A framework can help to create an effective marketing strategy.  Building a marketing funnel can help you visualise you’re strategies and help develop an effective campaign.

Marketing Strategy

A marketing funnel is a structure businesses use to turn strangers into loyal customers. A marketing funnel helps envision the entire process of the customer's journey from noticing the business to finally making a purchase. Digital marketers will cast a wide net to get as many leads as possible and then nurture them in every stage of the journey through the purchasing decision.

Marketing Funnel Definition

There are numerous versions of the marketing funnels.   The simple marketing funnel model contains three stages to help visualise the entire process of the journey.<ol><li>Tofu (Top of funnel)</li><li>Mofu (Middle of funnel)</li><li>Bofu (Bottom of Funnel)</li></ol>

Marketing Funnel Stages Explained

Tofu is the first stage and the wider part of the funnel. Tofu is all about making the targeted audience aware of your business. Prospects can be drawn into this stage through marketing campaigns such as events, trade shows, advertising, blog posts, infographics, and social media.

Tofu (Top of Funnel)

Mofu is where you position your company as the best product or service provider to suit the customer's needs. This stage is used to provide enough value through podcasts, comparison charts and webinars so that your website visitors are interested to learn more about your company and establish a relationship with you. You can further nurture prospective customers by offering free trials or product demos.

Mofu (Middle of Funnel)

Bofu is where you turn leads into customers. As a marketer, you have already built enough trust with your prospective customers and can present your brand in a compelling way that inspires your prospects to take action. The bottom of your funnel might look like a limited-time offer for your products or services. Your task is to ensure prospects have enough information about the product beforehand, so they will want to complete the transaction.

Bofu (Bottom of Funnel)

Sales and marketing go hand in hand but have different functions. <ul><li>Sales are more focused on generating revenues.</li><li>Marketing is more focused on driving sales.</li></ul> Both can use the funnel strategy to create revenue for the company.

Sales Funnel vs. Marketing Funnel

<ul><li>A marketing funnel simplifies the customer journey.</li><li>It is useful for nearly any customer interaction.</li><li>It enables you to influence customers at every stage.</li><li>It helps you understand and visualise the process, allowing companies to map out each marketing campaign stage.</li><li>It provides a greater opportunity to drive bigger sales, more loyalty, and stronger brand awareness.</li></ul>

Benefits of a Marketing Funnel

Let's dive into marketing funnels and one of the main models of managing the funnel with the system of ToFU, MoFu, BoFu. What audience belongs to what stage and how to use the strength of this system.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

Marketing Funnels Explained: What Is Tofu, Mofu, And Bofu

“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courag

“Play by the rules, but be ferocious.”

“Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.”

“Every problem is a gift—without problems we would not grow.”

“You only have to do a few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

“There’s no shortage of remarkable ideas, what’s missing is the will to execute them.”

“I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.”

“I don’t know the word ‘quit.’ Either I never did, or I have abolished it.”

The quotes to inspire you to become self independent and be curious to learn...

These 30 business quotes are sure to motivate you to greatness. See what the greatest minds in history had to say about business and success.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

creativity

Creativity

10 Quotes to inspire you to never stop Learning. 

Strategy is a competitive game, which always evolves in response to competition. But the magnitude of the changes in the technological, social, and natural environment are such that corporate strategy will need to be qualitatively reinvented again for new circumstances. Six factors are driving these changes: 1) dynamism, 2) uncertainty, 3) contingency, 4) connectedness, 5) contextuality, and 6) cognition.

Corporate Strategy: The Evolution

Competitive advantages do not last as long as they used to, as reflected in the acceleration of the <a href="https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/fighting-the-gravity-of-average-performance/">competitive fade rate</a>, which measures how quickly market and operational returns regress to the mean, has accelerated markedly in recently years.In practical terms, the result is that the churn rate of companies on lists like the Fortune 500 has increased remarkably.

