Now I hate to break it to you guys, but it is TRUE. Nobody cares about your business. What people ultimately care about, is themselves, the problems they have and then – when it comes to your business – whether you can solve them. That’s the bottom line.
It’s all free!
Gary Vaynerchuk says it all the time, (and you know what, he is right), there has never been a better time in human history to get into business. It wasn’t until recently that the cost of setting up your own business digitally has gone down to next to nothing. Since buying server hosting is dirt cheap, you can build your own website, and you can do it with simple software off the shelf. Setting up a Facebook page, YouTube channel, Twitter account. It’s all free.
Image from best-selling book Start With Why, motivational speaker and marketing consultant Simon Sinek
There’s never been a time in history like this, where if you have an idea that you believe will make a difference in people’s lives, you can connect with them anywhere in the world, and they will pay you to solve their problems. That’s the magic of the digital age and that’s the good news. But the bad news is there’s never been a harder time in history to get people to care. Nobody cares about your business.
You know the feeling when you first get into business.
One of the first things you do is you build your website and you go out and you research all your competition and then you go to a designer and then you put the site out there and nobody’s going to look in on Google Analytics and there’s almost no visits. Even when there are visits, it’s not nearly enough to make a difference.
Then you go out and you build your Facebook page and you put all these great posts and videos and memes. But no one likes it in your Facebook account, you can’t even get your mom to like your Facebook page. I mean, it’s embarrassing. Then you go out on YouTube. You spent all this time; you hire a videographer and you make these amazing videos that are going to help people and you think that’s going to make the difference. Well then again, no one’s watching your videos and then you buy ads on Facebook and Google but no!
So, you have traffic, but no one’s buying. And it’s so demoralizing. I’ve been there when I started my first business over 7 years ago. I remember spending all this time on my website spending thousands of rupees on AdWords and literally not a single person bought.
Now, all these things are important. You definitely need a website. You need landing pages, you need emails, you need Facebook page, you need YouTube ads or YouTube channel. You need Twitter account. You need Instagram, you need all of that. And it all needs to work together. But really, none of that stuff matters unless you get one thing right.
Story matters because if you have a product or service, ultimately nobody’s going to buy it unless it does one thing –
Selling the Value Proposition
Sales is taking someone from a place that they are right now, whether it’s a place of extreme pain or trying to avoid pain or maybe they’re in a good place, but they want to get to a much better place.
Sales is the process of convincing someone to invest in a better future, invest in you and themselves together to create a better future.
People are literally walking around talking to themselves about why they’re in pain or why they can’t get that bright future that they think, they and their family deserve. They have emotions wrapped up around this. You might try to reason with people and give them all the features and the benefits of why they should buy your product.
But ultimately they buy one thing and that’s emotion – people buy in emotion and justify with logic.
So if you can’t tap into the emotions that they’re feeling, you have no chance to really make a difference in their lives.
So empathy, once you do that, the next thing you have to do is, now that you’re inside their head, you need to really understand what is the story that they’re telling themselves in their life. Everyone is walking around based on their pain points and their emotions and what’s happening to them, telling themselves the story.
Anthony Robbins loves to say this, and I totally agree with him. Everyone’s got a story they’re telling themselves. And that’s the fascinating part, it is if you can figure out a way to change their story, you change their life. And your job as a marketer is really to help people change their story, so they can change their lives.
When people think about story telling, a lot of brand owners like to get egocentric again and think, well, I need to tell my story and how I’m such a hero for creating this product or how my company is such a heroic brand. But actually, it’s not about that. People really don’t care about your story because they’re inside their own head.
They don’t care about what you’re doing. Think about the movie Star Wars. Everyone’s walking around, and they want to be Luke Skywalker in their own story. They don’t want YOU to be Luke Skywalker. They don’t want you to impress them and dazzle them. They want to feel like they can be the Luke Skywalker in their own hero’s journey through their own life. Your job is to be Yoda as a brand, as a product. You’re playing a very small part in their lives, in the story that they’re telling themselves.
But it’s an important part because Yoda, everyone loves Yoda. It’s important. You just have to be there providing those little nudges so that they can be a hero and accomplish. Even if you’re helping them a lot, they themselves will accomplish what they are on a journey to achieve. That’s the goal of your product or service. Make sure digital marketing almost always starts out with a successful free offer, which is something you need to use to interrupt people in the story that they’re living and show them there’s a different path.
Once you get them to follow you a little bit on the new story, you’re helping them tell themselves they’re starting to get some confidence. They know, like and trust you. Only then they’re going to invest potentially in the paid offer whether it’s a product or service that you have, it’s going to help them live that brighter future. OK, so that’s the easy part. All right. Empathy and story and what I say, easy.
It’s quite hard because you actually have to sit down and go through a process to get this right, that the real hard part is helping people write that story, that digital story that they’re going to tell themselves and people who are walking around.
People were never bombarded by more information than now in human history. You’ve got to cut through that. The last part of success in online digital marketing is digital storytelling.
How to find your ideal customer?
You really have to catch people where they are, because you know who your ideal client is. You know when they’re young, they’re hanging out on Snapchat or when they’re older, they’re on Facebook or if they’re in business they will be on LinkedIn, you have to meet them there and give them that spark to get them to follow you on your journey. Then they hit that landing page, and the copy is speaking right to them on the page. The video is talking right to them and their pain points and their emotions, just offering them a better future.
Transfer values and beliefs on to your audience
Once they sign up for your free marketing series, then they’re getting in there and they’re getting emails. It’s continuing to lead them down this journey and it’s all linked together. You have to wrap it in this cocoon of any channel that they might be in social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest. They need to see you’re the next part of the story because most people will not go through your digital story. All in one, all in one shot.
They’re going to have to go through it multiple times, or they’re going to stop, and then they’re going to start. That’s really the magic of digital story.
So when you master these three things – empathy, really understanding your ideal client, story – then what is the story that your customer is telling themselves in the head and how do you rewrite that story? And finally, once you’ve written that story, how do I as a digital marketeer, map that story methodically onto digital storytelling, map through the journey they need to take to know, like and trust you to invest in your services?
Why Story Matters (And nothing else)
Who Is Your Hero? (HINT: It’s not you…)
Writing Your Hero’s Journey (Magical stuff)
Mapping the Digital Journey (A real strategy)
Story matters! And that’s why I’m sharing my story with you.
Digital marketing is all about creating a bridge through the noise online that people trust.
This is not a get-rich-quick article
There are no guarantees in life. But the one sure guarantee is that if you don’t have a strategy, you’re going to fail in marketing – that I can tell you that with confidence!
Thank you again for reading this. I look forward hearing from you, if this is right for you.
One of the first things you do is you build your website and you go out and you research all your competition and then you go to a designer and then you put the site out there and nobody’s going to look in on Google Analytics and there’s almost no visits. Even when there are visits, it’s not nearly enough to make a difference.
Sales is the process of convincing someone to invest in a better future, invest in you and themselves together to create a better future.
So empathy, once you do that, the next thing you have to do is, now that you’re inside their head, you need to really understand what is the story that they’re telling themselves in their life. Everyone is walking around based on their pain points and their emotions and what’s happening to them, telling themselves the story.
But it’s an important part because Yoda, everyone loves Yoda. It’s important. You just have to be there providing those little nudges so that they can be a hero and accomplish. Even if you’re helping them a lot, they themselves will accomplish what they are on a journey to achieve. That’s the goal of your product or service. Make sure digital marketing almost always starts out with a successful free offer, which is something you need to use to interrupt people in the story that they’re living and show them there’s a different path.
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