The StoryBrand Framework: How to Clarify Your Message — and Why Clarity Alone Isn’t Enough

What an unclear message costs you

A few years ago I was at a business leaders event with about three hundred people in the room. I sat down at a table, introduced myself to the man next to me, and asked what he did.

He talked for ten minutes. He would start explaining a problem in his industry, walk me all the way into it, and then say — but we don’t really do that. Then he would start on another one. Same ending. By the time he stopped I was looking around the room for an exit, and I still had no idea what his company sold.

Eventually he got there. His company installs rubber liners on flat commercial roofs. That is a clear, specific, useful thing to be able to do — and he had just spent ten minutes not saying it.

Then he asked what I did, and I said this:

He leaned in. You could watch it happen. Two sentences did what his ten minutes couldn’t, and the only difference between us was that I had done the work of figuring out what to say before I got there.

Donald Miller has an analogy for this that I have never been able to improve on. Imagine walking up to your neighbor and handing him a rope. He would take it, look at it, and wonder what was wrong with you. Now imagine a sinkhole opens in the neighborhood and your neighbor falls in. You walk up with the same rope and he grabs it before you finish speaking.

Same rope. The difference is the hole. As a business, you have to own a hole — name a specific problem so clearly that when people see your rope, they already know what it is for. (The rope half of that analogy comes from Sean Biddle at FitSimply Marketing, who added it to Miller’s sinkhole in a post I have been stealing ever since. Credit where it is due.)

Here is the part that sounds harsh and is worth sitting with anyway: when someone lands on your website, they do not care about you. They are not there to admire you. They have a problem and they are scanning for whether you can solve it. Only after they believe you can does anything else you have to say become interesting.

The eight elements, one at a time

StoryBrand is built on the shape of every story that has ever held anyone’s attention: a character wants something, something stands in the way, and a guide helps them get it. Miller calls it the SB7 framework. I count eight, because there is one element that is not technically part of the seven and does more work than almost any of them.

Walk through all eight for your business and you will know everything you need to know about who your customer is, what they are up against, and how you help.

The step where it breaks

I became a certified StoryBrand Guide in 2020, and since then I have coached breakout rooms at something like twenty StoryBrand livestreams. Each one runs two full days. Don Miller or J.J. Peterson teaches a section of the BrandScript, sends everyone off to work on their own, and then the business owners come back into small rooms — six to eight of them — where someone like me reads what they wrote and helps them fix it.

Call it a hundred and forty business owners, minimum, whose messaging I have read over their shoulder in the moment they were writing it.

Here is the pattern. Almost everyone struggles with the character and the problem, but they struggle productively — they argue with themselves and get somewhere. Then we reach the plan, and the wheels come off the cart.

Over the years I have landed on a formula that gets people unstuck almost every time. Three steps:

Step one is the call to action. Not a warm-up — the actual ask. This is the single place in the whole process where the customer has to put skin in the game and decide. Book the call. Request the quote. Send the file. Make it the first step and you have told them exactly where the door is.

Step two is what happens after they take it. This is the one clients cannot answer at first, and the one that matters most, because it is the part they are actually nervous about. What do you do next? What do they receive? Who calls them, and when? Write down the thing you have done four hundred times without describing it once.

Step three is the success picture. Pull it straight from the success element of your BrandScript. Not “we deliver the project” — what their life looks like when it is done.

Occasionally a business needs four, and it is usually because they have to qualify the customer before going further. A business brokerage, for instance, needs a step in the middle where the seller and the business get vetted before anything is listed — leaving it out would misrepresent how the process actually works.

What AI does with a clear message

I had been saying for a while that clear messaging gives AI assistants something usable to work with. Then I decided to find out whether that was true or just a theory I liked.

So I ran a test. I know The Business Brokers well — I built their site and worked on their messaging — which means I know exactly who their ideal customer is and what that person is actually worried about. So I asked an AI assistant the question that customer would ask, in the words they would use.