Dynamism In The Market

<ul><li>Active management of the business portfolio is again important: companies need to ensure that their business portfolios are continually rebalanced in order to maintain growth expectations. </li><li>New businesses need to be seeded at a higher rate, requiring large companies to behave more like entrepreneurs in part of their business, and to build the requisite skills and structures to ensure this. </li><li>Turnaround or transformation has become a prevalent and strategic capability for fixing or renewing businesses which have experienced competitive disruption, reached maturity, or fallen into decline.</li></ul>

The Three Consequences Of Dynami

As a product of the technology revolution and other factors, business plans have become less predictable. This is expected to continue with further waves of technological disruption like AI washing through the corporate economy. The consequence for corporate strategy is an entirely new logic for scale advantage.  These capabilities combine to create a new dynamic type of advantage: resilience, which delivers <a href="https://bcghendersoninstitute.com/becoming-an-all-weather-company-35d819aa99fe">long-term performance through uncertain periods</a>.

Uncertainty

Depending on the uncertainty, malleability or harshness of each, corporations have to adopt very different approaches to strategy-making, each with its distinct processes and tools. These approaches include: classical strategy (in which firms compete on scale and position), adaptive strategy (they compete on their ability to learn), vision-driven strategy (they compete on imagination, creativity, and innovation), shaping strategy (they compete on their ability to collaborate with partners), or turnaround (they compete on their ability to renew a business).

Contingency

On average the business environment has become more dynamic and uncertain.Corporate strategy must cultivate capabilities to apply and balance these diverse frameworks/strategies, picking the right approach to strategy to each business and creating a common platform for operationalizing them.

The Right Approach

The list of the world’s largest companies today is dominated by <a href="https://www.bcg.com/en-us/publications/2022/what-is-your-business-ecosystem-strategy">digital ecosystem orchestrators</a> like Amazon, which create an offering in collaboration with hundreds or thousands of other enterprises. This profoundly changes the role of corporate strategy since the diversity of offerings and capabilities that contribute to a firm’s value creation can now reside beyond the boundaries of the firm. The goal of corporate strategy becomes to create an advantaged position within an advantaged ecosystem, blurring the boundary between corporate and business strategy

Connectedness

Corporations now need to demonstrate purpose, social contribution, trustworthiness, and ecological responsibility. This involves not only matters of intent, measurement, compliance and communication, but also increasingly issues of competitive advantage. A corporate strategy must now create credibility, social contribution, and generate advantage by dealing creatively with new social and ecological constraints, as well as deliver on the traditional variables.

Contextuality

Until recently business strategy was largely about human analysis and decision making. But machine learning has now reached a level of sophistication that rivals or exceeds human expert capabilities for an increasing scope of tasks. This has profound implications for corporate strategy. To begin with, the cognitive advantage of corporations becomes a potential axis of competition. This is determined not only by its ability to deploy AI in each business effectively, but also to shift the focus of human minds to more uniquely advantaged areas like ethics, empathy, and creativity.

Cognition

Strategy is a competitive game, which always evolves in response to competition. But the magnitude of the changes in the technological, social, and natural environment are such that corporate strategy will need to be qualitatively reinvented again for new circumstances.

The Bottom Line

Strategy is a competitive game, which always evolves in response to competition. But the magnitude of the changes in the technological, social, and natural environment are such that corporate strategy will need to be qualitatively reinvented again for new circumstances. This article discusses six factors are driving these changes: 1) dynamism, 2) uncertainty, 3) contingency, 4) connectedness, 5) contextuality, and 6) cognition.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

strategy

Strategy

6 Factors Driving Changes to Today’s Corporate Strategies

Good strategy has traditionally been seen as the key to business success. More recently, purpose has become an essential element of doing business. But something else is missing: culture, or the essential elements of how an organization and its employees behave, as well as its governing beliefs and principles. And yet, culture often receives less attention than purpose and strategy.

Culture: The Missing Link

What do successful companies like Microsoft, Netflix, Best Buy, and many others have in common? Culture has been the fertile soil that has enabled their purpose and strategy to come to life and drive extraordinary performance at scale.Purpose, strategy, and culture form a triangle: Each angle connects with and shapes the other two, and if one changes, the other two must evolve and adjust to maintain balance and shape, or the triangle breaks and falls apart.

