide section be related to the hero or the problem part of the story?

Yeah. Okay. I would say the guide section itself needs to be long enough to clearly explain. What it is that you do and why you should trust us, but you shouldn't include so much stuff in there that you start to confuse people. So in the guide section, it's okay to include, for example, in an email, a couple of paragraphs or a paragraph or so that explains more about how you actually solve their problem. So the steps that you take it through on the web page, it's okay to include some features of this particular solution or some bullet points that explain how you go about solving this. But you probably wouldn't want to have a great big long page with 20 or 30 different features in there because otherwise you're just confusing them again. They're sort of getting distracted and they're getting overloaded. So as I say, keep it long enough to explain clearly what you do, but not so long as to start adding confusion.

Okay, so to summarize, in the guide section we create empathy and we create authority. And the guide section shouldn't be too long so that people start to think that we are the hero.

Yeah, exactly. That's important.

What would you say? Is there anything else that you want to add to, to the guide section, Simon?

No, I think, as I say, I think we cover the main parts in there and I think you've covered Everyone's got their brand script so you can go and fill in those couple of sections in there. And I would say what you're aiming to do is probably a paragraph, maybe two or three sentences for each one of those sections as you go in filling that in. So I think that's probably all to say today. All right. Good. So yeah. Thanks for that, uh, quick conversation there, Daniel. So speaking of your brand script, if you haven't already done so, then you can download the brand script template from wantauthentic. com slash brand script and follow through with everything that we're doing in this season. And for today's 15 minute task, you know, I want you to go through and fill in the guide section of the brand script. It shouldn't take you too long to do that. It's often one of the easiest things to do. People like talking about themselves. Shouldn't take you too long to come out with a few examples, particularly of the authority side of things. If you need to, again, rewind the, uh, the podcast here, listen through to some of the conversations that we've had and some of the points that we've given, and, uh, yeah, build out your guide section and show your hero how you're going to, uh, play that role and how you're going to guide them through the struggles and solve the problem that they've got. If you're having any challenges doing this yourself, of course, there's always people here to help you. You can come and join us in the Authentic Engagement Coaching Community, where you're going to find other people, similar business leaders to yourself, that are talking about these sort of ideas, and you can test out your ideas and test out your own brand script there in a safe environment. You know, myself and Daniel are in there, as well as some of our other coaching customers, and you can try things out and see how the old brand script works in the real world. If you want to join us there, you can just go to want authentic.com and you can join me and everybody else there very quickly. So I think that's probably about all for today's episode of the authentic marketing podcast. Thanks as always for joining us next time. We should be carrying on looking through the rest of the brand script. And if you think you know anybody else that actually being able to explain what they could do with help their business, then, you know, feel free to share this episode in this season. With any of your other colleagues, it would help us and it would help them. So I thank you very much for them for starting off. That's it for today. So I look forward to talking to you next time. Bye for now.