Anthony Garcia

Anthony Garcia

Anthony Garcia heads up Client Services for Buyer Legends.  Anthony began his career by way of radio broadcasting at the young age of 14.  After a 15 years in broadcast radio management Anthony became an ad writer and client consultant for Roy H. Williams “The Wizard of Ads” and managed a portfolio of high profile clients including Leo Schachter Diamonds and Robbins Brothers.  He went on to become the lead consultant for Future Now Inc. working with Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg to help clients like HP, Webex, and NBC Universal. Anthony has teamed up with the Eisenbergs to work with such clients as Runa.com, OneSpot, Adorama, and Google.

Storytelling to Improve Communications, Conversions, and Execution

“Humans have only one tool capable of communicating the subjective experience of relationship through time, and that’s narrative. Ask someone about a favorite possession, and you’ll hear a story. Ask them about a friend or spouse, and you’ll hear a story. There simply is no other way to talk about relationship. And that goes for the relationship between customer and company (or brand) as well. “

You and I are wired for story. Period.

This is not just a powerful insight into our nature. It is profound and fundamental to our ability to communicate our experiences with one another, and as it turns out, ourselves. Thorin Klosowski over at Lifehacker writes

“A story is a tool to help us make sense of the world. But what about the future? What would happen if you turned your to-do list into a story as a rehearsal for the next day? Personally, it’s helped me not just Get Things Done, but also boosted my memory so that I’ve been able to ditch complicated to-do lists and schedules for good.”

Klosowski then dives into the storytelling process he uses to increase his productivity. Pretty cool, and pretty powerful.

What is good for productivity is even more powerful for improving the communications, conversions, and execution of your marketing.

Grab your copy of Buyer Legends – The Executive Storytellers Guide and in the half hour you’ll invest to read it you’ll learn how to create customer-centered, data-driven customer experience design that is supported by narrative.

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Five Important Updates About Buyer Legends

 

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This week over on the Salesforce blog Bryan Eisenberg explained how Buyer Legends improved collaboration within an entire marketing organization and brought clarity, focus, and better results to all their efforts.

John Jantsch interviewed Bryan and they discussed how to create a  Buyer Legend, listen to the podcast over at the Duct Tape Marketing blog.

Late last week Amazon introduced a new cloud device called the Echo, and knowing what we know about Amazon Anthony speculated that this device may be part of Amazon’s larger story to make shopping Amazon a more seamless part of our everyday life.

We interviewed Melissa Burdon Cameron from Extra Space Storage in the first of an ongoing series of posts featuring Buyer Legends in real life.  Melissa tells her story about how she was able to quickly integrate the Buyer Legends process into their current conversion optimization efforts.

Bryan’s article at ClickZ outlines the reason why so many rock star marketers are unhappy with the results they are getting from their personas and what they can do about that.

Have an awesome weekend!

P.S.  Jeffrey Eisenberg also lead a webinar at Balihoo called Buyer Legends – Combining Data with Storytelling to Boost the Bottom Line.

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How Extra Space Storage (NYSE: EXR) Uses Buyer Legends For CRO

 

 

 

 

Who Are the Storytellers Behind Buyer Legends: the Executive Storyteller’s Guide?

This is the first in a series of interviews with marketing executives who have read the book and are putting the ideas to work for their businesses.

Today, we chat with Melissa Burdon, Director of Marketing Optimization for Extra Space Storage (NYSE: EXR) and winner of the Direct Marketing Network 2014 40 Under 40 Award.

Good day, Melissa. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. First of all, can you tell us a bit about what you do as Director of Marketing Optimization at Extra Space Storage?
I’m responsible for reaching established goals within a testing-centric culture for the customer acquisition process across all platforms and channels including desktop website, mobile website, email, click-to-chat, call center sales, and various social media and customer-facing apps.

What are your short-term marketing goals?
Our primary goal at Extra Space Storage is to increase rentals of storage units. We drive reservations of storage units through the web and call center and then follow up with these reservations via phone, email, and SMS to improve move-in rates.

In 2014, we’ve focused more heavily on optimizing the buying experience through the entire customer-buying funnel based on who the customer is and what they are looking to accomplish. Data has given us some tremendous insights into who our customers are and how to give them the experience that effectively drives them to converting. But we know there is so much more to learn about our customers and so much more we could be doing to create a better buying experience for them.

What did you think of the ideas presented in Buyer Legends: The Executive Storyteller’s Guide?
The ebook was very enlightening. It’s based on a simple concept. We really just need to put ourselves in the shoes of our visitors and actually walk through the buying experience they go through in order to identify the holes and opportunities that exist. The difficulty has always been how to come up with a process to achieve this. The Buyer Legends ebook is this missing piece. It outlines the steps you need to take to effectively put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer and actually walk through their buying experience to look at your marketing efforts through their lens. Once you’re able to identify the opportunities that exist, then you can take these pieces and begin optimizing the experience.