The Triangle

Changing a company’s culture requires more than role modelling.Companies can use three types of levers to profoundly shape an influential culture and allow their strategy to come to fruition:Business levers, management levers, and “human magic” levers.

The Three Levers

<ul><li>Operational progress creates strategic degrees of freedom.</li><li>Improving operations influence strategic choices.</li><li>However, changes in business operation shape company culture, too.</li><li>Companies have to act from the outside in and from the bottom up. </li><li>The company's future depends on listening to customers and improving their lives.</li></ul>

Business Levers

At Netflix, there is only one policy for travel, entertainment, gifts, and other expenses: “<a href="https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr">Act in Netflix’s best interest</a>.” That’s it. Also, there are no company-wide rules on office hours or the number of vacation days employees can take. These reflect the culture of “freedom with responsibility”There are other management levers that shape culture, such as seeking to recruit only “stunning colleagues” and rewarding adequate performance with a generous severance package; and offering frequent, honest, and constructive feedback.

The Culture At Netflix: 'No Rules' Rule!

Key management processes directly impact culture as well. What kind of people do you appoint to positions of power? What kind of people does your company recruit? Does performance trump bad behaviour? How are decisions made and by whom? What are key business rhythms? How are meetings conducted? What kind of controls and compliance are in place? All these structures, processes, and rules can shape culture.

Management Levers

These are the essential and interconnected ingredients that, together, create an environment in which people are eager and able to fully give their energy and talent to serve the company's purpose.Articulating the company’s culture as a singular, simple, and yet powerful idea makes it easier to answer all these questions and use all three levers with that in mind.

Human Magic Levers

The triangle of Strategy, Purpose, and Culture.

Good strategy has traditionally been seen as the key to business success. More recently, purpose has become an essential element of doing business. But something else is missing: culture, or the essential elements of how an organization and its employees behave, as well as its governing beliefs and principles. And yet, culture often receives less attention than purpose and strategy. The author thinks of purpose, strategy, and culture as a triangle: Each angle connects with and shapes the other two, and if one changes, the other two must evolve and adjust to maintain balance and shape, or the triangle breaks and falls apart. He presents three types of levers companies can use to profoundly shape an effective culture and allow their strategy to come to fruition.

Does Your Company’s Culture Reinforce Its Strategy and Purpose?

Offices come with multiple benefits, including enabling colleagues to feed off each other's energy.Having an office space where you have good light and a good environment can just make you feel a little inspired, and enables you to be a bit more brave.

An Ode To The Office

<a href="https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/workforce/hopes-and-fears-2022.html">11% of US workers would prefer to work full-time in the office, and 62% said they’d like to spend at least some</a> time there. More than half (51%) of managers are also confident their <a href="https://www.goodhire.com/resources/articles/the-great-return-manager-survey/">employees would be keen to return to the office full-time</a>.The motivations may vary – some long for the sociability of the office, while others prefer a clear boundary between work and home. Companies will need to work out how to accommodate the needs of people who want to be in offices as well as those who don’t, as they map out their post-pandemic working models.

The Hidden Story: People Want To Come To Office

While many people love the flexibility that remote work brings, for others the loss of an office environment and the social contact it provides can be a major blow.Not having a routine where you get up, leave the house, and socialize and interact with other people throughout the day can massively <a href="http://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220616-is-remote-work-worse-for-wellbeing-than-people-think">affect your mental health</a>. Not to leave your house for long periods of time isn't good for you.

In Favor Of Commuting To Office Daily

In a survey of full-time remote workers, two thirds are concerned about missing out on development opportunities by being based at home.Only 40% of UK workers surveyed by employment and HR specialists are confident that office-based and home-based staff will be rewarded equally in the next 12 months.

