Building a Storybrand Book Summary

I highly recommend Donald Miller’s book Building a Storybrand. I can credit a large increase in monthly sales to this book. By implementing the Storybrand process into my niche websites I increased my email subscribers, reduced bounce rate, and increased my monthly recurring revenue. You can see in the graph below how my revenue jumped after implementing Storybrand.

In a super quick one-sentence Building a Storybrand summary, this book will teach a step by step guide to clarify the message of your business and marketing by positioning the customer as the hero, so that you can guide them through the challenges they face to solve their problems with your products and services.

In this book you will learn:

• The seven-step framework to communicate your brand and value proposition to your target market
• The step by step plan to implement Storybrand into your business
• The five simple steps to tweak your website to implement Storybrand

I owe a lot to this book so in this blog, I’ll give you a quick summary of Building a Storybrand, but I highly recommend you purchase and read the book to fully comprehend and implement Donald Miller’s Storybrand process. In fact, in the book, Donald Miller gives you free access to his online program where he takes you step by step through the Storybrand process to build a Storybrand for your business. I did this process, implemented Storybrand on my own websites, and saw a huge lift in engagement and sales.

That being said, below is the Building a Storybrand Summary, so let’s jump into it.

Building a Storybrand Summary – Seven-Step Storybrand Framework

Donald Miller discusses his seven-step Storybrand framework. This framework should be implemented in every business. It worked for my niche websites, it works for my colleagues in my mastermind group, and I’ve recognized it being successfully implemented in thousands of businesses around the globe.

The seven-step Storybrand framework is the key message of the book. It’s the bulk of the book, accounting for approximately 100 pages of the 225-page book. Donald Miller teaches this seven-step framework in extreme detail with lots of examples, making it easy to relate this framework to your business so you can easily apply the principles.

Now, I’m not going to give away Donald Miller’s secret sauce. This is his proprietary framework that he has perfected over the years and the best way to learn it is by purchasing the Storybrand book, plus if you’ve been following the niche website ideas case study for AssociatePI (see all of my niche site ideas here), you know I’ve dealt with a cease and desist in the past and I don’t really feel like getting into any copyright infringement claims at the moment. Typically, I try to avoid getting sued.

That being said, I will share a summary of the Storybrand process to help you understand why this seven-step framework is so effective and why you need to implement this framework in your business.

Building a Storybrand Process

In essence, the Storybrand process is like following the script of a movie. Your customer is the main character or the hero as Donald Miller says in the book. Your character has a problem that they want to solve. That’s when they meet you, you are the one that guides them and gives them a plan to solve their problems. You give them a push, or call to action as the book puts it, to help them avoid the impending doom or failure that is sure to happen if they don’t work with you. And it all concludes with a happy ending, but you must tell them the happy ending that is sure to happen when they follow your advice.

In the book, Donald Miller gives a great example using Star Wars. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is the Hero and Yoda is the guide. Although Luke is the hero of the story, he never would have achieved success and the ability to use the force without Yoda. Yoda has been there before. He is an experienced master Jedi, and in the movie, he acts as the guide teaching Luke the force and way of the Jedi. He calls Luke into action to fight the empire, helps Luke avoid death, and directs Luke down the path to achieving great success in destroying the Death Star.

You want to position yourself, the business, as Yoda and picture your target market as Luke Skywalker. Your customers (Luke) face a huge problem, maybe not as big as saving the galaxy, but in the eyes of the consumer, they are facing a giant uphill battle or challenge. This challenge can be anything ranging from trying to fit in a workout while rushing around dropping the kids off at soccer practice or feeling overwhelmed studying to pass their next CPA exam. Your customers have a problem that they need help solving. That’s where you (Yoda) step in as the guide. Someone that has been there and succeeded in the past, someone with experience and a plan to solve the customer’s problem. Give them a call to action so they can avoid failure and show them how their life will look after they take your advice, follow your plan, and end their story with a success.

