This week’s Maximize Business Value Podcast, is a continuation from last week's podcast on the book, Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller - New York Times best-selling author. Tom continues to walk us through this remarkable book and how to implement the seven part-process that leverages the power of story and revolutionizes the way you connect with your customers. You can find part one at masterypartners.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
Tom Bronson is the founder and President of Mastery Partners, a company that helps business owners maximize business value, design exit strategy, and transition their business on their terms. Mastery utilizes proven techniques and strategies that dramatically improve business value that was developed during Tom’s career 100 business transactions as either a business buyer or seller. As a business owner himself, he has been in your situation a hundred times, and he knows what it takes to craft the right strategy. Bronson is passionate about helping business owners and has the experience to do it. Want to chat more or think Tom can help you? Reach out at tom@masterypartners.com or check out his book,Maximize Business Value, Begin with The Exit in Mind (2020).
Mastery Partners, where our mission is to equip business owners to Maximize Business Value so they can transition their business on their terms. Our mission was born from the lessons we’ve learned from over 100 business transactions, which fuels our desire to share our experiences and wisdom so you can succeed.
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Tom Bronson is a serial entrepreneur and business owner. He is currently the founder and President of Mastery Partners, Mastery Mergers & Acquisitions, and the Business Transition Summit. All three companies empower business owners to maximize business value and serve business owners in different capacities to help them achieve their dream exit. As a business owner, Tom has been in your situation a hundred times and knows what it takes to craft the right strategy. Bronson is passionate about helping business owners and has the experience to do it. Tom has two books to help business owners on their journey to a dream exit: "Maximize Business Value Playbook," (2023), and "Maximize Business Value, Begin with the EXIT in Mind," (2020). Both are available on Amazon. ...
Announcer:
Welcome to the maximize business value podcast. This podcast is brought to you by mastery partners, where our mission is to equip business owners to maximize business value so they can transition their business on their terms. Our mission was born from the lessons we've learned from over a hundred business transactions with fuels, our desire to share our experiences and wisdom. So you can succeed. Now, here's your host CEO of mastery partners, Tom Bronson.[inaudible] welcome to maximize business value. A podcast for business
Tom Bronson:
welcome to maximize business value. A podcast for business Business leaders who are passionate about building longterm, sustainable value in their businesses. In this episode, we're going to wrap up a two part series on StoryBrand. If you picked up last week's podcast or blog post, then you are no doubt aware by now that I am absolutely in love with Donald Miller's bestselling book, building a story brand. Clarify your message. So your customers will listen. Last week, we talked about this simple to follow StoryBrand seven part framework. It reads like a sentence. A character has a problem and meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action that helps them avoid failure and ends in success. Now, if you took my advice last week, then you took the time to build your own brand script based on this easy to follow framework. Now, if you didn't do that, I suggest that you go back and either listen to last week's podcast or read last week's blog posts so that you can start building your own brand script. I have a degree in marketing. Now my degree is almost as old as I am, and that means that the things I learned back in the eighties applied to the marketing techniques that we used back then, for those of you who weren't around in the eighties, there was no such thing as a website because Al Gore had not yet invented the internet back then we focused on televisions and newspapers and magazines, and sometimes even direct mail today. The mediums are quite different. My degree in marketing has been rendered, merely useless based on today's mediums for all the years I've in business. I really wish that I had a process to follow. That was as sim- simple as the StoryBrand framework, StoryBrand genuinely takes the mystery out of writing a message so that your customers will understand quickly and want to pay attention. So last week we walked through the seven step process to build your brand script. This week, I'd like to focus on taking that StoryBrand brand script and putting it to practical use in your marketing efforts. Now, if you haven't already done. So I strongly suggest that you pick up StoryBrand because it can give you because all I can do here is give you an overview, but Miller gives great and detailed descriptions of how to implement your brand script into your every day marketing material. As Miller says in the opening paragraph of chapter 12, and here I quote, we will only see an increased engagement from our customers. If we implement our StoryBrand brand script and our marketing and messaging material, the brand script you've put together has to show on websites and email campaigns, elevator pitches, and sales scripts. The more you execute, the more clearly you will communicate and the more your brand will stand out. And the more I learn about StoryBrand and the more we have woven it into our own marketing material, the more I realized that any business can use this simple concept to really stand out from their competition and achieve great results in driving customers into their business. I spent a good portion of my days, talking with business owners about how we can help them prepare their business for a future transition. When I get those calls, one of the first things I do is go straight to their website because I want to see how their business is using their website to drive customers to them. Frankly, you may not be surprised to hear this, but I'm astounded at the number of websites that are 20 years old using old technology and really amount to not much more than a brochure on the internet. Now don't get me wrong. There are many great websites out there today, but there are still too many websites that just miss the Mark. There are so many inexpensive tools to, to let your website languish. It's very affordable today to build a great website. And that's why here. And when we're talking about implementing your brand script, one of the first places that I believe any business should start to implement their brand script is on their website. So that's what we're going to focus on today. Miller suggests that every website should have at least these five things and offer above the fold obvious calls to action, images of success, a bite size breakdown of your revenue streams. And very few words. Let's take a moment and explore each one of these important website attributes, starting with an offer above the fold. So an offer above the fold, hearkens back to the heyday of print media in newspapers, you always wanted your offer to be on the top side of the fold of the newspaper. If your advertisement or offer is below the fold you risk not being seen by potential customers. We can all learn from the old newspaper days when we are creating a great website. When you go to your website, you have to scroll down in order to see your brand script or calls to action or worse yet are your brand script and calls to action. Absent from your website. If you do have to scroll down, then you need to redesign your website to ensure that your brand script is very