Live: Why The Best Story Wins (Inbound 2024)

Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot has supported the show for over three years now and today is a very special episode of Success Story because HubSpot doesn't just support podcasts. They don't just create great tools for entrepreneurs. They also put on an amazing conference inbound, which I have been fortunate enough to speak at for the past three years. So today you are going to share me live from inbound. You're going to share me on stage with Amani Ellis. She is the founder and CEO of CultureCon. We speak about all things brand storytelling, trust, marketing from both of our unique perspectives. Again, I really hope you enjoy. This is live straight from inbound 2024. Hi, everybody. Hey, everyone. How's it going? How's it going? How's inbound? I guess, well, day one, I guess day two, if you're a partner. How's everything going so far? Good? Good? Awesome. I'm excited. I'm very excited. So what we're going to talk about today, it's really going to focus on on brand. The brand is such a, it's like a very big word and comes as a lot. Yeah. And I think that we're going to talk about sort of where we come from and why, why we should even be talking on this, but also after we, after you sort of get through sort of our backgrounds and our audience doors very quickly. I want to focus sort of on three key aspects. I want to focus on brand through the lens of community, of trust and of storytelling. We're going to have a whole bunch of ideas around all of this. So I'm excited. And we're going to drop some frameworks. We're going to, we're going to go into the weeds on this. Hopefully it's very educational. If you feel like you want to learn more about this, I'm going to put this out there right now so you can enjoy it. And you're not going to have to be taking notes the whole time you can. But if there's something you want to learn more about, we both spent a whole bunch of time putting together some notes. So get us up after and we'll send you all the notes. So I want you just enjoy the session. So let's kick it off. This is me. This is, I actually, I'm laughing because that picture that I gave HubSpot is the exact same as what I'm wearing now, but plus a beard. So just a little bit of a background on me. I run a podcast called Success Story. I have built a very large personal brand and a brand around Success Story. In my past life, I've been an operator in several companies helping them with their take to market strategy, helping them then figure out their brand. I've probably worked with over a hundred startups, both notably one of my sort of my most interesting times in my life is when I was working with creative destruction labs out of University of Toronto. And they're a startup incubator and helping all these brands figure out these companies figure out their brand. So I've been around marketing sales brand for a while in a money. Take it away. Awesome. Thanks, Scott. Hi, everyone. My name is Imani Ellis originally from Atlanta, Georgia, and I am the founder and CEO of the Creative Collective and CultureCon. Yes, in the front row. So the creative collective is the largest community in the country dedicated to facilitating brave spaces for diverse creatives. Now, the reason I say brave and not safe is because safe is an intrinsic right. You deserve to be safe as a human being. But when you're showing up and your brave and you're allowed to be your authentic self, that's where the magic happens. So fast forward in my previous life, I was a publicist slash vice president at NBC Universal, where I worked with all of the bravo liberties, all of the housewives, anyone know Andy Cohen, any Andy Cohen fans? Yes, it was as fun as it sounds. But I realized that what I really was lacking was community. Where could I go to meet people, other creative people, creators, learn about resources and pay transparency. And so what I did was what anyone would do. I invited some friends over for tacos. And the only rule was that you had to bring someone that you could vouch for. It was my apartment after all 10 people turned to 20 people turned to 40 people turned to too many people in my one bedroom apartment. Fast forward. We are now the largest conference in the country culture con for creatives of color. So we're so excited to be here. Like Scott said, we're going to talk about stories. We're going to talk about building trust. And we're also going to talk a lot about community. All right, let's get into it. So before we talk about any of those things, I love, I love when brands speak to their customers, but not enough do it. So before you can build a brand, before you can create trust, before you can tell a good story, before you build a community, you have to understand who your customers are. And this is why brands fail. They don't speak to their customers enough. And this is sort of the message that I want to start everybody off with. So most brands, I think the stats are like less, about 42% of brands don't communicate with their customers at all. Aren't jumping on calls. I mean, the number ranges. But the point is, the opportunity for your company, it already is in your customer's minds. I've figured out where they want and where they think your company should go. And I think that that's a huge missed opportunity. So if