How to Supercharge Your Marketing With Storytelling—Anthony Butler, Founder, Can-Do Ideas

April 11, 2023

Are you familiar with ancient storytelling principles and how they can impact your ability to connect with your clients? 

Our guest today, Anthony Butler, shares with us his 3-Step process to help supercharge your marketing with storytelling.

TODAY’S WIN-WIN:

Focus on your audience and stop focusing on what you are trying to sell.  When you build trust your audience, they audience will become curious about what you do.

ABOUT OUR GUEST:

Anthony Butler is the founder of the digital marketing agency Can-Do Ideas and the creator of the Primal Storytelling content system. He is the author of Primal Storytelling, Marketing for Humans, and is a highly regarded expert in brand storytelling and digital marketing. Anthony graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the US Army Ranger School. He is a combat veteran and commanded an infantry company in Iraq during the invasion of Baghdad. He is also a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu blackbelt and currently resides in Montana with his wife and two sons.

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TRANSCRIPTION:

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:01):

Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team and as we open today, I’m wondering how familiar you are with ancient storytelling principles and how they can impact your ability to connect with your clients. And we’ve had several guests talk about this idea of storytelling, but no one’s really dug deep into this ancient use of storytelling, much like our guest today, Anthony Butler does, and he shares with us his three step process to help supercharge your marketing with storytelling. Now, Anthony is the founder of the digital marketing agency, Can-Do Ideas and the creator of the Primal Storytelling Content System. He’s the author of a recent book called Primal Storytelling Marketing for Humans, and is a highly regarded expert in brand storytelling and digital marketing.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:03):

Anthony graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and the US Army Ranger School. He is a combat veteran and commanded an infantry company in Iraq during the invasion of Baghdad. He’s also a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt and currently resides in Montana with his wife and two sons. This interview with Anthony is fantastic. You’re going to enjoy it. So let’s go ahead and jump right into it.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (01:26):

I’m Anthony Butler and I’m the founder of Can-Do Ideas. It’s a marketing company.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:33):

Great. Thank you for being here. And as part of your marketing and a book you’ve recently released called Primal Storytelling, I’d love for you just to give a quick overview on what the book is about and these ideas orienting around primal storytelling being in marketing. Let’s just jump right into that.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (01:53):

Yeah, sure. So the book is called Primal Storytelling, and the subtitle really matters. It’s Marketing for Humans. And I’ve been doing this for going on 10 years and just creating content for businesses and trying to help businesses grow. And I came at it from the sales side of the world years ago. I was part of a startup in New York City and I was employee number 50 something in a little tiny company, and we didn’t have marketing, and I started on the sales side and the question always was, “Hey, how do we get more leads? How do we grow? How do we do this affordably?” And that led me into marketing, and then that company blew up. When I left, there was hundreds of employees and it had a nine figure exit. From there, I went on to some other companies and founded some marketing departments in a couple of companies and helped some other companies build their own marketing teams.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (02:59):

And then just about nine years ago, I founded this company, and as we got going, I realized that not all content is the same. And most corporate blogs, corporate social media accounts, they’re just a wasteland of stuff that no one reads. And everyone’s writing for the bot because they want to have SEO on a page. They want to get found organically. Well, what happens is they start writing for the search engine instead of for people, instead of for humans. And so I don’t know if you’ve ever gone on any big… Go on any really big company or even a lot of small companies and read the blog and then read it out loud and ask yourself, would you read this for fun? And so that’s where Primal Storytelling came from. I was like, this is just not working for anyone.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (03:51):

I love this idea. Primal Storytelling is a great phrase, especially the Marketing for Humans for this tagline there. So as you described, the driver for creating it, I like how you shared that blogs content, it’s written for bot, right? Some artificial thing that’s not a person. So talk about how you help whether your clients or customers or even through some suggestions maybe for the business leaders that are listening into this, what they need to be thinking about. There’s not just SEO, it’s also there’s a human element to this, so I’d love for you to talk about that.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (04:27):

So what Primal Storytelling is, it’s a content system, and I wanted to create a system that any business could pick up the book and just follow its step by step by step and come up with a year long content plan and then train their team on how to implement it. And so I give you some different structures, whether you’re B2B or B2C, that you can apply to any business. And I’ve tested it in dozens and dozens of industries, in all kinds of, whether it’s consulting or services or hard products or tech sales, I’ve tested it all across the board. What you do is just follow the formula. There’s three parts to it. The first part is what we call tribe. And that is who is your perfect audience? Who are you trying to work with? Who are those clients that you love to work with that they’re profitable and what are the demographics and psychographics that make them unique?