Office Equals The Work Mode

Working in an office to learning at a university campus.Your brain automatically switches to a ‘work mode’ when you're surrounded by colleagues who are hard at work. The smell of ink from the printer, the silent tapping on the keyboards, the quiet chatter in the coffee room, all of that truly helps. It's the atmosphere of the place that puts you in the working mood and raises your productivity.

The Campus Analogy

Companies need to create a culture of communication and flexibility to meet employees’ needs. For those businesses requiring people to work remotely, that includes creating more opportunities for staff to connect via company-wide socials, regular check-ins from line managers and turning video calling into the default mode of catching up rather than email.It encourages employees to stay connected and helps reduce loneliness and fatigue.

What Companies Can Do

The loudest voices may be remote-work advocates, but plenty of other people can’t get back to the office fast enough.

remotework

Remote Work

career

Career

The people who hate working from home

Let’s imagine you find yourself on an airplane, in the sky, without a pilot. You are in a non-normal situation.A useful guide to your initial actions if you’re in such a pickle is a simple mnemonic called ANC: Aviate, Navigate, Communicate.  So, aviate. You need to keep the plane in the safe, stable flight you found it in.

Up In The Sky With No Pilot

Use the control wheel and the horizon displayed on the attitude indicator to level the wings. If it’s gin-clear outside and the real horizon is obvious to you, feel free to use it.Next, take a look at the altimeter and the vertical speed indicator. Pick an altitude as your target—a simple number near your current altitude, like 10,000 or 15,000 feet. If you’re climbing away from your target, then very gently push the control column forward—that is, away from you—until you’ve stopped climbing.

Get On The Steering Wheel!

If you’re descending, then pull the control column back, toward you, until you’re not descending anymore. Be gentle, as it’s easy to overcorrect. Now, look at the airspeed indicator. Pick a target speed toward the higher end of the safe range. It’s impossible to give numbers for every airplane, but try 100 knots in a small plane, 250 knots in a small airliner, and 280 knots in something like a 747. If your speed is higher than your target, pull the throttles or thrust levers back slightly to reduce power. If it’s lower, then add power.

Picking A Speed After You Have Control On The Aircraft

The goal is to reach an equilibrium in which your speed and altitude are safe and stable. Note the pitch attitude and power setting at which this occurs. The problem, as you’ll soon realize, is that the inputs required to correct one aspect of your flight path will almost certainly upset another one. The best way to catch any unintended changes early is to move your eyes between the primary instruments in a consistent pattern. This pattern is called the scan, and scanning is something you have to constantly do.

Maintaining Being Alive

Sometimes (Scan!) just (Scan!) maintaining (Scan!) level (Scan!) flight (Scan!) requires you to hold an awful lot of forward or backward force on the controls. This brings up the important concept of trimming. Trimming, you might say, is a way of resetting the conditions under which the controls feel neutral. Or to put it another way, a perfectly trimmed plane would carry on doing what you want it to, even if you were to let go of the controls.

Trimming The Controls

Planes are typically trimmed by adjusting the positions of the panels and surfaces on the wings and tail that act on each of the three axes—roll, pitch, and yaw. Imagine an engine failure on a plane that has one engine under each wing. You’d need a lot of rudder input to keep the plane flying straight ahead as It’s tiring to hold that rudder position for a long time—and if you trim correctly, you won’t have to.

How To Trim The Plane

In routine flight, pilots most often trim in pitch, especially after a change of speed. Look for a trim wheel, or trim switches on the control wheel. If you find you have to hold a forward force on the controls to maintain level flight, slowly roll the wheel or switch forward until that force is no longer necessary. If you’re constantly pulling back, then trim backward.

Trim Wheel And Trim Switch

Navigate a safe flight path (in relation to mountains, storms, air traffic zones, and other aircraft) and communicate with the folks who need to know what you’re doing, or who can help you to achieve a safe outcome. For a trained pilot, navigation is a more immediate priority than communication (hence the order of the mnemonic, first A, then N, and last of all C). But for you the opposite is true, because unless you can see an airport right in front of you, you’re going to need outside help to remain clear of terrain and to find a runway.

