branding

5 Steps to Great Brand Storytelling, with Chris Smith

Storytelling is critically important when giving a presentation, making a sale, or pitching your business idea – but how do you achieve great brand storytelling? How do you make sure that your story is compelling, that other people will connect with it? How does your story relate to your brand?

Chris Smith of The Campfire Effect teaches entrepreneurs and their teams how to powerfully tell their story so that they can increase clients, revenue and their impact on the world. He shared some of his trademarked frameworks with us, which you can use to clarify your story and tell it in a meaningful, impactful way. Smith recently gives us a detailed interview on his methodology and the key techniques needed for engaging connected brand storytelling. This post will go over the key highlights that you can take away today and apply to your own business. For an even deeper look, check out the full video:

First Things First: Story and Brand

Smith says that many clients come to him, asking how they can brand their story, but they aren’t always clear about how story and brand-related.”Your story is your brand. It’s what you speak into the world, what you become known for.”

[bctt tweet=”Your story is your brand. It’s what you speak into the world.” username=”advancereach”]

Another way to think about it is that after you speak with a client or prospect, your brand is what they remember about you. And we, as humans, always remember stories. There are three components of your brand:

What you’re known for: What do people immediately think of when they hear your name?
What you consciously decide to stand for: This is what you’ve decided to put out into the world. It’s the image you project and the causes you attach your name to.
What other people say you’re known for: What is your audience going to say to a colleague about you? How will they describe you and your business?

That last idea might be a bit scary to some entrepreneurs. If my brand is what people say I’m known for, that means I’m not fully in control of my brand! That’s right. “You control that by telling your story in a powerful way,” Smith says. If you tell a compelling, unique, authentic story, people will remember and share it.

Brand vs. Branding

Before we get into details, there’s an important distinction between brand and branding. Your brand is your story, that essential, unique story that drives you and your business. “Branding is an external manifestation of your brand,” Smith explains. “It’s your logo, marketing, materials, collateral.”

Many entrepreneurs fall into the trap of mistaking their branding for their brand. They obsess over logos and collateral. They have trouble making clear decisions about how their branding should look or feel – and it’s because they haven’t addressed the internal work of understanding their brand first.

Branding for the People helps companies understand their brand identity. Once they have that, branding and collateral fall into place.

“You should at least have a high-level understanding of your brand… for your team to communicate your story consistently and effectively,” according to the experts at Branding for the People. Branding has to come out of your brand, and your brand comes from your story. Once the story is clear, you know your brand. Once the brand is clear, the branding decisions are easy.

[bctt tweet=”Once the story is clear, you know your brand. Then, branding decisions are easy.” username=”advancereach”]

The Importance of Storytelling

Okay, so understanding your story will help you understand your brand. But what does great brand storytelling do?

The truth is, great brand storytelling leads to more clients, more revenue, and a bigger impact. Smith often asks his audiences, “Do people buy from people, or do people buy from companies?” Most of his audience raise their hand to say that yes, people buy from people. “So,” he asks, “How much of you is in the story of your business?” The audience goes quiet.

Chris Smith of TheCampfireEffect.com

Leaders know intuitively that people buy from people, but then fail actually to tell their personal, unique story. We’ve written about this before – storytelling is not just a feel-good exercise, it’s a vital business growth tool.

The Five Forces of Brand Storytelling

The Campfire Effect™ is Smith’s proven storytelling methodology. He uses five forces to tell his story and to lead clients through storytelling workshops. These forces help leaders understand the storytelling process and improve their storytelling technique. They can be used as the actual structure of your story in a presentation – each force can be a few slides in your deck.

On top of that, he says, after a Five Forces workshop, clients “actually have the confidence to tell their story – because they know they have a great story.” These five forces are a powerful tool not just as a framework for telling your story, but for really understanding the impact of your brand storytelling.

The First Force: Who You Are

Telling your story starts with telling who you are. What are your roots, what connects your childhood to what you do now? Who are the important people in your life?