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (05:28):

Once you understand the audience really deeply and you know what drives them, what are their hopes and fears? What are their desires? What keeps them from working with you? Once you understand that, then you move on to the second side of that formula, and that’s where we look at what are the primal urges and emotions that they’re interested in? And most of the time, it’s not what you think. It’s absolutely not what you think. Because anytime someone makes a decision, it’s a multi-layer decision. It’s not just logic. There’s a lot of emotion involved. I don’t know if you have kids or not, but think about your kids. A little kid graduates from kindergarten and they’re going into first grade and you’re really excited. Now they’re getting in first grade, they’re being a big boy. Well, you’re happy they made it to the next level, but then you’re a little fearful. Oh, are they going to learn how to read? Are they going to do well there? Are they going to make friends? Are they going to get bullied? There’s all this mix of emotion. And we have the exact same problems when we’re making business decisions, when we’re buying something from a new company.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (06:37):

One time I did a consult with this really large IT company in New York City, and I mean they were massive, thousands and thousands of employees doing hundreds of millions of dollars of business. And they hired me to help them with a marketing problem where they were going into the middle market where companies that were like between 100 and 500 employees. And so they were going to these companies and they were having meetings, but they just weren’t closing any business. And I went there and I listened to their pitch, I followed their sales team, and what we realized was their pitch was for the enterprise, was for like, “Hey, you have 10,000 employees across 20 states.” And that was their whole pitch. They’re like, “Yeah, some of our employees are Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies.” And I said to them, I was like, “You’re talking to smaller companies and they actually don’t care that you are working with global enterprises.”

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (07:34):

One of the guys asked them, “Have you ever worked with a small business?” And his fear was, if I hire you, am I getting fired? Are you going to take my job? Because you guys do everything. And once they started to get around the fear that they were bringing into the sales process, and they could alleviate that in the marketing and the stories they told and, “Hey, you know what? We have bespoke services that we can really tailor for a smaller business of any size,” they started to do a lot better because it was a fear base that they just didn’t even understand. It was a primal urge.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (08:11):

Very, very interesting. And so then once you figure out these emotions, then what’s that third part of the formula to take and implement there?

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (08:20):

So then the third part is we’re looking for story structures. How can the marketing team create storylines that… Think of it like your favorite Netflix mini-series, your favorite season. Every show has an overall plot. So think of Game of Thrones. It’s got multiple seasons. Well, each season has its own overall theme and plot, things that are happening. And then each episode has its own mini plot that’s happening just in that episode, that adventure. And so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to create multiple storylines that connect with this audience, that have a structure that our team can learn and get trained on. And then what we’re going to do is we’re going to apply that throughout an entire year and just come up with content that’s interesting and that brings them in. And then what I do is I help companies expand their thinking on the kinds of content that they can create.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (09:16):

And now what do I mean by that? I mean, you don’t need to be a me too content creator where you’re sharing industry news like everyone else, you’re sharing the news of the day like everyone else, you’re publishing quotes. If I see one more company publishing pithy, fake quotes, I just want to kill myself. What we want to do is we want to create unique content that’s helpful for the audience and it doesn’t have to be about what you do. And there’s lots of examples of companies doing this really well, and I go through some case studies in the book. Anyone who comes to my website, if you download the book from my website, I also send case studies out. I send lots of examples for companies to get started. So it’s tribe plus primal urges and emotions, and then plus story. And then from that, you get what we call Primal Story.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (10:08):

And what we’re doing is we’re just creating content that people love and want to consume over time. And we’re using that in our email marketing, we’re using it in our nurture campaigns. We have good structures for the sales team because we want the sales team telling stories. We want the sales team understanding and connecting with the audience. That’s why I do some sales training and I help companies with that. And it really, really helps and it can help a business blow up. And that’s why so many people who’ve used the book, applied the book, are really liking it.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (10:43):

And one of the things I had a question on, we’ve had other guests on talk about storytelling and the use of this kind of thing in some of their marketing with different vantage points of it. And I love this topic. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you on, is to see how you approach and use this and this concept of storytelling with the formula you’ve developed. One of the things that stood out to me is in your book, one of your chapters is called Non-fiction Plots for Brands. And that really resonated with me because I think sometimes, let me speak for myself, applying story in a business setting, especially a fiction story in non-fiction, real world application sometimes can seem a little convoluted, challenging, cloudy. How do we do this in creating the story? So we’d love for you to maybe talk just a little bit about how these plots or these stories apply to brands or maybe a case study or an example might be helpful. I’m not sure.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (11:41):