The Next Step: Safe Flight Path And Communication

Radios work like a party line. Everyone tuned in to a given frequency can hear what anyone else says, but only one person can speak at a time. It’s basically a giant conference call in the heavens, one that can be quite intimidating for new pilots.To speak you need to press and hold a “Transmit” button, then release it when you’ve finished, just as you would on a walkie-talkie.

How To Talk In The Radio

There’s probably a button or switch on the control wheel, often on the back. If you’re sitting on the left side of the cockpit then it’s likely to be under your left index finger, a carefully chosen position that allows you to speak on the radio without removing your hand from the controls. Some switches rock up to transmit, and down to speak via the intercom that goes straight into the other pilot’s headset.

Finding The Radio 'Transmit' Button

You might also look for a “hand mic,” a microphone with a transmit button right on it. As you search for the transmit switch, keep in mind that on some control wheels and sidestick controllers there’s an autopilot disconnect button, often red, where your thumb might land. You do not want to press that.A pilot transmission often follows a standard four-part format: whom you’re addressing; who you are, expressed as a call sign, or identifier, that’s absolutely unique to your aircraft or your flight; where you are; and what you want.

Talking On The Radio While Flying A Plane

Use your flight number or the aircraft registration (it will probably be on a placard in the cockpit).Give your altitude and position—as best you know it—and a concise summary of your situation. Then release the transmit button (important!) and listen for a reply.If you don’t hear one, transmit again. If you still don’t hear a reply, it’s time to change frequency. Look for the radio’s control panel (below), which will have multiple digital displays of numbers in a certain format—typically three digits, a decimal point, and then a few more digits, such as 134.975.

Life-Saving Communication: Do It Right

If no one has responded to your initial call, the frequency to enter now is 121.500 MHz, the universal emergency frequency. Select this in the standby field, then swap the standby frequency into the active field by pressing the bidirectional arrow button. Change the frequency on all the panels you can find. Also, press every radio panel button with a “1” or “L” on or near it, to make sure you’re transmitting via the correct radio, and not, for example, repeatedly making a PA (public address) to the cabin. Then transmit your call.

What To Do In Case Of Radio Silence

Now that you’ve established communications, it’s time to navigate. Ask the controller for a direction to fly in to keep you clear of terrain and perhaps also bad weather—in some parts of the world the controllers can see weather systems on their screens. When the controller decides that you need to turn, he or she will give you a heading (known as a “vector”), measured in degrees, such as 090 degrees for east. Look down at the heading indicator and then gently turn the control wheel in the desired direction. You don’t want to roll too steeply.

Navigate The Plane

As you roll, you’ll need to pull back on the control column a little and probably add power too. That’s because some of the lift that was keeping you in level flight is now being deployed “sideways” to turn you. If you don’t create more lift, you’ll start to descend. Pulling back creates that lift (and the more steeply you bank, the more you need to pull). But it also creates more drag, so you’ll need more power to maintain your speed. And so it goes on. That’s why the scan is so important.

Pulling The Aircraft

Now you know how to keep the aircraft flying—to aviate. The controller you’re in communication with is helping you to navigate. In fact, you’ve earned a pause for another cup of tea (but actually, keep on scanning). Nor should you miss the chance to have a little fun (the technical aviation term for “fun,” by the way, is “familiarizing yourself with the feel of the airplane”). Try some gentle turns or climbs or, for extra points, combine them in a climbing turn. Enjoy!

Breathe Again

Up in the sky in the cockpit with no pilot.

Print this out and bring it with you on your next flight. Just in case.