Smith grew up in Arizona, around ranchers and cowboy storytellers, and he always includes that when he tells people who he is. He was fascinated with storytelling, and now he teaches people how to tell their stories. This connection to his roots is part of his story, and it’s often what people first connect with when they meet him.

Or think of this story, of a father coming to understand that his son’s tattoos were his way of telling his life’s story. Both the story and the son’s means of telling it were distinctly personal, and it brought them closer together.

The way you tell your story is just as unique as the story itself.

“Everyone has connections in their childhood and roots that connect to what they do today,” Smith says. “We have a tendency to leave it out because we don’t want to be vulnerable.”

This should be simple and genuine. It’s not a sales pitch, and you’re not trying to influence your audience. Your audience will see that you’re a real human being and interested in connecting with them. It builds trust.

Another benefit to really understanding your roots is that it builds confidence. Smith’s clients see for themselves that there are connections between their roots and what they do now, which gives them a sense of connection and purpose.

Need more inspiration for your storytelling? Check out 26 Tips For Storytelling

The Second Force: Why You Do It

The second part of brand storytelling is explaining why you do what you do. Don’t use this time to state that this work is your passion or your life’s purpose – if you tell your story right that will be clear without you ever having to say it. Instead, why you do it is external. Talk about how you saw a problem or need and knew that you could do something about it.

If you’re having trouble putting this into words, Smith has some advice. “Break it up into observations and realizations,” he says. “Observations are things that you observed that were struggles or challenges.” Those are the problems you saw in the world around you, suffering or need that you observed in other people. Then, he explains, “Realizations are the ideas you had about how you could make it better.”

This starts to plant seeds of credibility, reliability, and hope. Again, this stage is not about selling. It’s about telling your authentic story, which will demonstrate to your audience that you’re credible, outward-looking, and here to solve a problem. If they identify with the struggles you’ve described, now they know that you may be the right person to help them.

The Third Force: What You Do

“This is where most entrepreneurs get in a lot of trouble,” Smith warns. Entrepreneurs are excited about their businesses, and genuinely want to share that excitement with others. They can go on for days about what they do – whether their audience wants them to or not.

The key to getting this pillar right is to tell your audience enough to get them interested, but not so much that it turns them off. They don’t need to know every detail of your product or service. This is not the time to close the deal. It should be just enough information to build a little bit of interest. You want the person on the other end to say, “Tell me more.”

Four Filters for “What You Do”

Smith has a list of filters he likes to use, to check himself when he starts to talk about what he does. By asking these questions, he makes sure that he’s giving the right amount of information.

Is it clear?
Is it succinct?
Is it thought provoking?
What’s the benefit?

Here’s an example from his business. At The Campfire Effect, he says, “We teach entrepreneurs how to tell their brand story in a really powerful way, so they can get more clients, build a stronger culture, and make more of an impact.”

That statement is clear – it’s a simple language that anyone can understand. It’s succinct – a single sentence. It’s certainly thought-provoking, making the listener want to ask how exactly he accomplishes all of this. And it states major benefits that his clients get out of working with him.

A simple, clear statement of what you do builds interest in your audience and makes them want to engage with you to learn more.

The Fourth Force: How You Do It

Many entrepreneurs can go on for hours about what they do without ever getting to how exactly they do it. The more precise and specific you are with this, the more it instills confidence in your business – you know what you’re doing. You’ve thought this through.

Have a specific name and clearly articulated steps for your methodology.. Rather than telling people that he leads a “two-day workshop on brand storytelling,” for example, Smith explains that he has a “proprietary framework” to help companies tell their story and increase sales. He goes into the details here, listing the parts of his framework and the stages that he leads clients through – stages like these Five Forces of Storytelling.

Chris Smith engaging his during a presentation on brand storytelling at the Entrepreneurial Summit in India in 2016.

The clear articulation of your process shows that you’ve put time and thought into it. Every prospective client wants to know what they would be buying. For many people, “a two-day workshop” is simply not enough information to feel confident that they’re going to get a return on investment from working with you.