Do you plan to use the process at Extra Space Storage?
Absolutely!

We’re applying the process to four projects at this point within the marketing department. We’re applying Buyer Legends for a social branding video, a few on-site content pages, one of our main buying funnel pages, and an acquisition email campaign.

How do you believe the Buyer Legends process will help you reach your goals?
We know the Buyer Legends process will help our department approach our optimization efforts based on what matters to our customers, first and foremost, rather than what matters to our sales process. The Buyer Legends approach allows our employees to put themselves in the customers’ shoes and see the experience from their perspective. This will help us achieve a higher number of rentals at the end of the day because we’ll be answering the questions our customers have at the most critical points of their buying process.

Have you shared it with your team/staff?  What was their reaction?
I shared what I learned with our CMO and he completely sees the vision and even thinks that once we prove this out in Marketing, that this is something we need to train other departments on because this affects Operations, Learning and Development, as well as many other departments.

Once I got the thumbs up from our CMO, I put together a small group of 4 employees; our Email Manager, the Brand Manager, the Content and Social Manager, as well as our Optimization Manager and did a half-day Buyer Legends training for them. They were all expected to take on their assigned project and use the Buyer Legends approach to create or improve the campaign.

Do you see things any differently after reading the book?
I always knew it was important to see things from our customers’ perspective and focus on them rather than our sales process but it has always been difficult to actually approach making changes to specific campaigns based on what we know about our customers. The Buyer Legends ebook gives you a step by step guide on how to achieve this.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking to improve their results through every channel the customer is exposed to.

Thanks, Melissa! 

As more readers share their success stories with us, we’ll tell you about them here.  Have a story you would like to tell, contact us.  To get started creating your own Buyer Legends, grab a copy of of the book Buyer Legends – The Executive Storytellers Guide.  

 

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How Airbnb Uses Sensitive Stories To Connect With Audience

 

 

The most powerful stories are usually the most revealing.  They reveal our innermost secrets, dreams, hopes, fears, and the struggles we overcome.  They often lay the hero completely bare.

So how does a marketer tap into these vulnerable stories without seeming like an opportunistic shameless wares hocker or without seeming like you are capitalizing on the pain and gain of others?

Ashley B. Coombe at Affiliate Blogging Coach outlines how Airbnb successfully makes a customer the epicenter and hero of it’s brand story.

Get the whole story over at Ashley’s Blog.

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Retail Legends: Amazon’s Trojan Horses And Their Customers’ Story

 

Back in June Amazon released its first smartphone and we wrote this 

While it may be true that Amazon is attempting to become a profitable consumer electronics manufacturer with a new smartphone venture, make no mistake that what matters most to Amazon is its ability to leverage those devices to improve the customer experience by reducing friction, and creating more buying/selling opportunities.

Turns out it was an epic flop and now Amazon is sitting on $170 million in unsold phones.  But if you think that is going to deter Amazon, you would be wrong.  

Blair Hanley Frank at Geekwire writes

Jorrit Van der Meulen, the head of Amazon’s device division in Europe, told The Guardian in an interview that the company is “undeterred” by the Fire’s poor consumer reception, and is taking feedback from the device’s introduction under consideration for future forays into the same space.  “We certainly read everything that’s written from customers to journalists and take note, so might the second step be slightly different than our first step, sure. I suspect that it will be,” he said.

With their goal of being the most customer centric company in the world, Amazon most certainly will release an improved Fire phone that will sell better.  But keep in mind, Amazon’s eye is on a bigger prize than just selling more phones, they want to sell more of everything.  Fire phone is likely only one piece of a comprehensive strategy that Amazon is hatching to create their own shopping ecosystem in the story of our daily lives. 

So almost on cue, Amazon introduces the Echo.

Echo is a tube shaped cloud device that recognizes your voice, answers questions and basically acts like an always-on Siri on steroids.  At a glance it looks like it has the potential to be a supremely useful device to have in the home.  

Of course, we think the Echo is Trojan horse, and Greg Kumparak of TechCrunch agrees.

Amazon is in the business of selling you things — and that is why Echo exists.

For now, Echo’s shopping-centric functionality is limited to helping you add things to your shopping list.

Need some pickles? Cool. Just say “Alexa, add pickles to my shopping list.” (Note: Echo listens for the word “Alexa” by default. You can pick a different name, it seems.) It won’t order them for you yet. It’ll just add them to a list for you to look at later.

But if Echo sees any sort of success, just watch how fast that will change.