It’s a great analogy that has really stuck with me over the past few years since reading this book, it’s an example I think of every time I’m implementing the Storybrand framework.

Again, this is such a quick Storybrand Summary that I urge you to pick up a copy of Storybrand for yourself. You can see it here on Amazon, the book does an incredible job of going deep into each part of the seven-step framework, making it easy to tie the framework into your business.

Building a Storybrand Summary – Storybrand Website

One of my favorite parts of the book is the chapter titled “Building a better website”. In this Chapter, Donald Miller gives us five simple steps to create a better website using Storybrand. This is an incredibly powerful section and only took me about one week to modify my website to following the Storybrand framework.

Again, I don’t want to give away everything from the Storybrand book. I highly recommend you pick up a copy for yourself, it’s a small investment that has generated thousands of extra in revenue for me. That being said, I will give you a couple of tips that I have used on my websites to implement the Storybrand framework to increase my email subscribers. You can use these same tips to increase sales, blog open rate, and decrease bounce rate. I’m a big proponent of email marketing, 90% of my niche website sales come through my email leads, so I used this process to increase my email opt-in rate.

Three things I recommend to implement Storybrand into your website:

• Call to action first
• Call to action top right
• Less words

Call to Action – Top Middle

In Storybrand, Donald Miller calls this “above the fold”. Make sure, when someone opens your homepage or sales page, that the call to action is clearly visible in the middle of the page as a button. Make sure it is right there, clear and obvious, without the need to scroll down and read paragraph after paragraph of text.

No matter what your call to action is, whether it is a “learn more” button, a “work with me” button, or a “download my free guide” button, you want it right there in the middle of the page preferably a different color that sticks out from any other distractions on the page. You want it to be easily identifiable so that the website visitor sees the page and knows that button is what they are supposed to click next, you want to take the decision and confusion out of the process, make it easy to see they are supposed to click that button before doing anything else.

You can see some examples of how I do this in the Storybrand website examples blog.

Call to Action – Top Right

In addition to the call to action button right in the middle above the fold, you also want the same call to action in the top right of your webpage. I put this call to action button in my header menu so that it shows on every page of my website, not just the sales page.

In my case, for one of my niche sites, this is a button that says, “Download Free Practice Exam”. That way, no matter what page the website visitor is viewing or what blog they found on Google, they will always see my email opt-in and know that I offer a free practice exam.

Less Words

In terms of a sales page or home page, less is more. Less words are better. You want quick sentences and bullet points, get straight to the point and tell the viewer what their problem is and what you will do to solve it. No need for long drawn-out paragraphs. You want it quick and to the point.

Storybrand Website Examples

I’ve gone through some of my favorite websites and put together a blog detailing Storybrand website examples. In this blog, I show you some examples of real websites using Storybrand and tell you exactly what they are doing to implement the Storybrand framework. You can check out the Storybrand website examples here.

Building a Storybrand Quotes

One of my favorite quotes from the book is “Companies tend to sell solutions to external problems, but customers buy solutions to internal problems.”

This is one of the key principles that you will learn in Storybrand. You need to understand the customer’s internal problem. The external problem might be “I want to start a business” but the internal problem is “I want to be free from the day job so I can make my own schedule and spend more time with my kids”.

Donald Miller covers this in-depth in the Building a Storybrand book, telling you exactly how to identify the internal and external problems of your customer and how to work this into the Story Brand Framework.

Building a Storybrand Summary – Read The Full Book

I strongly urge you to pick up a copy of Building a Storybrand for yourself.

This book directly resulted in around $2,000 extra in recurring revenue per month on one of my niche sites. I used the Storybrand process towards the end of 2017 and saw a drastic increase in revenue simply because I understood the framework and applied the five website tips that Donald Miller gives, and applied these five tips to my website.

You can do this too. Start by picking up a copy of the book on Amazon here.

More Website Traffic in One Week

You have your business, you have clarified your message using Storybrand, but now you need more people to see your message.

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