The Fifth Force: Social Proof

“The fifth force is the one that I see so many entrepreneurs use the least, and it’s the most powerful,” Smith says.

We use social proof every day to make decisions about how to spend our money and time. We look at product ratings on Amazon, we find restaurants on Yelp, and we decide to go see that movie that everyone has been talking about on Facebook.Your customers are guided by social proof in the same way, and many entrepreneurs miss the opportunity to use it.

The most powerful form of social proof you can use is telling a client’s story. Who were they? What were they struggling with? How did you approach the problem? What was the result?

[bctt tweet=”The most powerful form of social proof is telling a client’s story.” username=”advancereach”]

It’s strongest if you can talk about a client who has a lot in common with your audience – the key is knowing your audience first. If you’re in a one-on-one conversation, this means listening to the person you’re speaking to and asking good questions. Then look them in the eye and say, “You remind me of a client that we recently helped, can I tell you their story and what we did for them?”

With a broader audience, it means doing your research. Learn who is going to be there, and learn what their challenges are most likely to be. Then tell the specific, detailed ways in which you helped a similar client. Be intentional, and use this as an opportunity to reinforce “How You Do It.” Explain exactly how you walked the client through your process. This makes your process real and relatable and demonstrates the value in what you do.

One final piece of advice

This framework is useful in understanding and telling your story – which, remember is your brand. That’s important and powerful, but it’s not the most important story when you talk to a prospect or client. Their story is.

Smith uses this same framework to learn other people’s stories and asks these questions when he meets a new potential client. It builds trust, Smith says and creates an opportunity to relate your story to theirs directly. You’ve set your listener at ease by building trust, and you know exactly what form of social proof will have the greatest impact.

Use this framework for your own brand storytelling, then use it to connect with others and learn their stories.

Remember: Your story is your brand. Everything else – the collateral, logo, and designs that you’ve been obsessing overflow naturally out of your brand and your story. Clearly articulating your story and being able to share it with an audience makes you a more powerful speaker, helps you connect with clients, and gives you the confidence and clarity to develop your branding.

Let your story bring wealth to your business and those you’ve set out to help, and let us help you with your story. Follow the steps in our Signature Talk Outline to develop your Signature Talk in a more compelling and impacting way. Download now to get started!.

8 Keys to Growing a Great Facebook Community

Building an engaged Facebook community can help build your brand and extend your reach. The community itself is a critical marketing channel. Group members help each other get the most out of your products, driving its value up with little additional investment on your end. On top of that, members are loyal to your product, deeply engaged, and likely to promote your products outside of the group walls.

Where is Your Community?

There are a lot of tools out there for creating a community, from simple message boards and forums, to Slack, to custom-built paywall websites. But what about Facebook?

Facebook is powerful. Your community is already there, waiting to be engaged. They check in regularly, and they’re comfortable scrolling through posts and jumping into discussion threads. There are other tools that work well for community building, but Facebook has the lowest barrier to entry for your users.

To Paywall or Not To Paywall

These communities come in two flavors: paid and unpaid. In an unpaid Facebook community, group membership is open to anyone interested in the product, and group members stick around for as long as they’d like. Paid Facebook communities are closed groups, requiring monthly or annual dues to join.

Unpaid communities can be great for building your brand and extending your reach on social media. Members don’t feel particularly invested in the group content and goals, and might not interact regularly. However, the more you can drive value in the group content, the more engaged your members will be, and the more likely they’ll stay in the group and stay connected to your brand.

A paid Facebook community is an especially excellent way to build a consistent recurring revenue stream. Monthly dues can be relied on in a way that one-time product launches can’t, and they provide the stability that you can use to take other business risks. Churn is even more critical here because each lost member is a blow to your revenue.

Self-Publishing School has a Facebook community of over 1,000 paying monthly members.