you do nothing else after today's presentation, I want you to build some sort of cadence into speaking with your customers on the regular. What does that matter? Because right now we are in the empathy economy, where EQ matters more than IQ. And the brands that win are the brands that solve true pain points, not the pain points that we just assume the customer has, but the pain points that truly they do have. And how do we know that? Well, first of all, even if it was a pain point five years ago, when we were winning pain points evolve and customers evolve. And I put this on the slide as chewy. So chewy is a pet delivery, a pet food delivery company, online pet food marketplace. And what was going on with chewy is they had spoilage problems. They were shipping a whole bunch of pet food during the summer hot weather. And it was going bad. Chewie could have very easily chalk this up to logistical problems. There's nothing we can do about it. But they use this as an opportunity and eventually turned into a $10 million plus line of revenue. What they did is they created a temperature controlled delivery of the pet food. So they actually innovated the actual box at the food was shipped in. And also they did a spoilage guarantee. So this was not only just understanding the customer complaint. They included the customer in their story. They spoke to the customer and ultimately turned into a $10 million plus line of revenue. They started to license out that technology to other pet food companies. So ultimately, you can see how if they had just sort of brushed this off, it would have been a huge missed opportunity. So the opportunity for your next $10 million or $100 million idea really is with your customer. They're giving you an MBA every single day. So you have to find a way to listen to it. You have to find a way to go to that class. So sort of the action step just before we kick off all the other brand stuff is to really do a pain point audit. And I don't care if it's 15 minutes zoom call with your top customers. I don't care if you want to speak to your most recent customers or highest value customers. You pick a metric that works, but you should always be communicating with them and engaging with them. One more very quick story of a friend, Aaron Spivak who sold his company, Hush Blank, his sleep country, Canada for 50 million. And what he would do when he started out and all the way through to when he sold, he would jump on zoom calls with his customers and he'd use that to improve the product. But also he also realized that the lifetime value of every customer who he spoke to normally blankets are like a one time purchase. The lifetime value of those customers increased exponentially because now they were just buying blankets for themselves. They're buying blankets for their family members because they felt they actually had a semi personal relationship over 50 minutes zoom call with the founder. So pain point audit with your customers communicate with them all the time. If you're a founder, definitely do it. If you have employees, different business units, they should all be speaking to the customers, even I mean, even when I was CRO at a company, there was never a point where I wouldn't be getting on the phone with potential prospect. So that's how we kick this off. It's so important. And I think, you know, one of the things that I always empathize is kind of what you're saying, this two way street of conversations. I love to say that building a brand story is a lot like dating. I'm someone who works through metaphors and I'm a metaphor early. And so let's walk you through this framework of how it's like dating. So the first is a lot of what Scott just said. It's creating a compound sentence. When I first created the creative collective, I had a whole vision of everything we would do, everything we stood for. And it is important to start with values and a North star. But you want to be flexible. You want to start the sentence. And like Scott was referring to with those zoom calls with those focus groups. Allow some space for some feedback. You know, I did ballet for 14 years. And so I love feedback because the way I see it when the instructor used to walk by you. It actually meant they had given up. When they gave you feedback, it meant that they realized there was room for growth. So see feedback is a positive attribute. It's something that can make you so much better. The second is gone are the days where you need to be everything to everyone. Everything is changing. And Ginzy actually prefers to be spoken directly to versus the blanket statement that you can be everywhere all at once. So you really want to think about who am I talking to? How can I niche down and make sure that people truly feel seen? The third is going to be to find common ground. We are past the day where perfection is the sexiest thing in the room. People actually want trust. They want vulnerability. They want to understand that maybe everyone doesn't wake up at 5 a.m. in the morning with their latte and run and do yoga. Some of us, listen, I'm a 7 a.m. snoozer. That's okay. Being able to be transparent can really form trust with your audience. And today more than anything we are selling trust. If there is no trust, there is no strong foundation. And so really want to lean into building that trust. Having