You’ll be able to say “Alexa, order me a copy of Kung Fu Panda 2,” and it’ll be done.

“Alexa, order me some dope-ass high thread count egyptian cotton sheets.” Bam. Done. Sheets are on the way.

One-click purchase becomes no-click purchase. Your entire house (or at least, anything within earshot of Alexa) becomes the impulse-buy candy shelf from the grocery store’s checkout lane.

While other online retailers scramble to optimize their shopping carts, Amazon continues to do that too. Amazon is also innovating methods to take their shopping cart offline and embed it seamlessly in our day-to-day lives.  

So while Amazon weaves themselves into the fabric of their customers’ life stories, will other retailers be able to keep up?

Probably not without working just as hard as Amazon does to understand its customer.

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All The News About Buyer Legends

 

 

This week over at LinkedIn, we shared some data from a Kapost study about the critical role content is playing in marketing strategy and how Buyer Legends can pull all your disparate content efforts into a cohesive and accountable customer experience.

Murray Newlands over at Inc. explained how the Buyer Legends process can be used to hack your growth.

How your organization prices products and services tells your customers a story about your brand, in this post you can read how J.C. Penney learned this lesson the hard way.

Anthony shared an example of how simply telling a story using a series of banner ads can have a nice impact on conversion.  And we also wrote about how Steve Jobs built a legendary brand story and how after 30 years, that brand story is still exactly the same.

Bryan Eisenberg wrote about the future of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) for eConsultancy.

Today is also the last day to grab a free copy of Buyer Legends – The Executive Storytellers Guide.  Currently the book has 52 5 star reviews, for a overall 4.9 star rating and it hit #1 in Marketing.  

Your support means everything to us, thank you!

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True Buyer Legends: How Steve Jobs Created Apple’s Legendary Brand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmwXdGm89Tk

You don’t have to be an Apple fan-boy to understand or appreciate the mojo of Apple’s brand story. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 it’s brand story was tribal, but anemic and small. Jobs needed to take that tribalism in his small base of customers and expand it beyond the PC vs. Mac war , a war that Apple was losing. As a result the “Think Different” campaign was born.

So instead of telling a story about the company, a product, or even a philosophy, Jobs decided to tell a story about Mac users by placing them in the same category as some of the worlds movers and shakers like Einstein, Dylan, Lennon, Earhart, etc…

Steve jobs created a Brand Legend where the hero of the story were his customers.

hero of the buyer journey

In an internal meeting introducing this campaign to Apple Jobs describes the ad:

“It honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are alive, some of them are not. But the ones that aren’t, as you’ll see, we know that if they ever used a computer it would have been a Mac.”

Fast forward 17 years, and a market valuation that now exceeds Microsoft, we can see that the Apple brand story is still the same. Here is the video they featured at their introduction of the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch.

The most powerful brand stories are not about the brand, they are about the customers. What is your brand story about?

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Stories – Not Just for Fairy Tales Anymore

 

 

To some, the idea of using story and storytelling in a business setting feels like some airy fairy pixie dusted exercise in touchy feely-ness. It’s understandable. For some STORY equals FICTION, and what use is fiction in business? In our practice the stories, or Buyer Legends we write and use are based on market research, real customer interactions and use cases. And the stories are not fictional, but rather speculative. In addition they serve as predictive models of customer behavior that can be tested and optimized. Don’t think of storytelling as some romantic notion, instead view it as an established construct for more effective communications both with customers and with your team.

There is no shortage of evidence that storytelling works either. A joint research study by Facebook and Adaptly found that a series of sequenced ads that tell the customer a story about the product/service far outperform those ads that sought to get people to take action immediately. Chad Brooks of Business News Daily writes

“The researchers found that among those who saw the sequenced ads compared with those who saw the non-sequenced ads, there was an 87 percent increase in people visiting the landing page. Additionally, there was a 56 percent increase in email subscription rates among people who saw the sequenced ads.”

You, I, and your customers are wired for story.  That is not a fairy tale, that is a reality. Ignore it at your own risk.

Want to know more about unleashing the power of story in your business?  Get your copy of Buyer Legend – The Executive Storyteller’s Guide.

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Your Pricing Tells a Story, is it the Story Your Customers Want to Hear?

 

Bernadette Jiwa over at The Story of Telling writes.

“Price, like design, location or quality is part of your brand story—one you are asking customers to believe in. You get to choose the story you want to tell and who you want to tell it to. It pays to understand what story the people you choose to serve want to believe.”

Jiwa explains how Ron Johnson, the retail guru behind the first iterations of the hyper successful Apple Store, took the CEO helm at J.C. Penney and sought to save the struggling retailer by creating a better shopping experience. One of his first orders of business was to change the stores longtime discount pricing strategy. Things didn’t turn out that well.