But how do you keep users engaged? We talked to Sean Sumner at Self-Publishing School about the techniques they’ve used to grow a community of over 1,000 paying monthly members.

Your Keys to Building a Great Facebook Community

1. Prevent Overwhelm

“The number one reason people leave these programs is overwhelming, too much content, too many contacts, not knowing what’s right for them,” Sean explains. They’re overwhelmed, and unsure where they fit in. Sooner or later, they give up on trying to find what’s relevant and just leave the group.

This is a theme that you’ll see keep coming up in the keys below, and it needs to be baked into your strategy from the beginning. Think about the purpose of your community and the journey that each community member is on. You might even diagram this. If you’re starting a community for new entrepreneurs, for example, you’ll have some people who’ve just come up with their first business idea, and others who have had their business up and running for a year and trying to figure out how to do their taxes. Those two members are going to be interested in different content.

Find ways to tag or organize content so that each user knows which posts are relevant to them. Make sure your round-ups or highlight posts delineate wherein the journey each featured post fits.

This should apply both inside and outside of the Facebook community. Keep your customers oriented within your product. Many training courses use level numbers or course numbers to do this, or you might use descriptive titles or named goals. It all depends on your business and your customers. Use that same terminology in your community and encourage posters to do the same. That’ll keep everyone on the same page and prevent fatigue, letting community members skim past irrelevant posts.

2. Drive Value

What does your community do for its members? If you don’t know the answer immediately, your community members don’t either. If they’re not getting value, they’ll leave.

“A community is a two-way conversation. A living, breathing thing. Extremely interactive. Social,” explains David Garland in The Rise to the Top blog. Active engagement is key. Does your community support a product, so that community members can ask each other clarifying questions? Does it support a course, offering a space for additional discussion and interaction? Is it a product itself, with experts giving advice to novices?

A great community can feel like friends, or even like a family, where members get to know each other and support each other. But ultimately, members need to feel that they’re getting a benefit. That benefit might just be moral support, but the strongest communities offer more to keep their members coming back.

When you’ve figured out what value your community offers, encourage engagement that drives that value. This might be as simple as throwing some good social media juju at a poster who provides a great answer to a question, by giving it a like, posting a thumbs-up, or calling them out in a weekly update to the community.

3. Be Consistent

A consistent weekly schedule prevents overwhelm and keeps your group organized. Some community members will post at all hours of the day and night – which, by the way, is exactly what you want them to do! But others will worry that if they’re not constantly checked in, they might miss something. They get fatigued trying to constantly monitor the message boards. On top of that, spending too much time on the Facebook community boards makes it harder to work towards the goals that they had in mind when they joined in the first place.

Have your moderators track the best posts throughout the week. Then post a weekly digest of the top posts, and keep it on a regular schedule – say, Monday at 10 a.m. Group members will learn that they’ll still get the most valuable content even if they aren’t checked in 24/7.

Think of other content that would be useful in a weekly schedule. Live Q& A sessions. User highlights. Posts welcoming new users. A weekly leaderboard of top users. Self-Publishing School rolls several of these into their Weekly Bulletin. They use the weekly bulletin to shoutout their top group members, announce book launches, and provide important group updates or plug other top content. Members know to look out for it and know that they don’t have to worry about missing anything important. Your weekly schedule will put your best content front and center, showing off the value of the group and preventing fatigue.

A well-organized weekly bulletin keeps users engaged without feeling fatigued.

4. Enforce the Rules…

Post a list of clear, simple, important rules somewhere easily accessible in your group. It might be in a pinned post, or in the group description. Then enforce them.

At first, it’s tempting to let freewheeling, off-topic discussions creep into your boards. You think, ‘People are here, in my group, being social and making friends! Great!’ But ultimately, it will drive users away. They’re in your group because they’re interested in the group topic, and they’ll only stay if they see valuable, relevant content. If they feel that their time is being wasted by off-topic (or worse, off-color) posts, they won’t be interested in staying in your group – much less paying for a subscription community – for long.

