5 steps for turning pain into powerful brand messaging

As a business owner, telling your story will help you build a connected audience—one that empathizes with you and wants to see you succeed.

Showing that vulnerability—whether it’s by talking about mistakes you made, pain you experienced, or failures you encountered—can help you stand out, build trust, and create deeper connections in your marketing messages.

Here’s are five steps I use to help my clients leverage their pain in their high-impact marketing.

Step 1: Brainstorm the generations of your business

First, you need to think through the different phases, or what I call “generations,” of your business. 

If it’s helpful, go in chronological order starting with the first year, then second, and so on (or by five- or ten-year increments if your company has a longer history). Nobody is going to see this list aside from you, so be generous in your brainstorming, and don’t skip the embarrassing events—those can be turned into powerful teachings for your audience. And, remember, the small moments matter, so get them all down. 

Here’s a list of questions to get you thinking:

• Were there specific phases or your business that felt cohesive, then a shocking moment that forced you to change direction? The most obvious recent example would be how the pandemic forced your business to pivot. 

• Can you remember a time when something you thought would work failed, forcing you to switch gears to a new product or tactic? (Think Google Glass.)

• Did someone react to your business in such a way to make you second guess your direction? Although businesses can’t react to all reviews, sometimes there’s a particularly scathing and accurate review that leads to real change.

• What were your personal reactions to those moments, those experiences, or those shifts that inspired a pivot or change in your business? 

Here’s an example. L. Michelle Smith shared her story with Zapier, and she speaks to all of these things: mistakes she made, reactions she got, opportunities she seized. This story makes her more relatable and builds your trust in her as a career coach.

Step 2: Create your hierarchy of challenges

Take your list from the first step, and create a hierarchy of challenges. Typically challenges, or pain, come from three types of experiences:

• Loss pain: What did you lose? Success, customers, money, time, an employee, a job? 

• Process pain: What did you experience that felt inefficient, boring, unfulfilling?

• Outcome pain: What result did you want that you didn’t get?

Make sure you choose a few from each pain type, and then decide which ones were the most provocative, the most meaningful, the most intense, and which ones caused the most change for you and your business—then put them in order of significance. 

Sometimes, there will be one obvious experience that was the most meaningful. That was the case for Jaz Broughton, whose journey as a career coach began when she had a full-blown panic attack one day when getting off the subway. She talks about that moment openly to show how she’s more than qualified to help people overcome obstacles.

Step 3: Map the generations to universal truths

It’s easy to forget that you’re not the only person who’s ever felt a certain way or experienced a certain thing. But all of your experiences are shared, in some way, with other humans. That’s why it’s important to connect what you’ve been through to a universal truth, a feeling, an emotion, a challenge, or pain that others have been through too.

This connection is where the magic happens. When you share the inner details of that moment—the emotional, physical, intellectual, or spiritual reactions—you connect to other people because they get it. And this connection moves your customers from observers to advocates. 

So, take your hierarchy and draw a line between your challenges and the universal truths that you’re certain other people would resonate with. They can be inspirational, values-based, or even humorous (like Oatly’s Help Dad campaign).

Step 4: Show the chasm between then and now

As a business owner, you’re responsible for architecting a specific future for your customer—one they can relate to and aspire to in the near term. 

The best way to do this is by sharing stories that speak to the universal truths you identified and showing the before and after. By showcasing the chasm, people will be incentivized to take action—be it signing up for your email list, following you on social media, or purchasing your product or service—because they see the effect it can have.

Take Pia Beck: she was checking all the boxes in life but realized she wasn’t happy. So she started her own business, and now she’s a successful entrepreneur. She tells that story, which helps her draw in her clients: other women entrepreneurs who want to build their businesses. 

Step 5: Share your epiphany, strategically

Now it’s time to tell the story: take people through the emotional experience that got you excited about the thing you’re doing now, the product you’ve created, the service you’re all about. And do it with a strong narrative arc.

Section 1. Bleed first to create a hook

Start with the most fascinating and emotionally evocative part of that story: the bleeding. People will connect with the real, deep, and concrete emotions of that experience—your pain, your challenge, your tightrope, your conflict.

Section 2. Give context

Without context, there will be no payoff to the story and people will lose interest. You can do this by answering the four basic questions of any good story: Who? What? When? And why? So, after you hook people, open up the story to give people an understanding of what happened, who was involved, and why it matters.

Section 3. Close with a lesson, then present the solution (your offer)

End by sharing your reflection of the pain, of the challenge, and what you’ve done with that information. What was the lesson you learned from it? What did you do to overcome it? What was the thing that helped you break through to a new normal?

This allows the narrative to come full circle and gives your story a valuable payoff. As a business, this is where you can allude to your product, your service, or the course that you’ve created to allow others to avoid the same mistakes you made or challenges you faced. 

You can present this story in written or video content, across a series, or on social media to give your audience an inside view of how you’ve come to be what you are today. 

Following these five steps allows you to reflect on the key moments in your business, and it gives your pain a reason to exist. It will help your customers better understand where you come from, creating a connection and building the trust you need your audience to have in you.