How to Fly a Plane in an Emergency Situation

Most companies are not great at executing complex goals. Many leaders think their strategy is good but complain that implementation is the problem. One study showed that three out of five companies rate their organisation as weak on strategy execution. This is because of a general lack of understanding of the various factors at play. Three steps can build the right execution system.<ol><li>Achieving strategic clarity</li><li>Achieving organisational clarity</li><li>Building a management system</li></ol>

Building the Right Execution System

It's vital to have a strategy that can and should be executed. A well-executed strategy will match your aspirations and your capabilities. <ul><li>Is your strategy set at the right level of ambition? Two problems exist: Inaccurate optimism "How can this possibly work?" and irrational pessimism.</li><li>Do you know what capabilities are essential for your strategy? First, identify the essential organizational capabilities the new strategy will require, and then know if these capabilities are something you can build.</li></ul>

 Achieving Strategic Clarity 

Once you select the right level of ambition and understand the key capabilities required to achieve it, you can align your organization towards the key challenges for executing it. <ul><li>Have you specified which unit owns which part of your strategy? Group key choices around two axes: Find the key subset of strategic goals, and consider the strategic capabilities to cut across these groups.</li><li>Have you built the right interactions between these key units?  </li><li>Have you assigned the right talent to the right roles? Build the right roles, then map the executive talent onto the key roles.</li></ul>

Achieving Organizational Clarity

The key custodians of the execution become the managers. The approach combines management hierarchy with two key conditions to allow for the successful adaptation of strategy. <ul><li>How have you empowered your staff? How can they be supported to achieve what they need?</li><li>How have you built self-corrective feedback into your system? It should allow executives to quickly understand what is working well and what is not in the fastest and clearest way possible.</li></ul>

Building A Management System

Three out of every five companies rate their organization as weak on strategy execution. When you dig into the potential barriers to implementation, there is a general lack of understanding of the various factors at play, resulting in the inevitable managerial justifications — “poor leadership,” “inadequate talent,” “lack of process excellence,” etc. This article suggests three key steps to build the right execution system: 1) a good strategy, 2) the right organization, and 3) effective management. With these three ingredients in place, human ingenuity can be unleashed, and employees can collectively deliver on the company’s strategic goals.

How to Move from Strategy to Execution

Over the past 12 years, Chris Anderson has had a ringside seat, listening to many hundreds of amazing TED speakers. He’s helped them prepare their talks for prime time, and learned directly from them the secrets of what makes for a great talk.And even though these speakers and their topics all seem completely different, they actually do have one key common ingredient. And it’s this: Your number one task as a speaker is to transfer into your listeners’ minds an extraordinary gift - a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea.

The #1 Task Of A Speaker

During a talk, X number of people, many of whom have never seen each other before, are finding that their brains are starting to sync with the speaker’s brain and with each other. They’re literally beginning to exhibit the same brain-wave patterns. They’re not just feeling the same emotions; there’s something even more startling happening.

Brains Sync

If we could look inside the speaker’s brain, we would see billions of interconnected neurons in an impossible tangle. But if we looked closer, we would see that a few million of them are linked to each other in a way which represents a single idea. And incredibly, this exact pattern is being recreated in real time inside the minds of everyone listening; in just a few minutes, a pattern involving millions of neurons is being teleported into X minds, just by people listening to a voice and watching a face.

Ideas Teleport

What is an idea anyway? Well, we can think of it as a pattern of information that helps us understand and navigate the world. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, from the complex and analytical to the simple and aesthetic.Our minds are teeming with ideas, and not just randomly. They're carefully linked together. Collectively they form an amazingly complex structure that is our personal worldview. It’s our brain's operating system. It's how we navigate the world. And it is built up out of millions of individual ideas.

Our Ideas Are Our OS

That’s why ideas really matter: if communicated properly, they're capable of changing, forever, how someone thinks about the world, and shaping their actions both now and well into the future. Ideas are the most powerful force shaping human culture.

Human Software Update: New Ideas Installation

If you accept that your number one task as a speaker is to build an idea inside the minds of your audience, here are four guidelines for how you should go about that task: <ol><li>limit your talk to just one major idea</li><li>give your listeners a reason to care</li><li>build your idea, piece by piece, out of concepts that your audience already understands</li><li>make your idea worth sharing</li></ol>

Guidelines For Successfully Installing Ideas 

Ideas are complex things; you need to slash back your content so that you can focus on the single idea you’re most passionate about, and give yourself a chance to explain that one thing properly. You have to give context, share examples, make it vivid. So pick one idea, and make it the line running through your entire talk, so that everything you say links back to it in some way.