those Zoom calls at CultureCon, we do focus groups every quarter. At first, Scott, it's terrified me. The idea of getting on a Zoom call for an hour and a half and hearing everything that we could do better. But it's actually incredible because I can now know the future. I know that they want more food trucks because I asked them if they wanted more food trucks. So when CultureCon comes in October, there's no surprise there. So get used to feedback and see it as a value add instead of something that's a little bit more cringe. How do you, I have a question for you. How do you tie that feedback? Because I'll have some ideas in this too. But for CultureCon in particular, how do you tie that feedback into your story? I know, well, one of the things for us is we're a community based business, right? And so when you think about the creative collective, it has to be collective voices. And so I think you optimize by bringing in all of that feedback, right? It's not the Imani con. It's CultureCon. And so we want to make sure that everybody is contributing to that mosaic. It's a better story. It's a stronger story. And when people feel like they're seeing, you know, in that example, you gave with Aaron, you can create lifetime customers because not only are you giving feedback, but leadership is listening to that feedback and giving it right back to you. And that's how we create compound sentences. Okay, tell me about this, this case study. I don't know this. Okay, so I am obsessed. How many of you have heard about topicals? Anyone in the room had about, oh, well, that's what I am here for. My goodness, you guys. The topicals is incredible. It's very new. So I understand that a lot of you are getting familiar, but it is a skin care line created by founder, Alameda. Alameda, she's actually the youngest founder to secure over 25 million in funding. So round of applause for funding, right? We love guys. Round of applause for funding. Thank you. Thank you. We love money over here at Spite. So one of the things that she did that really was revolutionary was she broke into a market that really was oversaturated and still made a really big splash. So when you think about skin care, I'm sure you can name off the top of your head so many different brands that are already existing. And so for her to be the number one brand in Sephora, after only existing for three years is a pretty large feat. But let's talk about how she did it from a marketing lens. So first she created a compound sentence got one of the things I really loved was this ambassador program. That's topicals created a web three ambassador program where you could sign up for points. You could meet other creatives. You could get different perks and depending on how many points you got, you got different prizes. So in person activations free goodies. The second thing was that they didn't want to become everything to everyone. So they went viral in December of last year because they did an influencer trip to Ghana. They took specific creatives flew them out to Ghana and they were really able to say we see you. We know your pain points and we're solving for it. And the number three was they found common ground. So when I usually think of skincare, I think of a woman with no pores. She never has bags under her eyes. And I want to be just like her. Topicals did the exact opposite. They showed women with acne scars, stretch marks, livable, breathable women. And because people in the audience could see that they were able to convert from audience to community and a really magnifiable way. I love that. And that all becomes part of your story that you tell your customers. Absolutely. I have three ideas on storytelling that we're going to keep going. So the first idea is that your story has to pass what I would consider to be the cocktail party test. Basically, your story for your brand has to be so simple and so memorable that even if you tell somebody this story drunk, they're going to remember it, they're going to understand it. I love it. Now, this particular meme that you're seeing on screen is listen, that guy does not have a strong story. It's not memorable. It's not compelling and look at how much he hates that story. Don't be like that guy. So you have to figure out on getting the most memorable and simple story. I'm going to talk to you just very briefly about how to do that. The second idea that I think is very important is that we're going to talk about this a little bit later. But when you talk about who you are and what you do, a lot of brands position themselves as the hero, the brand should be positioning itself as the guide, the guide in your customer's journey. So think like Yoda or Gandalf, you are the wise mentor that is guiding your customer to the end result. And I actually wrote down exactly what that sounds like. There's a big difference. So if you think about, if you think about a brand like a gym. So a gym could say, hey, we have top of the line equipment. We're open 24 seven right now. You can get in for a January special for 50 bucks a month versus a plan of fitness kind of did this similar strategy. Like whatever your fitness goals are will help you achieve them. So a very big difference in how you position your brand in that customer journey. And the last idea to sort of build that cocktail to pass that