The Growth Newsletter #114

1. Use the Pixar storytelling framework

The team at Pixar uses a simple framework to help develop their story lines:

Once upon a time, . Every day, . Until one day, . Because of that, . Because of that, . Until finally, .

Let’s use our Un-ignorable Challenge as an example:

Once upon a time, Alice, a founder of a creative agency, was on top of the world.
Every day, she’d do sales calls for inbound leads and crush her client work.
Until one day, a recession hit and cut inbound leads by 2/3rds.
Because of that, she needed to increase leads, or else she’d have to lay off staff.
Because of that, Alice started posting on LinkedIn and Twitter. Most of her posts flopped—but a few did well and brought in leads, but she had a tough time running a business and creating good content consistently.
Until finally, she joined the Un-ignorable Challenge to learn how to systematically create content that resonates with her audience.

The result: She’s increased lead volume and humanized her brand by becoming the face of her agency. She’s made interesting and valuable friendships and partnerships.

This framework explains the value of your product. It helps you think through the exact person you’re helping and problem you’re solving.

3. 5 metrics to track brand performance

Here are five that we think are solid indicators of brand performance:

*Branded keyword search volume*: If, before doing any brand work, you had ~100/month Google searches for your brand name, and all of a sudden you’ve got 1000s, then your brand work is paying off.
*Organic social mentions*: If people are shouting you out or recommending you, that’s a pretty good sign that you’re building brand awareness.
*Click-through rates*: An improvement in CTRs could mean that people are already more familiar with your brand—and more likely to click through on an ad by you.
*Sales timeline (for B2B)*: If people are already aware of your company when they come to you, you should have a tighter sales cycle from first contact to close.
*Conversion rates*: As your brand builds trust and affinity, it’ll be easier to convert more of the people who come across your products.