Getting Started with StoryBranding

If I am honest with myself. One of the areas that I lack strength & skills, is marketing. I try and focus on areas I am weaker to hopefully improve over time. But it is hard to do this when you are running a business, doing client work, and have a family.

A while back a friend of mine introduced me to the book, Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller. I read it through, and it resonated pretty strongly with me. But it was non-trivial for me to apply. So I let other things get in the way.

I feel like if I had better marketing skills it would seriously impact my ability to help push my business to the next level. So being that I have some time during Christmas vacation I have decided to give it another go. This time pushing myself through the discomfort in hopes to grow my skills & abilities.

I figure if I can at least start it during Christmas break and keep a journal as I go through then I will be able to actually push through and finish with something to show for it.

So jumping right in, Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are really an outline and sales pitch for the concept of StoryBranding and the framework to create a StoryBrand. StoryBranding is basically the idea of taking the same fundamental structures that make stories so impactful to people and applying them to your branding.

The later chapters get into specific details about the framework and what each step is. I will cover those in detail in future posts as I reread them and attempt to apply them.

Right now I am planning on using a rough template consisting of two main sections.

  • context
  • actions
  • application

The thinking behind this is that I am focusing on details of how to apply this concept which I will outline in the actions section. While the context section will house all my notes from reading the chapter that I believe are necessary context while doing the actions. The application section will house an explanation of how I have attempted to execute the actions.

I have a number of different projects, services, etc. that I could apply this concept to that I may use some of in the application section just to try and get a better handle of things.