cocktail party lit mistest is to you. This is a framework that I put together that will help you craft your story. It's called the story stack framework. It's really just a pitch and why do I call it the story stack framework? Because when you have a word or a name to it, you can actually remember it. But what you do with this framework is you're going to build out a story that's going to be super memorable, super concise. And after you get this going and you understand it for your company, I would like. Literally every single employee in your company to be able to recite this verbatim and to understand it. So very briefly again, like I said, I can send you notes after, but you start with a hook. An eight second hook. Why? Because unfortunately studies have shown that that's our attention span right now in 2024. Then you go into a problem where you agitate the pain point. You go into a solution where your product is the magic fix. And then you finally paint the promise land where the customer is going to end up. And this one or two or maybe max three sentence story. It's just so simple. It's so clear. And it common sense isn't common. It sounds like that makes so much sense. But there's very few times when I spoke into sales reps from companies or other departments and companies that in one or two lines, they can describe exactly why they're doing what they're doing. And that's a super power. If anyone in your company can evangelize, can sell, can communicate that clearly. Think about how effective your messaging is to your customers are going to have this unified experience across all your touch points. So very quick exercise. I think it's very valuable. Let's keep going. So what are we talking about next? We're talking about. Oh, I'll catch up on my slides here. Okay, trust. Yes. So let's talk about building trust, which really goes into building your brand story and credibility. One of the things we really like to say a culture con is that we're scaling intimacy. So remember, it started in my one bedroom apartment, which feels a lot different than 10,000 people at a conference. But how can you take the feeling of that one bedroom apartment and scale it? Well, you can find points of connection that resonate and make people feel seen. So think about when you go to Starbucks or think about any coffee shop at all. There's something about hearing your name called, right? You know, we love hearing our name called even when you're going out to a restaurant. There's something about, hey you versus Scott, can you come here? So really think about building those little touch points throughout your marketing campaigns, your events to scale intimacy. Because when people feel seen, they want to show up. We were made for community and it makes us feel stronger together. The second way to really build brand credibility and trust and this one is 101. But I always love to bring it back is to get the people talking. One of the best examples of this was the Popeyes chicken sandwich. Who here tried the Popeyes chicken sandwich? Really guys? I mean, listen, it's too late, but it's not too late. The Popeyes chicken sandwich sold out in the first 24 hours with zero marketing budget. How did they do this? They got people talking. And why does it work? Because when you're telling your friends something, the chances of them really trying that are really, really high. Why? Because we trust people that we know. So if you're able to build this trust and build this connection, you can use a similar framework that we used for culture con. And our motto was, bring someone that you can vouch for. And why that worked was because friends were bringing friends, bringing friends. And that's how we were able to scale from 10 people to 10,000 people in less than four years. You know what else does that? Mr. Beast does that with bid summit. Yes. So if you have over, I can't remember the amount of followers. You get a free ticket because he knows that you're going to go. You're going to document. You're going to create some content and your audience trusts you. It's so good. I mean, it really is human nature to show up to a place when you feel comfortable, when you're bringing someone that you can vouch for. Three more ideas on trust. So just to, because you sort of nailed exactly what you want the customer to do, how you want the trusted brand and evangelize you. But a lot of people will ask, okay, how do we actually get the customer to evangelize us? What, what Popeyes, it's not easy to do that. Yeah. So the way that I broke it down, the first idea was a social proof pyramid. So if you think about a pyramid, because not all audience interaction, customer interaction is the same. So if you think about on a pyramid on the bottom, you have likes and follows, then you keep moving out the pyramid. Then you have comments and shares, user generated content, testimonials and reviews, brand ambassadors and writer, die fans. So as a business, it's your job to figure out exactly where your audience is sitting on that pyramid and move them up. Now, there's a lot of different ways to do that. But ultimately, I don't even think we really know where audience is sitting on that pyramid because if we can move them from just liking and following to eventually creating UGC evangelizing, that's going to be the best marketing you ever