I want to sell my business quietly, so my staff do not find out. Which broker should I use? Then the obvious follow-up: which of these would make it easiest and take the least time out of my life?

The assistant picked them for that second question. And when it explained why, it did not quote a tagline or an about page. It quoted their plan — the four steps, in order — and noted that a seven-person team meant somebody would actually pick up the phone. It described that as the lowest activation energy of the firms it was comparing.

Lowest activation energy. That is a machine independently arriving at the reason the plan element exists in the first place: a simple plan lowers the threshold of stress and makes it possible to start.

So that answered my question. But the same answer contained something more useful, and I did not go looking for it.

The assistant also looked at their free valuation offer and speculated — reasonably enough, from the outside — that a free valuation creates an incentive to quote a number the seller will like, so that they sign the listing agreement.

I know that is backwards. Their valuations regularly land below what owners hope to hear. Some owners get annoyed, walk away, try to sell on their own, and come back a year later having found out the number was right the first time.

That story is nowhere on their website. So the engine hit a silence and filled it with a plausible, uncharitable guess.

This is worth naming clearly, because it is a different failure from being invisible. They were found, quoted and recommended. The damage came from a question their site never answered. When your content is silent on an obvious objection, AI does not leave a blank — it reasons from your business model and tells the buyer what it infers. Usually that inference is the one a skeptical customer would have made anyway. You just never got to hear them make it.

Ordered, concrete, plainly written content is easy for a language model to lift and repeat accurately. A paragraph of adjectives about your commitment to service is not. More on writing content AI can quote.

How to clarify your message

The process I run is not complicated, which is the point. It starts with a ninety-minute conversation, because the words are already in your head and the job is getting them out. Gordon, a client of mine, described that better than I can: the useful part was not the framework itself, it was having someone ask the right questions until the story he wanted to tell came out of him.

Out of that call comes a BrandScript — all eight elements written down for one specific customer — and from the BrandScript, a one-liner: the problem, your solution, and how life gets better, compressed into something you can say at a table with three hundred people in the room.

When you have more than one kind of customer

Most businesses do, and this is where a lot of StoryBrand work quietly falls apart. If you write one BrandScript for a customer base that contains three genuinely different people, you end up with mush that speaks to none of them.

What I do instead is write a separate BrandScript for every character, then lay them side by side and read across the rows. All the external problems together. All the internal problems together. All the success pictures together. Common language rises to the surface almost immediately, because these people are different but not unrelated — they came to you for related reasons.

That shared language becomes your homepage, so anyone who lands there recognizes themselves. Then the page offers the specific paths, the visitor self-selects, and the page they land on speaks only to them.

I am doing this right now with a commercial lender who offers nine different loan types. Nine characters, one message at the top, nine specific conversations underneath. It is not nine businesses — it is one business that has done the work of knowing exactly who is standing in front of it.

Messaging for multiple services →  ·  One-liner examples →

Then answer the questions

StoryBrand gets you the message. It does not, by itself, get you the depth.

Years ago, while I was working with a software company serving real estate brokers, a friend named Mike Stewart asked whether I had read They Ask You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. I hadn’t. I bought it, and like Building a StoryBrand, it just makes sense while you are reading it.

The argument is simple: when someone has a problem, their head is full of questions. What will this cost? How long will it take? What could go wrong? How are you different from the other option? Is anyone actually happy with you? Most businesses avoid answering those in public, especially price. Sheridan’s position is that you should answer all of them, thoroughly, on your own website.

That book is a decade old and it turns out to have been written for this moment. What people type into an AI assistant is not a keyword — it is a fully formed question, usually a long one, often the awkward one they would not have asked a salesperson yet. If the answer exists on your site, in a form that can be lifted cleanly, you are in the conversation. If it doesn’t, you are the silence I described earlier.