“This change in the story that J.C. Penney’s core customers believed about price (one that the company had trained them to believe) stopped loyal customers coming and ultimately led to a 37% drop in the company’s market value. The financial results also lost Johnson his position as CEO after only 17 months.”

Ouch. Wanting to tell a new brand story is a noble business goal, just make sure you know how your customers will interpret it. Start by having a comprehensive understanding of how they understand your current brand story. Buyer Legends should help.

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Your Customers Desperately Want To Be Legends

shutterstock_170727395 copyI love the idea behind NatureBox.com.  According to their About Us page

“NatureBox delivers a world of carefully sourced and nutritionist-approved foods right to your door. Each snack contains wholesome ingredients – with no artificial sweeteners, flavors or colors. Snacking has never been so deliciously fun and naturally easy.”

For a monthly subscription fee of $19.95 on up to $49.95 NatureBox will send you a selection of healthy snacks for you or your whole family.  I just joined at the $29.99 level, but I almost didn’t.

Recently I was going through my email subscriptions when in a Daily Digg email I read a headline that caught my attention.

“How to Snack without Eating Crap”

I quickly clicked the link and landed on this page

skitch

Now I am fascinated, but on this entire page the only option I have is the “Start Now” button.  When I click on that, I am taken to this page.

skitch 2

My obvious first question is “OK, but what snacks will you send? Can I select the snacks?”.  I’m about ready to bail out, but still intrigued I click on “select this box” because it is the only choice I have.  My thought is that I might find those answers in the next step.

skitch 3

This next page is even worse.  It clearly is the checkout process.  Pigs might go airborne before I complete a checkout process without knowing exactly what I am purchasing, and I am surely speaking for most mentally stable adults as well.

Now I can go on and on about how horrible this conversion funnel is, and I can nit pick several tactical things wrong with these pages, but instead I will point out this ‘landing page experience’ follows several commonly used marketing techniques.  It attempts to ‘squeeze’ out a conversion, by locking me into a single landing page and forcing me through a checkout.  This is not uncommon, and in some cases might be the most effective practice.  In fact, it might have even worked here had these marketers understood one thing, the context of a health conscious customer.

So let me whip up a quick Buyer Legend (buyer narrative) based on myself.

Over the past few years Anthony has tackled some severe health issues, and recently has become much more aggressive about his health.  He has adopted a rigorous workout schedule, and has made several major adjustments to his diet mostly cutting refined flour and sugars.  While Anthony has no problems making his meals interesting he has struggled finding snacks that he both enjoys and are healthy for him.  He is simply bored with nuts and berries.  He has spent hours in Whole Foods and other health food stores searching for a few more snacks to add to his diet to no avail.  He reads nutrition labels meticulously and watches his carbs and tries to eat organic as much as possible.  As he arrives at NatureBox.com his first order of business is to see what the snack line up is.  He finds several snacks and reads the nutrition facts for each. Anthony must find it easy to save the snacks he wants to a shopping cart or wishlist before he checks out.  

I am pretty sure when it comes to reading food labels, I am no different than most health conscious eaters.  When I went directly to the NatureBox.com homepage (as opposed to staying on the landing page I was linked to), I was able to peruse all the yummy looking snacks AND their nutrition facts.  The biggest problem I had was narrowing down my choices for my first monthly snack box.

So here is a word to the marketers  at NatureBox.com that paid for my click by placing a sponsored ad in one of my emails.  Gals and Guys, I understand why you did what you did, Your headline about not eating crap for snacks was brilliant.  If you were building a classic squeeze page campaign you did a great job. However,  the one thing you failed to do was understand my needs, and every other healthy eater’s as well.  I wonder if after you read the above Buyer Legend would you do the same thing?  How many people can you expect to sidestep your landing page urls?  And wouldn’t you like the credit for my conversion?

I’ll happily gift a copy to the folks over at NatureBox.com of Buyer Legends: The Executive Storyteller’s Guide just ping me and it will be on its way.

Dear reader, do you have your copy of Buyer Legends: The Executive Storyteller’s Guide yet? Your customers would love you to read it.

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Four Pillars Ongoing Support

After our workshops, we work with only a few select clients. Your business must be committed to the Four Pillars (as described in Be Like Amazon) on a long-term basis .

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We kick-off the workshop with a two-day onsite visit. We help you create the Four Pillar foundation for your organization. The entire process takes between 4-8 weeks and the typical investment is $30,000 – $100,000.

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We can speak at your event. Our fees are $20,000 in North America, and that includes travel. International fees are $20,000 plus business class travel, from Austin, and lodging. Contact us to discuss your event  

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