have. But a lot of us are very ignorant as to where they are. And we're looking at the wrong metrics and we're assuming that's what we should be tracking. So move those customers up in that pyramid through a variety of incentives or programs or community building with a touch on the second idea around trust. What is UGC? I mean, if you just remember the period I just mentioned, UGC is the first point in that pyramid where customers will actually start to market for you. And I think that finding a way to get customers to build user generated content. I mean, if you look at business-created enterprise-created marketing content versus UGC user-generated content, I mean, I see a lot of UGC in direct consumer brands and whatnot. But anyone who can find a way to get their audience or their customers to build content and create content for them, the level of trust that content has is just on another level compared to if I'm a brand putting stuff out. So again, there's a lot of nuance as to how to do that. A couple ideas. You can do UGC contests. That works very, very well. You can feature UGC on your website, on your socials. You can do collaborations with your customers. You can reach out to customers, again, speaking to them, ask for their stories. So a ton of ways to do it, but just start finding ways to include UGC in your marketing. And then lastly, transparency. So I think a lot of brands are very scared to be transparent. I think a lot of brands are very scared to speak about what they're struggling with, what they're trying to figure out. I haven't seen too many instances where a brand reaches out to their customers or communicates this on social and speaks about some of the problems or some of the things that they're dealing with where it's not like a net positive because your customers want you to win. A good example of this is buffer. So buffer actually publicly shares all their employee salaries and the formula they use to come to that conclusion. It's just a very transparent way of doing business. And I think that this is what brands, this is what brands should be doing is what customers are actually looking for behind the scenes, struggles, being open about areas where you're trying to improve, explain decision making processes. I think it's all in that positive. So I'm not saying you give everything away, but maybe start to pepper some of that in because I think we are over indexing on the opposite end of the spectrum, which is super close, keeping all of our secrets close to home, not putting it out, not asking our audience again for feedback as to what we're doing. So I think that brands could move in the other direction a little bit. And then lastly, let's talk about this is actually something we spoke about at the beginning, but this is going to lead into community in a second, but absolutely. So Scott talked about this earlier, the importance of really being the guide and not the guru. And we're going to talk about how this ladders right up into building that community, you know, there was a recent trend that crossed everywhere, very mindful, very demure that came from a constant creator. And we saw a lot of brands jumping onto this and really meeting their consumers where they are. It really goes back to that visibility and being seen. And it builds trust because it goes from you speaking to and speaking at and walking right alongside your consumer, converting them to the community. We understand everything through storytelling. And so the best story is always going to win as you're building out your marketing campaigns and your community, you want to come from a place of eye level with your consumer versus telling them, like Scott said, what you think they want and the best way to do this is just to ask. So you want to craft these impactful stories, we're going to talk about these campfire stories in a second as an action item, but it's really important to spend some time with what is our narrative, what is our origin story. You'll notice I spend a lot of time talking about where culture cons started in a living room. I could have just fast forwarded and say, yeah, what's both myths was there last year, but that's not really the best part of the story, right? The best part of the story is that hidden friends came together and built something larger than ourselves. And the reason we always lead with that story is because our community can then envision themselves starting really, really small and scaling to create something bigger than themselves. So you want to craft that impactful story. And once you have that story, you want to leverage it again and again in new ways to make sure that you're constantly creating connections through marketing, through events, and through your mission statement. So let's talk about community because just just a note, all the things that we've spoken about, they kind of all play on each other. So I don't want you to think that we had three very separate ideas. It's very important to understand that you cannot build trust. And I hope that you picked up on that. You cannot build trust without speaking to your customers. You cannot build community without speaking. Like you have to combine all of these elements. It's kind of like a dance between all three of them. But community in particular, why is community again such an important