Mike Huber

#195: How to Get Your Story Found Online

#195: How to Get Your Story Found Online

You and I are bombarded with information. As a defense mechanism, our brains are brilliant at filtering out the nonsense.

But our important content often gets lost in the messaging maelstrom, too.

So it’s important to approach your brand storytelling by understanding and appreciating your customer’s journey first. Place them at the center of your story and then follow and search engine optimization strategy to make sure ou get found and heard.

Mike Huber is Senior Director of Business Strategy and Education for Vertical Measures, a Phoenix-based company that has a strong reputation for digital marketing strategy, content marketing, paid and organic search, lead nurturing, and conversion rate optimization.

Mike and colleagues have written a book about a fictional character, Sophia, to illustrate how providing the wrong content at any phase of the customer journey can create dire results. The Customer Journey: How an Owned Audience Can Transform Your Business, is a terrific example of business storytelling given the tale they tell of Sophia to make what can by dry educational points on SEO come to life.

The customer journey can vary wildly, but most steps can be simplified into these four: awareness, consideration, decision, and advocacy. It is extremely important to know where your customer falls on this 4-step journey because that will help determine what sort of brand storytelling is relevant to this individual customer at a particular point. And missing this, as so many companies do, can leave your content drifting lifeless out in cybersapce.

You’ve got to have content in every stage of their journey otherwise they are going to fall out of your journey and into someone else’s. –Mike Huber

But how do you get to know where your customer is on their journey? According to Mike, his breakthrough was consultative selling — actually listening to and asking questions of your clients and/or customers.

It’s amazing what you can find when you start asking questions. –Mike Huber

And, what happens when that content is thoughtfully tailored and individualized? Once you have asked the right questions and listened to the needs and goals of your customers, it is much easier to tailor their customer journey experience. Now, instead of selling and interrupting people on your website, you’re guiding them through the customer journey by informing them and helping them understand your product or service. This care and consideration creates a bond between the customer and brand and ultimately these customers become your greatest marketing asset. 

Topics Discussed in this Episode

• Journalistic headlines versus search-focused headlines
• The evolution of the ways in which consumers can purchase items and goods, for example, you no longer have to go to a car dealership to purchase a vehicle
• How marketing used to work is the sales department was focused on awareness, consideration, decision and advocacy, and marketing was kind of involved in that awareness phase, nowadays, marketing is involved in everything except sales
• What it means to have and the importance of an “owned audience”

Resources & Links

• The Customer Journey: How an Owned Audience can Transform Your Business written by Blake Pappas, Brad Kuenn, Shana Sullivan, Drew Eastmead, Mike Huber
• Restaurants Near the Mesa Convention Center by Mike Huber
• Vertical Measures
• The Customer Journey: How to Create, Optimize & Amplify Content That Converts
• Arizona Tourism
• A Beginner’s Guide to SEO
• Mapping Your Customer’s Journey Worksheet
• Business of Story Masterclass & Deliberate Practice Program
• Mike Huber’s Linkedin 
• Mike Huber’s Twitter 
• Vertical Measure’s Twitter 

Neal Smoller

#194: How to Create a Healthy Brand Story

#194: How to Create a Healthy Brand Story 

Big pharma has taken over television advertising with its brand storytelling for every conceivable medication while the natural supplement industry counters with organic health advice and products. But there is an immense amount of misinformation on both sides of the drug store aisle. This week’s show introduces you to a man and a brand that is out to combat what he calls the “horsesh!t quackery” in the drug and natural supplement businesses that consumers have to navigate.

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Dr. George Basile

#193: How to Harness the Energy of Story to Drive Your Brand

#193: How to Harness the Energy of Story to Drive Your Brand

Society today faces unprecedented climate challenges. Yet many people either do not believe this is a real threat, or they don’t want to do anything about it. Much of the resistance to facing these challenges comes from fear and beliefs that are a result of outdated stories. Therefore, if we begin to update our narratives surrounding climate change, the result may have a tremendous positive impact on the future of businesses, societies, and our planet.

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L.S. Larson, Author

#192: How to Immerse an Audience in Your Brand Story

#192: How to Immerse an Audience in Your Brand Story

As our attention spans grow shorter, most of us look for new ways to absorb stories. But it’s challenging to make your story stand out amongst all the noise and distraction. On this week’s show, welcome to the world of the virtually immersive novel where tech and the printed work take you on a Sci-Fi adventure.

The creator, L.S. Larson, president of Axon, formerly Taser International, shares his inspiration for creating the future of storytelling and how your brand can immerse your audience in your stories, too.

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Chad Gabriel, Sherpa of Purpose

#191: How to Wake the World With Your Purpose-Driven Brand Story

#191: How to Wake the World With Your Purpose-Driven Brand Story

You hold the power to create the life you want. But the world has become so chaotic and so full of noise it’s difficult to distinguish your own authentic story from the story the world is telling you. Therefore, it is important to pause and take a journey back to awaken the aliveness that is sleeping within you through the power of a purpose-driven brand story.

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John Oechsle, President and CEO of Swiftpage

#190: Why, How and When to Evolve Your Brand Story

#190: Why, How and When to Evolve Your Brand Story

All businesses have stories. It doesn’t matter if you own a small-scale business, a medium enterprise, or a large corporation – they all come together with a common denominator: a brand story worth telling. So how do you know when it’s time to evolve your business and your brand story?

With every company’s evolution and growth, the brand story needs to evolve because you want your people to take part in that evolution. But what comes first the business or brand story evolution? 

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Jason Linett, Speaker

#189: How to Re-write Your Internal Stories Through Hypnosis

#189: How to Re-write Your Internal Stories Through Hypnosis

We all tell ourselves stories. We all have collective, imagined realities. But these stories are critical because they can either make or break you. Therefore, it’s also important to take a step back, re-evaluate, and re-write these internal stories to make sure they’re in line with our personal and professional goals and our subconscious mind isn’t tearing them down.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” —Hamlet

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Dr. Ghina Halabi, Space Scientist

#188: How Storytelling is Attracting More Female Scientists

#188: How Storytelling is Attracting More Female Scientists

How “woo woo” does it sound if I tell you we are all made of stardust?

I guess it depends on the messenger. If you hear it from someone who has a doctorate in astrophysics and has mastered the study of the entire solar system, it might sound like a natural science phenomenon.

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Barry Kirk, Vice President of Strategy at Maritz Loyalty

#187: How to Build Customer Loyalty Through a Shared Brand Narrative

#187: How to Build Customer Loyalty Through a Shared Brand Narrative

Two weeks ago, I bought a pair of black wingtip shoes from the Johnston and Murphy store at Scottsdale Fashion Square. I noticed a pair of blue dress shoes that I had bought in Chicago six months earlier were marked down by $40. I mentioned this in passing to the cashier. When she rang up my new pair, she knocked $40 off of them. I wasn’t looking for a deal. But she was empowered to give me one.

That was the best $40 Johnston and Murphy could’ve spent on advertising in that moment. Because I am now telling you, and they have a loyal customer in me. (more…)

Pete Sena, Founder of Digital Surgeons

#186: How the Medium Magnifies Your Message

#186: How the Medium Magnifies Your Message

The media you choose, the channels you select, determine the kind of message you will share to connect with your audience. And most of us use our analytical left brain to understand what drives our customers. But this only covers what we believe is the logical behavioral side, and isn’t capturing the full picture of what customers want and need.

Therefore, in this week’s episode, discover a revolutionary way of understanding audiences and how to effectively communicate using an interesting combination of algorithms and anecdotes. 

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