What is StoryBrand?
StoryBrand is a proven framework for communication. It was made famous by Donald Miller in his book Building a StoryBrand. Since then it has helped thousands of companies worldwide to clarify their offer, get more customers and ultimately grow their business.
What is a StoryBrand Guide?
Why Do Businesses Need a Framework for Communication?
When you’re close to your business, living and breathing it every day – it can become incredibly difficult to explain it clearly to someone who’s never heard of you before.
You know every feature, benefit and nuance but customers don’t need all this. They just need to know if you can solve their problem. But when you know your business inside out it can be hard to know what to put front and centre and what to leave out.
Frameworks are an enormous help with this. They provide structure, clarity, and a proven path forward. It’s like the difference between wandering around hoping to find your destination and following a satnav that’s guided thousands of others to exactly where they want to go.
What Qualifies Someone to Be a StoryBrand Guide?
Becoming a StoryBrand Guide isn’t something you can do overnight. It requires specific training, certification, and ongoing commitment to the framework.
The Basic Requirements
To become a certified StoryBrand Guide, you must complete a comprehensive 4-day training programme, followed by months of further training. In fact StoryBrand Guides never really stop training!
This isn’t a casual online course – it’s intensive training that covers every aspect of the StoryBrand framework, from understanding customer psychology to implementing practical marketing strategies.
During this training, you learn how to:
- Use the framework to create clear, compelling messaging that resonates
- Identify customer problems and position solutions extremely effectively
- Design customer journeys that lead to conversions
- Implement the framework across all marketing touch-points
Beyond the training?
Part of the magic of storyBrand is the access it gives to other marketing folk at the very top of their game. The ability to sense-check, discuss and get opinions from the likes of Dr JJ Perterson is invaluable and hearing the latest thinking from industry leaders such as Seth Godin, Donald Miller and Marcus Sheridan invaluable.
It gives you constant professional growth and keeps you abreast of the latest market trends and thinking. Invaluable for both our business and the results we are able to get for our clients.
What Does it Take to be an Effective StoryBrand Guide?
Sarah Edwards – Founder of Frog Marketing
StoryBrand is an incredibly effective framework, but having marketing experience and expertise to draw on outside of the framework is very important.
I completed my certification and training with Donald Miller, Dr JJ Peterson, and the exceptional StoryBrand team in 2024. But certification alone doesn’t make someone effective – marketing experience and in many respects, life experience has a significant influence, as does aptitude and empathy.
I’ve been working in marketing for over 20 years now, and Frog Marketing has been recognised by the Financial Times as a top marketing consultancy for two consecutive years. I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with blue chip companies in the UK as well as organisations such as Reuters, WaterAid and smaller local businesses, giving me insight into how messaging challenges affect businesses of different sizes.
What I bring to the StoryBrand framework is an ability to quickly understand how to position businesses, craft compelling messaging, and join the dots between strategy and implementation. The framework provides the structure, but experience helps you know which questions to ask and how to adapt it for different industries and business models.
What Does a StoryBrand Guide Actually Do?
This is perhaps the key question: what actually happens when you work with a StoryBrand Guide?
The BrandScript Process:
All guides have their own process but most Frog Marketing projects start with a discovery call where we talk about your challenges and work out if we’re the right fit. Following that we have an in-depth meeting where we ask a ton of questions about your business and your customers. From this we create what’s called a BrandScript. This is the foundation document that clarifies all your core messaging and how you should talk about your business.
The BrandScript identifies:
- Who your customer really is (and what they want)
- What problems they’re facing (both obvious and hidden)
- How you can position yourself as the guide who can help
- What your solution looks like in practical terms
- What success looks like for your customer
- What’s at stake if they don’t act
- Their transformation
- The controlling idea for your brand/ service
These BrandScripts focus on one problem at a time. For the most impact it is usually best to aim to create a BrandScript for each service/ product. For those with budget constraints I usually advise starting with the home page and then picking off the most important services pages as budget allows.
Beyond the BrandScript
To get the best value out of working with a StoryBrand Guide you need at least one output that you can implement practically. That’s why as a minimum we like to deliver a BranScript plus a webpage wireframe (Think of this wireframe as a script and layout for a website landing page). Other implementation examples are:
Strategy: Showing you where and how to use your messaging that will give you the best returns for your unique company. Identifying where opportunities lie and the order that marketing activity should be done in as well as identifying what content needs to be produced and what an overall budget might look like for the short, medium and long term.
Website messaging: Translating your BrandScripts into website copy that converts visitors into customers
Marketing campaigns: Creating email sequences, ads, and content that follow the StoryBrand structure
Sales conversations: Training your team to use the framework in face-to-face selling
Internal alignment: Ensuring everyone in your company tells the same clear story
How Can a StoryBrand Guide Help Your Business Grow?
Unclear messaging isn’t just a marketing problem – it’s a growth problem. Without effective messaging and a strategy to deliver it, growing your business is hard. StoryBrand gives you another path.
Eliminating Confusion
When your messaging is confusing:
- Website visitors leave without taking action
- Sales conversations take longer and close less frequently
- Marketing campaigns underperform
- Your team struggles to explain what you do
- Referrals become harder because people can’t easily describe your value
Harnessing the Power of Clarity:
When you get your messaging right:
- Website conversion rates improve (often dramatically)
- Sales cycles shorten because prospects understand your value faster
- Marketing becomes more effective because you’re speaking directly to customer needs
- Your team becomes more confident in sales conversations
- Customers can easily refer you because they understand exactly what you do
What's the Difference Between Reading the Book and Working with a Guide?
Donald Miller’s book “Building a StoryBrand” is excellent and gives you a great overview of the framework. Many businesses know it can accelerate their business growth but is it possible to implement it yourself?
The answer, broadly, is yes. But is it easy to implement it yourself? Not always. The problem is executing the framework is not that simple and implementing it across your marketing can feel overwhelming.
The Value of Outside Perspective
When you’re inside your business, you do develop blind spots. You assume people understand things that they don’t. You skip over important details because they seem obvious.
A good guide asks the questions you wouldn’t think to ask, spots the gaps you might not see and generally has a different/ new perspective. The number of times we’ve heard the phrase “I’d never thought of it like that” in a discovery session is too many to count!
Experience with Implementation
Reading about the framework and implementing it effectively are two different things. A certified guide has seen the common mistakes, knows the typical challenges, and can help you avoid the pitfalls that trip up most businesses trying to do it themselves.
Accountability and Support
Let’s be honest – most business owners don’t have time to completely rewrite their messaging alongside everything else they’re doing. Working with a guide means you have someone dedicated to just getting it done.
Is Working with a StoryBrand Guide Worth It?
The honest answer depends on where your business is at and what you’re trying to achieve.
If your current messaging is working well and you’re hitting or exceeding your growth targets, you probably don’t need to fix what isn’t broken (although shoring up the foundations in the current economic climate is never a bad idea). But if you’re struggling with any of these issues:
- Website traffic that doesn’t convert
- Sales conversations that drag on without closing
- Marketing that doesn’t generate quality leads
- Team members who can’t clearly explain your value
Then working with a qualified StoryBrand Guide could be be a hugely valuable investment. The framework works because it’s based on how people actually make decisions – not how we think they should make decisions. When you align your messaging with how customers naturally think and buy, everything becomes easier. Your website starts working harder. Your sales conversations become more focussed. Your marketing generates better results. And your team becomes more confident talking about what you do.
Most importantly start to become the go to in your industry and business growth follows.