Limit Your Talk To Just One Major Idea

Before you can start building things inside the minds of your audience, you have to get their permission to welcome you in. And the main tool to achieve that? Curiosity. Stir your audience’s curiosity. Use intriguing, provocative questions to identify why something doesn’t make sense and needs explaining. If you can reveal a disconnection in someone’s worldview, they’ll feel the need to bridge that knowledge gap. And once you've sparked that desire, it will be so much easier to start building your idea.

Give Your Listeners A Reason To Care

You use the power of language to weave together concepts that already exist in your listener’ minds - but not your language, their language. You start where they are. The speakers often forget that many of the terms and concepts they live with are completely unfamiliar to their audiences. Now, metaphors can play a crucial role in showing how the pieces fit together, because they reveal the desired shape of the pattern, based on an idea that the listener already understands.

Build From Your Listeners’ Ground Up

Ask yourself the question: “Who does this idea benefit?” And be honest with the answer. If the idea only serves you or your organization, then, sorry, it’s probably not worth sharing. The audience will see right through you. But if you believe that the idea has the potential to brighten up someone else’s day or change someone else’s perspective for the better or inspire someone to do something differently, then you have the core ingredient to a truly great talk, one that can be a gift to them and to all of us.

Make Your Idea Worth Sharing

There's no single formula for a great talk, but there is a secret ingredient that all the best ones have in common. TED curator Chris Anderson shares this secret - along with four ways to make it work for us.

There's no single formula for a great talk, but there is a secret ingredient that all the best ones have in common. TED curator Chris Anderson shares this secret -- along with four ways to make it work for you. Do you have what it takes to share an idea worth spreading?

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

communication

Communication

humanresources

Human Resources

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

TED's Secret To Great Public Speaking

<ul><li>The customer is the hero, not your brand.</li><li>Companies tend to sell solutions to external problems, but customers buy solutions to internal problems.</li><li>Customers aren’t looking for another hero; they’re looking for a guide.</li><li>Customers trust a guide who has a plan.</li><li>Customers do not take action unless they are challenged to take action.</li><li>Every human being is trying to avoid a tragic ending.</li><li>Never assume people understand how your brand can change their lives. Tell them.</li></ul>

Key Takeaways From The Book

If we haven’t clarified our message, our customers won’t listen.The more simple and predictable the communication, the easier it is for the brain to digest.There are two critical mistakes brands make when talking about their products and services:<ul><li>They fail to focus on the aspects of their offer that will help people survive and thrive; and</li><li>They cause their customers to burn too many calories in an effort to understand their offer.</li></ul>Make your company’s message about something that helps the customer survive and do so in such a way that they can understand it without burning too many calories.

The Key to Being Seen, Heard, and Understood

A CHARACTER who wants something encounters a PROBLEM before they can get it. At the peak of their despair, a GUIDE steps into their lives, gives them a PLAN, and CALLS THEM TO ACTION. That action helps them avoid FAILURE and ends in a SUCCESS.We always know:<ul><li>What does the hero want?</li><li>Who or what is opposing the hero getting what she wants?</li><li>What will the hero’s life look like if she does (or does not) get what she wants?</li></ul>Potential customers must be able to answer the following:<ul><li>What do you offer?</li><li>How will it make my life better?</li><li>What do I need to do to buy it?</li></ul>

The Secret Weapon That Will Grow Your Business: The Hero's Story

When we identify something our customer wants and communicate it simply, the story we are inviting them into is given definition and direction.In story terms, identifying a potential desire for your customer opens what’s sometimes called a story gap. The idea is that you place a gap between a character and what they want.When we fail to define something our customer wants, we fail to open a story gap. Defining something our customer wants and featuring it in our marketing materials will open a story gap.