We’re not writing the great American novel. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is using some story structures that stretch back thousands of years and people connect with. So I think the easiest way of helping people understand how it works is think about movies. Let’s look at Rocky for instance. So you’ve got this nobody, he’s at the end of his career, people think he’s a bum, he loses his locker at the gym. And one day he gets this lucky break and he’s going to fight the heavyweight champion of the world. And then the whole movie is about how this underdog overcomes this giant obstacle. And eventually in movie two, he becomes the champion, right? People love underdog stories. But that story structure is the exact same structure as Star Wars. It’s definitely the exact same structure as Harry Potter, two of the largest movie franchises of all time, bestselling books.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (12:48):

But that structure, the reason that it resonates is because it’s a primal structure. And if you look at all of the most famous literature, all of the things that last for a lifetime, there’s certain structures that just stand the test of time. So anthropologists discovered the oldest story that we can think of. Do you know what it is? Have you ever heard of it? Have you ever heard of this? What’s the oldest story that humans have identified?

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (13:16):

I don’t know.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (13:18):

It’s actually Little Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood predates the Bible. They know that it’s at least 4,500 years old and it permeates through different cultures. They’re 60 plus versions of it they’ve identified. The wolf is sometimes an ogre, sometimes instead of a woodsman coming to save Little Red Riding Hood, it’s a different hero. But the structure of the story and Grandma is almost basically the same across cultures, thousands of years old.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (13:47):

Now, why this story? Do you know of any child in the Western world that doesn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood and how often it’s been retold over and over again in movies and literature? It’s because it’s the structure of a little girl who is naive and a monster comes. She tries to escape from the monster, but then a hero comes to intervene and help her and save her and good versus evil, that’s the structure of it. And it’s this age-old story that everyone can identify. So what I did in the plots, I said, okay, how do we take a few of the story structures out there and apply them to a business? Now, obviously not every story structure is going to apply for every business. So what I did was I narrowed it down to just a few story structures and I tested these with businesses that, you know what? If you are a clever marketer, you could take one of these story structures and absolutely apply it to your business.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (14:50):

So the underdog is one, another is kind of this idea of the hero and not necessarily yourself being the hero, but your client being the hero. And there’s some others in there, you can go through them. You’ll recognize them from commercials, you’ll recognize all of those structures from businesses all around the world. I didn’t make this up. What I did is I put it all into one system and made it easy to use and easy to learn. So you can not have to spend three years going through all the research like I did. Does that make sense?

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (15:23):

Yeah, thank you very much. And it sounds like as well that you helped explain this through, like you had mentioned earlier, your newsletter, if someone downloads the book, they can get onto your case studies and some of the other things that you share as part of that. Anthony, this is a great time just for us to make a little transition in the show where we ask every guest the same four questions before we go. And the first question is, have you had a miss or two in your career and something you learned from it?

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (15:51):

I’ve founded five companies and one of those companies blew up in my face early on. And one of the things I learned from that whole process was that you just have to keep going because there’s always the black swan of things that you don’t know. And in a business, you have to separate what you know from what you think, work on data, and just keep going. And the number one rule of business is stay in business. So protect yourself. Don’t take any big gambles. I would say that’s what having lost a business and nearly going bankrupt helped me learn.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (16:33):

You have had a great career and accomplishments. Any highlight or two you’d like to share?

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (16:38):

One thing to remember is that everything is temporary. And I fought in Iraq, I spent enormous amount of time deployed into war zones and dangerous regions around the world is that the worst times of your life are temporary. And those highs in your life, those giant accomplishments, they’re also temporary. And you just want to find a baseline where you’re content as much as possible and really appreciate the up times. And just realize that those down times, they’re temporary. It’s going to pass no matter how painful it is.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:14):

Let’s talk about a multiplier that you’ve used to grow maybe yourself personally or professionally or even your businesses that you’ve created.