clear without having to scroll down with all the information available to us today, there are very few people that are patient enough to dig through your website, trying to mind their way to understand what's in it for them, make it obvious, put it front and center above the fold so you can grab their attention. Second, you need an obvious call to action that you might recall from last week's podcast that a call to action is the one thing that your customer needs to do in order to engage in business with you. There are two types of calls to action. The first is a direct call to action that gives your customers the ability to buy. Now, if they're ready, the second type of call to action is a transitional call to action. Also called a lead magnet. So think of this as the I'm not ready to get married yet, but I'd be happy to go on a date. So of course it's preferred to use a direct call to action. So your customers can engage immediately. However, if your businesses like ours, where every service or offer is customized to your characters needs, then perhaps a transitional call to action would be a great approach for you. If that describes your business, you should also think about creating a direct call to action that maybe just prompts the visitor to call. Now. It is so important to have an obvious call to action above the fold and to repeat it throughout your website. Next are images of success. What kind of images do you use on your website? Are they beautiful images depicting your product or service, or do the images on your website show, happy customers using your products or services, a happy customer, holding your product is far superior to an image of your product. Sitting on a table in some white room of the most common mistakes are one of the most common mistakes on websites today is putting a picture of your beautiful building front and center that just wastes mental calories, trying to get to the message. My advice, lose the building. Focus on the happy customers who have achieved success with your product or service. Now the next one, a bite size breakdown of your revenue streams is a little less obvious. So many businesses today have a very broad product offering. In fact, I was with a client today that has over 400 items in their product offering. Now, if that describes the, you, you obviously can't show everything above the fold, a better approach would be to synthesize your product offering into the single or one or two most likely candidates to engage your prospect for the first time. This is way easier to say than it is to do. I totally get that. Another way to think about it would be to analyze your most profitable products. If your most profitable products are the things that drive customers to you, then that would be a great place to start with your images. And, uh, finally you have to use very few words in this age of high information overload. No one really reads websites anymore. Rather we just scan them. So the fewer words you can use to drive your message home, the better think of the phrase first coined by the French philosopher, Blais Pascal in 1657. And by the way, used over and over throughout the centuries. If I had more time, I would've written a shorter letter. If your message is complicated, then spend the time to whittle it down to the fewest possible words that communicate exactly the message that will engage your prospect. So as you're redesigning your website with these five very important things, the most important thing to make certain is that it stays on script. Make sure that your brand script is front and center. Finally, today, I'd like to mention the five almost free things you can do to implement your StoryBrand framework and grow your business. According to Miller, number one, create a great one-liner think of your one-liner as a one to three sentence elevator pitch that clearly articulate your brand message. Developing a strong one. Liner is not easy to do. Take the components of your brand script and find a way to articulate the character, the problem, the plan and the success in just two or three sentences. Now this will take some work. I suggest that you make a draft, share it with your team and wordsmith it. And two, you have something that will keep your customers' attention. Number two, create a lead generator. You definitely need a lead generator. You can collect email addresses by offering free transitional calls to action like white papers or eBooks or an E course, or a webinar, or just about anything that will entice a visitor to give you their email address. Number three, once you've collected those email addresses, you need to create an automated email drip campaign. That is a way to stay in front of those prospects that have engaged by giving you their email. Now, there are dozens of free and paid tools that you can use to create automated campaigns, just like we have. Uh, so that once it starts, you don't have to think about what the next step is. It automatically communicates with your prospects. So you can stay top of mind with them. Number four, collect and tell stories of transformation. When you created your brand script, you articulated a character transformation of the hero of the story. Be sure to collect stories of customers who have been transformed by your products or services and tell those stories so that others can see themselves in the story. Number five, create a system that generates referrals. Now, if you're like me, you hate to be asked to, could you identify one or two friends that you can refer? That's the old school way of collecting referrals today, there are much more sophisticated and nuanced ways to ask your customers to give you a referral. Now, if you have customers that are genuinely delighted by your products or services, it's okay to ask them for a referral, but it's even better. If you make them an offer and give them an incentive to give you that referral, simply asking a customer for a referral is not enough. Uh, tell them specifically what you would like to have and give them a format to provide that referral. There are so many more things to implement your brand script into your marketing material. And if you want to learn them, I suggest that you go by building a story brand by de by Donald Miller. Of course, if you'd like to implement on your own, we're here to help just like you. We've spent time analyzing our own marketing so that we could implement our brand script into our marketing messages. If you take the time to do that, you can transform your marketing into a lead generating machine that can't help, but make your business grow. And of course, as you already know, a growing business makes you more valuable. And that's what this podcast is all about. Maximizing your business value. This is the maximize business value podcast, where we give practical advice to business owners on how to build longterm sustainable value in their business. Be sure to tune in each week and follow us wherever you found this podcast and be sure to comment. We love comments and follow us everywhere. So until next time I'm Tom Bronson reminding you That it is not enough To create your brand script. You also need to implement it in all of your marketing messaging While you maximize value
Announcer:
Thank you for tuning in to the maximize business value podcast with Tom Bronson. This podcast is brought to you by mastery partners, where our mission is to equip business owners to maximize business value so they can transition on their own terms. Our mission was born from the lessons we've learned from over a hundred business transactions with fuels our desire to share our experiences and wisdom. So you can succeed. Learn more on how to build longterm sustaiuable business value and get free value building tools by visiting our website, www dot masterypartners.com that's mastery with a Y mastery partners.com. Check it out.
Tom Bronson:
That was perfect. I wouldn't make any changes on that.