Identifying And Defining The Story Gap

As you create a BrandScript for your overall brand, focus on one simple desire and then, as you create campaigns for each division and maybe even each product, you can identify more things your customer wants in the subplots of your overall brand.Survival simply means we have the economic and social resources to eat, drink, reproduce, and fend off foes.Examples:<ul><li>Conserving financial resources;           </li><li>Conserving time;</li><li>Building social networks;</li><li>Gaining status;</li><li>Accumulating resources;</li><li>The innate desire to be generous; and</li><li>The desire for meaning.</li></ul>

Creating A Brandscript

The villain is the number one device storytellers use to give conflict a clear point of focus.The villain doesn’t have to be a person, but without question it should have personified characteristics.The villain should be:<ul><li>A root source;</li><li>Relatable;</li><li>Singular; and</li><li>Real.</li></ul>

The Villain

What is the chief source of conflict that your products and services defeat? Talk about this villain. The more you talk about the villain, the more people will want a tool to help them defeat the villain.In a story, a villain initiates an external problem that causes the character to experience an internal frustration that is, quite simply, philosophically wrong.Companies tend to sell solutions to external problems, but people buy solutions to internal problems.

Talk About The Villain

The external problems we solve are causing frustrations in people’s lives and, just like in a story, it’s those frustrations that are motivating them to call you.The only reason our customers buy from us is that the external problem we solve is frustrating them in some way. If we can identify that frustration, put it into words, and offer to resolve it along with the original external problem, something special happens. We bond with our customers because we’ve positioned ourselves more deeply into their narrative.

Solving The External Problem

The philosophical problem in a story is about the question why.A philosophical problem can best be talked about using terms like ought and shouldn’t.People want to be involved in a story that is larger than themselves.If you want to grow your business, you need to position your products as the resolution to an external, internal, and philosophical problem and frame the “Buy Now” button as the action a customer must take to create closure in their story.

The Philosophical Problem

<ul><li>Always position your customer as the hero and your brand as the guide. Always. If you don’t, you will die.</li><li>The day we stop losing sleep over the success of our business and start losing sleep over the success of our customers is the day our business will start growing again.</li><li>The two things a brand must communicate to position itself as the guide are empathy and authority.</li><li>The three things every human being wants most are to be seen, heard, and understood. This is the essence of empathy.</li></ul>

The Customer's Guide

When looking for a guide, a hero trusts somebody who knows what they’re doing. The guide doesn’t have to be perfect, but the guide needs to have serious experience helping other heroes win the day.There are four ways to add authority to your marketing.     <ul><li>Testimonials;</li><li>Statistics;</li><li>Awards; and</li><li>Logos.</li></ul>

Adding Credibility And Authority

Building a StoryBrand is about making your customer the hero of a story.

More than half-a-million business leaders have discovered the power of the StoryBrand Framework, created by New York Times best-selling author and marketing expert Donald Miller. And they are making millions. If you use the wrong words to talk about your product, nobody will buy it. Marketers and business owners struggle to effectively connect with their customers, costing them and their companies millions in lost revenue. In a world filled with constant, on-demand distractions, it has become near-impossible for business owners to effectively cut through the noise to reach their customers, something Donald Miller knows first-hand. In this book, he shares the proven system he has created to help you engage and truly influence customers. The StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their companies. Without a clear, distinct message, customers will not understand what you can do for them and are unwilling to engage, causing you to lose potential sales, opportunities for customer engagement, and much more. In Building a StoryBrand, Donald Miller teaches marketers and business owners to use the seven universal elements of powerful stories to dramatically improve how they connect with customers and grow their businesses. His proven process has helped thousands of companies engage with their existing customers, giving them the ultimate competitive advantage. Building a StoryBrand does this by teaching you: The seven universal story points all humans respond to; The real reason customers make purchases; How to simplify a brand message so people understand it; and How to create the most effective messaging for websites, brochures, and social media. Whether you are the marketing director of a multibillion-dollar company, the owner of a small business, a politician running for office, or the lead singer of a rock band, Building a StoryBrand will forever transform the way you talk about who you are, what you do, and the unique value you bring to your customers.

Building a StoryBrand

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