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (17:23):

Bringing automation into my businesses has been a big multiplier. And understanding how to collect data on clients and then what to do with it is a big part of what I do. I’m a very, very big believer in… I have this thing, I call it the business triangle. And on the top left of the triangle, you’ve got data, and that’s where you store data, how you gather the data about your clients and what you’re providing them and really understanding it. And then at the bottom of the triangle, you have technology. I’m a HubSpot partner. I help companies get on HubSpot, automate things on there, automate tasks, integrate that for their sales teams. And if they got customer support, put all that data in one spot. And then on the top part of the triangle is just understanding what stories should our business tell and how will those stories affect our growth?

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (18:23):

And if you can have a plan for all three parts of that triangle, your business is going to grow for sure. It just is. Because data, technology and stories are what drive growth. They just are. And as you know, you can have the best operations in the world, you can have the best product in the world, if no one has ever heard of it and you don’t know who your audience is, growth is going to be hard, business is going to be hard, life is going to be hard. You can have a really crappy business, a really crappy, crappy service, and a very poor product and really good sales and marketing and still do okay. It’s when you have a good product and a good service and excellent marketing and excellent sales. That’s where the magic is. That’s where accelerated growth comes from. And so I focus all on that front end side.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (19:15):

And the final question we like to ask every guest, Anthony, is what does success mean to you?

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (19:21):

I think I’m quite a bit older than probably most of this audience. For me, success is… I coach, I own a Brazilian Jiujitsu school, so I have lots of students coming in there and learning about themselves and how to be gritty, how to be more mentally tough. I have two teenage boys. My oldest son has joined me in my business, and that’s been a lot of fun. It feels successful just working with him. And he just turned 18. He’s got lots of energy and ideas and he thinks I’m an idiot. So it’s fun battling with him. Success for me has changed over the years. When I was younger, it was like, oh, I want to be a millionaire. Oh, I want to grow a seven figure business and have 50 employees. And after a while you understand that yes, there is some business success, but the success and the relationships in my life are way more important than any financial success. My health is important. I like to have all three, be fit, be rich, and have good relationships. So that makes sense.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (20:24):

Thank you for sharing. And Anthony, what’s the best way for someone to get in touch with you, get a copy of your book? How can they do that?

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (20:32):

Yeah, go to primalstorytelling.com. If you want to message me, Anthony@primalstorytelling.com. I answer my own email most of the time. And then I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I post on LinkedIn the most. It’s my social media of choice. I don’t use Twitter at all. I do use Instagram a little bit.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (20:50):

Perfect. And before we go, is there anything you were maybe hoping to share or a point you wanted to get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?

Anthony Butler, Can-Do Ideas (20:58):

The one piece of marketing advice I give to everyone is the same, is focus on your audience and stop thinking about what you’re trying to sell people. Deliver value to your audience first, and then they’ll be more curious about you and what you do if you can build some trust. And I think a lot of companies just got it backwards. They talk about themselves and talk about, “Oh, we have the best this, we have the best that, we have this,” and they talk about all their features and they go into their benefits. And you know what? Until there’s trust, no one cares. So focus on your audience first and then the rest of it will come. I must do half a dozen audits a month of companies and their marketing, and I would say that is the number one issue that I see is they just talk too much about themselves. They’re just too focused on themselves.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (21:50):

Anthony, thank you so much for a fantastic interview and let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when Anthony shared with us his primal storytelling content system, and he creates a full year content plan through this program, and he has options whether you’re a B2B or a B2C company or have a customer base in that regard. And he said, number one, you start with the tribe and identify what are their hopes and fears. Number two, identify their primal urges and emotions. And number three, create a story structure with a storyline for each different part of the customer journey or for the whole thing. And he described this as saying tribe plus primal urges equals primal story. And he offers, by the way, a free download on his website.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (22:44):

Take away number two came from his multiplier where he said bringing automation into his business really changed his company. And he described what he called his business triangle where he has data in the top left of the triangle, technology on the bottom of the triangle, and what stories should our business tell in the top right of the triangle. Take away number three is when he described in his make where he said, everything is temporary. The worst times in your life are temporary and the best times in your life are temporary too. So I thought that was a great perspective on things.

Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (23:22):

And now it’s time for today’s win-win. So today’s win-win is when Anthony said, “Focus on your audience and stop focusing on what you are trying to sell.” He said, “The audience will get curious when you focus on the audience.” They’ll get curious about what you do, and it will allow you to build trust with them, which will in turn lead to them probably wanting to buy something from you. So he said, “Stop trying to sell something and start trying to focus on what your audience wants or needs.” So I thought that was just a great way to close out the show today. And that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.

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