MSP Marketing Expert: 7 Steps To A Better Brand Story

‘If you jump straight into marketing tactics without defining your messaging, you run the risk of confusing your audience,’ says Decoded Strategies co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Annie Mosbacher.

“Harry Potter,” “The Lord Of The Rings” and the “Barbie” movie share a lesson for solution providers—the power of a good story.

A good story makes for good marketing, Annie Mosbacher, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Decoded Strategies, a Los Angeles-based marketing and retention strategies company aimed at technology businesses, told a crowd at XChange March 2024, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company and being held in Orlando, Fla., this week.

And solution providers looking to improve their lead generation strategy or sales team performance might have a different issue—messaging.

“If you jump straight into marketing tactics without defining your messaging, you run the risk of confusing your audience,” Mosbacher said. “Your prospect’s brain is going to be on high alert to tune you out the second you become irrelevant to them. … If you confuse, you will lose.”

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MSP Storytelling In Marketing

Dawn Sizer, CEO of Mechanicsburg, Pa.-based 3rd Element Consulting—a member of CRN’s 2024 MSP 500 and Decoded Strategies customer—told CRN that getting away from jargon in her marketing has made customer conversations about the company’s services easier.

“It is super easy for us to fall into that trap,” Sizer said. “And there are so many very technical terms that we all use. What they were able to do was boil down all those technical terms into very clear statements.”

Mosbacher laid out seven steps solution providers can take to write a script for their brand that borrows from the storytelling conventions of “Harry Potter” and other influential works of fiction.

Those seven steps are:

• Describe the hero character: “Your customer is the hero of your story, not your brand.”

• Name the hero’s problem: “Naming the problem that you solve for your customers is what takes your brand from ‘nice to have’ to ‘must-have.’”

• Establish your brand as the hero’s guide: “The first thing you need to do is to communicate empathy. … The second thing you need to do is to communicate your authority.”

• Show how you help overcome the hero’s problem: “Your value prop should not be positioned as a big laundry list of all of the things that make you and your products and services amazing. Your value prop needs to be positioned as … here is what we are equipping you with to win.”

• Give a clear call to action: “Book a call. Schedule a demo. Start a free trial. It might be download an ebook. Read a case study. Any of those are good, as long as it is clear.”

• Communicate what can happen if the customer doesn’t work with you: “I do not believe in FUD marketing—fear, uncertainty and doubt—we do not want to be fearmongers here. But if there are no consequences for not solving this problem, people are not going to solve the problem.”

• Communicate what can happen if the customer does work with you: “If you work with me to solve your problem, here’s what life could look like. Here are the successful outcomes you can anticipate. Here’s how much better your life will be.”

Once solution providers are past those steps, they can market and message better and even improve one-liners and elevator pitches, she said. “Once you do this, everyone on your team has shared language to communicate about your business. So it is extremely, extremely valuable,” she said.