Make the rules clear and easy to follow, and remove posts that break them. When you remove a post, always be sure to send a friendly private message to the poster explaining why it was removed. Include a screenshot of the post and a link back to the rules. More often than not, people don’t intend to break the rules and will be glad that there’s someone there keeping posts on-topic and appropriate.

5. … But Understand Why They’re Broken

If there’s a rule that’s constantly getting broken, there may be a good reason for it.

Self-Publishing School found that their Facebook community members were frequently adding posts announcing their book launches. In one sense, this was an annoyance. Nobody joins the community to ready a constant stream of book launch announcements. But on the other hand, it meant that their members were meeting their goals – actually launching books! Plus, the community was a valuable audience for their announcements. The ability to share their book launches was one reason people joined the community in the first place.

Community leadership encourages members to promote their launches through the right channels.

They hit on a solution that works for everyone. Book launch announcements aren’t allowed as regular posts and are removed promptly when they show up. Instead, group members can submit their book launch info to the moderator, who rounds them up in a regular weekly feature post. This makes the book launch announcements visible, important highlights in the group message board, a win for the authors. And it keeps the feed from getting clogged with announcements, a win for the moderators and the business.

6. Map Out Your Entry Points

This is a critical key for paid Facebook communities. If you’re running a paid membership system, it’s probably tied to your product. For example, the Self-Publishing School’s Facebook community originally supported users who enrolled in one of their paid courses. But they found that the community itself was valuable, even to people who might be too experienced and knowledgeable to be interested in one of their intro courses. They expanded their business model to allow more entry points into the community. They now offer a trial membership at just $1 for the first month, and they also offer a free month as a benefit of purchasing a small $7 guide.

The entry points to your community should be well-planned, to capture and retain new members.

The risk of offering these free trials is that someone will join their paid Facebook community, download all the information they want in the first month, then leave. We’ll call them the Free Trial Guy. Free Trial Guy just got access to their best content practically for free. Self-Publishing School has to work hard to ensure that the community itself – not just the exclusive content, but the community of people who answer questions and support each other – is so valuable that Free Trial Guy stays on past their free month and becomes Paying Member Guy.

They’ve created entry points with very low barriers – remember, the trial membership is just $1 – then retained those members through thoughtful engagement. Their community is supportive, helpful, and provides useful, specific advice – which you just can’t get by downloading a month’s worth of content.

7. Roll Out the Red Carpet

Each new member of your community should feel welcomed and valued. This is especially critical for paid communities. You should be going out of your way (or at least seeming like you’ve gone out of your way) to provide a personal touch from the start. Welcome each new person with a private message from your group leader or moderator. Then welcome them publicly in a weekly post, and encourage them to introduce themselves.

Self-Publishing School welcomes its new community members each week.

Build a warm welcome into the culture of your community. Encourage members to say hello when they see an introduction. Then the new member will pay it forward when new introductions are posted next week.

8. Empower Your Leaders

One of the best ways to ensure valuable engagement and content is to empower your best users to provide it. They’re already there, deeply engaged in the community, and with a little effort, you can multiply their effect.

Leverage experienced, knowledgeable members of your community. Give them a small gift or reward – like, say, discounted membership to your community – and an honorary title. Send them back into the group as Ambassadors, or Community Leaders, or Trusted Experts. They’ll feel empowered to answer more questions and jump into more discussions, and they’ll spread their expert knowledge and good vibes throughout the group. It’s a small cost to you and provides an enormous benefit to the quality of content in the group.

Wrapping Up

Communities keep your customers engaged beyond the initial purchase of your product and keep them coming back for more. Bringing new customers into your engaged community can turn a one-time purchaser into a brand promoter. It’s one of the many tools you should have in your toolbox to grow your business.

Live events are one of the best places to promote your community and move your business forward – whether you’re hosting live events or speaking at them. Want to know how to 10X (or more) the value of your next stage? Check out the Speak to Scale Formula Worksheet.

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