A lot of businesses create campaigns with the end of the customer journey being their product or service.

There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact it’s a fully viable solution.

What separates successful campaigns vs. ones that don’t perform, is the concept of providing value before the sell.

Your product or service is NOT the value people are looking for.

There’s a million and one solutions out there for almost everything.

The value your provide is how you are solving their problem in a way that is better, easier, or different.

The value you provide is also what problems do you prevent them from.

The easiest way to understand this is through something called the Value Proposition Canvas.

Here’s a guide on how this works:

Essentially, your value are the feelings and the situations you provide and prevent.

If you are a plumber, you might help someone feel safe in their home. Feel like nothing will go wrong because it was done properly.

If you’re a bakery, you give people the feeling of warmth in the morning, of being able to tackle the day because you had something delicious.

Regardless of what it is, understanding the value you bring allows you to construct your story in a way that pulls people in the direction you want.

Whether that is to a product, service, or simply to increase brand recognition.

The same feelings you help someone with, make them feel that in your story.

Don’t make the story about your product, make it about the audience. Make it about something the audience can relate to.

Remember what we talked about at the beginning?

A story needs to be three things: memorable, relatable, and emotional.

That way, by the time they get to the finish line, they’re already in that space. They already feel like it’s worth it, and they don’t even know what it is.

You promised a story worth sticking around for, and they got it. They can start trusting you because you delivered exactly what you said you would.

Now when you ask for their attention again, they are more likely to give it, because they expect it will be worth it as well.

You do that enough times, and you got yourself an audience of future customers that feel like they can trust you.

You can see this type of pull marketing everywhere, it’s just that it takes a while and only people that go through their journey can see it.

Let’s go through some examples.

Patagonia

A 3 billion dollar clothing company, started by Yvon Chouinard.

This company puts its values front and centre, and consistently delivers on this throughout their marketing and their business model.

This is what they promised:

And this is how they deliver:

Notice that they have a “choose your own adventure” style to their brand story. No matter where you go or what marketing they do, you can feel what they represent.

When the pressure mounted to find a new owner to keep their legacy and a new way to keep fighting for what they believe, they chose to do something that again delivered on their promise.

They left ownership of the business, to the world.

Square

Now for an example that is more linear.

Square, a credit card processing company, came with a marketing campaign called “For Every Kind of Dream”.

Their goal was to get more customers to their service.

What they promised the audience is right up front, as soon as you click on their landing page.

What they delivered:

They created a series of 12 storytelling videos showcasing real customers from different backgrounds. It’s probably easier if I let Square say what it is.

“All the films in the series feature Square sellers of all types of backgrounds that are bonded by their common dream of entrepreneurship and the risks each of them have taken to become a small business owner,” said Square.

https://squareup.com/ca/en/dreams

This campaign won them the 2018 Tribeca X Award.

No sales, just stories.

They took these videos and teased them everywhere, bringing the interested audience back to their landing page where they can watch them without interruptions.

You resonate with any of videos, you relate to any of them, and you will search for more information yourself.

Happy Customers

The examples above showcases companies with large budgets and large teams.

You’re probably thinking “this is not possible for my business”, and you would be wrong.

At the end of the day, we’re just trying to tell stories that resonate.

That can happen anywhere, at any time.

Social media, your website, even in person.

All it takes is if you to choose to tell them.

To create marketing that doesn’t sell, but makes selling easier.

It’s a shift in behaviour, and a meaningful one.

Sign up to my email list to keep receiving content like this on how to attract happy customers.

And if you’re feeling particularly fired up, send me an email and let’s chat about how you can create this type of marketing for your business.

Either way, I hope you enjoyed this guide and I hope to see you again.