Everybody loves a good story. Think about it – we spend time and money at the movies, we curl up with a good book, and we love sharing about “that time we went on vacation.” Stories are a huge part of our lives, and great stories enlighten us and encourage us.

Businesses can use the same elements that make up great stories to market their products and services and grow their businesses, argues marketing expert Donald Miller.

In Building A StoryBrand, Miller explains how creating a BrandScript – essentially a short story describing the journey you take your customers on – can help cut through the noise of competition and the fog of unclear messaging. The framework Miller teaches is made up of seven elements:

1. A Hero who has
2. A Problem he can't solve until he meets
3. A Guide who gives them
4. A Plan, then
5. Calls them to action that ends in
6. Success or
7. Failure.

By creating and arranging these seven elements, a business can clearly communicate what they do, how it makes their customers’ lives better, and how to purchase the business’s products or services.

Once you have created a BrandScript for your business or organization, all of your marketing will come from one or more of these seven elements. In that way, everything you communicate shares a common set of ideas, which helps keep your message clear.

On top of that, since you’ll use the same elements over and over, they will become associated with your business. Marketing is, in many ways, an exercise in memorization, so as the BrandScript elements become related in your customers’ minds, they will start to associate your products and services with the solution to their problem.

This Month's Free Resource

There's a lot to the StoryBrand Framework, and Three Cats Marketing has put together a list of resources you can check out to find out more. The list contains books about the StoryBrand and Messaging Made Simple frameworks, free websites and tools that can help you implement it. You'll find the list attached to this post!