I was a StoryBrand Certified Guide for 5 years and wrote nearly 300 Brandscripts during that time with clients from all sorts of industries from cybersecurity to legal to courses for moms. While I’ve ended my Certification renewals, the StoryBrand principles and training left a huge impact on the way I see and write for all of my clients. 

Within our market of clients, we began to see parts of the Storybrand BrandScript that we wanted to change. Through our changes, we developed our own brand storytelling technique and parted ways with the specific StoryBrand framework. We still use story-driven marketing with the customer as the hero and can create a guide similar to a BrandScript that will help refine and narrow down how our customers should communicate their message. So, if you came here looking for ways to utilize your brand story or Brandscript, you’re still in the right place!

I want to focus this blog on how to weave your brand message into testimonials to use for your marketing and website. 

Ask Yourself Questions

First, identify where you want you want these to go. Will you integrate testimonials on your website? Write a blog? Create a series of social posts?

Then, pinpoint your marketing strategy for these testimonials. You need to clarify your message. How will you use them to tell your brand story? What part of your story do you want told? Are you looking to showcase customer testimonials or B2B partners? What exactly do you want to show them? Keep in mind, it’s okay to pull different types of testimonials from different customers. You can use customer feedback and quotes from these in a variety of ways to talk about your brand consistency or different aspects of your brand.

It’s important to start here because you not only want to ask the right questions, but you also want to ask focused questions to direct the content of the testimonial.

Ask the Right Questions

Our biggest piece of advice, whether you are DIYing your brand message (or Brandscript), working with a Certified Guide or another marketing agency – or maybe you’re an agency that’s looking to improve how you gather testimonials – is to ask the right questions. 

Just asking your customer for feedback is not enough. Most of the time, they may give a short sentence or two but will not focus on the details of your business that you want to highlight. 

A great way to overcome this is to guide your customer on what to say through questions. Consider asking:

1. What problem were you dealing with when you called Acme?

2. How was this problem making you feel?

3. How did Acme demonstrate that they understood your problem?

4. Why did you trust Acme to solve your problem?

5. Did you notice a difference between Acme and similar companies?

6. What surprised you about working with Acme?

7. What does life look like now that Acme has solved your problem?

You can customize these questions for yourself or your client and send them out to customers to gather focused feedback that you can then turn into short snippet reviews highlighted on your website or use the quotes in full-page case studies you add to your blog or social channel.

Ask Focused Questions

It can even be taken a step further than just looking at your brand and how you helped a customer. If you have core values, a mission, or vision identified you can craft questions around how the customer viewed you in that light. Maybe you have some great authentic testimonials that speak about your company in a general sense, but you want to highlight how you like out your core values enough so that it’s visible to your customers too.

For example, let’s use Murphy Marketing! One of our values is “Collaboration.” This means that we’re being a collaborative partner to our clients as well as our business partners. We can include a question or a few questions like the following to pull customer feedback that provides us with a compelling quote or review from our partners that shows we live up to this value.

1. What made our team different from other partners you’ve worked with?

2. If you were to recommend us to someone else, how would you describe our teamwork?

3. How did our team help navigate challenges in the project?

4. What did you appreciate most about how we kept you informed and involved?

5. Can you share an example of a time when our team worked particularly well with your team?

Real-Life Examples

Check out some content we’ve done for Murphy Marketing here.

Read a few case studies we did for one of our clients last year!

• Turn Your Financial Chaos Into Systematic Growth: Jen Samson Design Case Study

• Bookkeeping You Don’t Hate: Taylor Campbell Case Study

If you’re still struggling to compose the brand story you’re working on, need help crafting focus questions, or need help compiling your testimonials into useable marketing content, book a call with me to see how our team can help!