topic? Why is it related to a brand discussion? Because audience is one way. And I think that as much as brands say they're trying to build community, they're really just building audiences. They're not really building fans that are engaged with their brand. So community in my definition, a very loose definition is it's not just one way communication like a brand, you know, speaking through a megaphone at their customers or their audience. Now all the audience or the customers are activating together to support the actual brand. So I think it's very important. Now why is community useful? Because you're going to say, well, yes, it's a lot of work to figure out how to do this. I would say like it accomplishes the major business objective. It accomplishes revenue, reduces your acquisition costs. And it ends up if you build it properly, turning into a flywheel. So not only is it going to help you attract new customers for cheaper through a variety of different means and I'll just listen that quickly. But also it can also increase the LTV of your existing customers. Because now they feel like they're part of something they want to spend more money to not going to churn as fast. So how do you actually build a community? We have again little framework. So engage in power, convert and evangelize and then repeat. So very briefly engage is really what content marketing or marketing really is. That's the first step where you're putting your meaningful content. And then eventually you'll want to empower them. So you'll provide platforms where the audience can move off your Instagram, move off your Twitter, maybe it's discord, maybe it's Facebook groups, maybe it's WhatsApp groups, maybe it's something internal, maybe it's circle, whatever it is, find a way to bring your audience and allow them to activate together. Now I put convert after empower you could also of course convert customers into bank customers right after you market to them. But if you engage with them, you bring them into some sort of community where all the members are providing value is going to be much easier to close them on your product or service. After that, then you're giving them, you're giving them resources to allow them to evangelize what you've done. So you can give them, you can give them a shareable content because people want to, people want to seem smart, people want to see them in the nose, you can give them tools, you can give them resources that only members of the community get access to. And this is a great way for them to speak about your product, speak about your service, evangelize it, share as much as possible. And then you're asking them, I mean, then you just repeat the cycle right so after you engage you empower you convert you evangelize and then you consistently repeat the cycle because now they're going to be such fans of your brand. They're going to have these behind the scenes content, they're going to have behind the scenes resources. This is when they start talking to their peers or their friends about this awesome company and all the stuff they've given beyond just a transactional product or service. So this is a very high level, brief way of how to build a community, just the steps you have to think about. And then the campfire story. So we spoke about the sort of like the pitch framework at the beginning that I wanted you to sort of get all of your employees to understand. You can also do a very similar thing for community members so that they can understand your business completely. And the campfire story is really just taking everything you're doing in your pitch and adding a little bit more dimensions to it so that your community members understand your origin, your mission, your values, your challenges, your victories, your vision. And this should be a story that you repeatedly sort of speak out to your community members, your customers, then they can go out and they can tell it's all their peers and all their friends. So I think the takeaway with this is build a community, move your audience into a community, find a way to build a community that turns into a sort of a flywheel for your business. And then lastly, give the community the resources to go out and market for you. Right. No, I mean, plus one, plus one, plus one. And like Scott said, it really is one big mosaic. You can't do one without the other. So hopefully you will are seeing how we're weeping that all together. Yeah. So that's pretty much it. We're almost at time. I would say that we gave a lot of very high level thoughts and ideas on on brand on community on trust on storytelling. What we're going to be doing is we're going to be going over to the house wide activation. And we're going to do a talk back session with basically means it's like a live Q&A. So if you have specific questions about community building storytelling, building trust with an audience that are a little bit more applicable to what your business is. Come and meet us there and ask. And then it's going to be a lot of value for everyone else. But I think that's the best way to go from here. And also, please, please, please, I've been told to repeat this a lot. Please rate this session. If you liked it, if you enjoyed it, please rate this session, give us some feedback. And we'll see you all at the activation. Thanks everyone. Thanks guys. You