My question extraction is part research and part interview: keyword data on what people are actually searching in that industry, my own experience of the questions every buyer asks, and then a recorded call where I keep asking until the real answers come out. That recording usually contains more usable content than the client believes it does.

The questions your buyers are asking AI →

Why clarity alone isn’t enough

Early in my time as a certified guide I built a site for Kevin Anthofer at Route 69 Customs, who was building custom motorcycles on rebuilt salvage frames. It was one of the best things I had made. The messaging was sharp — I wrote it during my StoryBrand training in Nashville and had Don Miller himself give me notes on it. I was proud of that site.

A few months later I checked in with Kevin to see how it was going. He said the site looked great, he loved it, and then he said the sentence that changed how I run my business:

He was right. I had built something clear and beautiful and completely invisible, and it had genuinely not occurred to me that those were separate problems. That is the day I started learning SEO, and eventually everything that has come since.

The numbers back up the anecdote. Ahrefs studied roughly fourteen billion pages and found that about 96.5% of them get no traffic from Google at all. Their own caveat is that the sample skews toward the better end of the web, which if anything makes it worse. The internet is full of beautiful websites nobody sees.

So no — a StoryBranded website does not automatically score well for AI search. I run AI readiness reviews for a living and I have seen clearly messaged, well-designed sites score in the bottom tier, because none of the structural work was there: no schema, no llms.txt, thin coverage of their own services, nothing off-site corroborating who they are.

Clarity is necessary. It is the foundation and nothing else works without it. It is just not sufficient, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you half a solution. I have written up the honest case for and against StoryBrand — what the critics get right, what they get wrong, and why a clear message is only about twenty percent of a website that works.

What this looks like when it works

Gordon Haave came to me knowing something was wrong and unable to name it. In his words, he knew there were keys to a good website but did not know what they were, and could not find anyone who could help him do more than “build a good website.” He was, as he put it, extraordinarily frustrated.

After we clarified the message for Advisormax, he told me that for the first time in his career he was conveying a simple, powerful message that led the right prospects to raise their hands. That last part is the whole game — not more leads, the right ones.

With Advantage Roofing, the numbers moved in a way I could watch. In February 2025 their homepage bounced 98% of the people who landed on it, and visits lasted a matter of seconds. Traffic was arriving and turning straight back around.

We rewrote the homepage around the customer instead of the company, and kept working on the site from there. In the same two weeks of February a year later, that homepage bounced 10.2%. Sessions now run past two minutes, which for website copy is a long time. People are reading it.

The marketing work that followed produced a 19.2X return on spend and took the business from a $2.2M plateau to $3.3M.

And Tina Clafin, who I coached in a livestream breakout room, described the problem from the owner’s side better than I could: she ran a niche business, could never explain it cleanly, hated marketing, and always felt people walked away not understanding what she offered. What she wanted was not cleverness. It was a framework she could rely on.

Where this doesn’t help

Clear messaging cannot fix a business model.

If the economics do not work, or the thing you are selling carries an objection at its heart that the market will not accept, better words will get you to that objection faster. That is genuinely useful information. It is not the same as a sale.

It is worth being plain about the role here, because it comes up more than you would think.

You say your product delivers this and produces these results, and that is what gets communicated. I will ask questions, and I will tell you when a claim needs proof behind it before it goes on a page. But deciding whether the business itself is sound is a different job from helping you say what it does.

That job exists, and I do it too — as a fractional CMO, or if I were the one running the company. In that seat I need to know that what we are saying is true and that we can show the evidence, because I am accountable for the result rather than for the words. Different role, different conversation. That work starts here.

So if you are not yet sure the offer itself works, that is worth settling before you pay anyone to describe it beautifully. I would rather say that at the start than at the end of a project.

There are other fair criticisms of this framework — that it is formulaic, that it oversimplifies complex businesses, that the results get oversold. I take all three seriously in an honest assessment of where StoryBrand falls down.

Common questions