Type and Tale

Type and Tale Helping small businesses grow through clear marketing & messaging.

How often do you actually come back to that article you intended to read? You keep the browser tab up; you might even em...
09/19/2025

How often do you actually come back to that article you intended to read?

You keep the browser tab up; you might even email it to yourself.

But how often do you actually come back to it?
10% of the time?
5% of the time?

Either way, it’s rare if ever.

Your audience is the same way. If they’re not immediately compelled to act as a result of your content, odds are that they won’t be compelled later on.

If you want your audience to take action, create content that they can implement immediately.

If you want this concept to stick with you, share this post with someone right now, because that’s what will make this stick in your own mind.

08/27/2025

Most small business owners think their paid ads problem is tactical:

➡️ Wrong audience targeting
➡️ Poor creative
➡️ Weak budget

But in reality, ads don’t fail because of placement — they fail because of positioning.

Three strategic gaps I see most often:

1. Audience Clarity — Businesses haven’t gone deep enough into understanding who their customer really is. Without that, your ads are shouting into the void.

2. Differentiation — They never study their competition, which means their ads sound identical to everyone else’s. No edge. No reason to click.

3. Trust Gap — Prospects don’t believe the business can take them where they want to go. Logic isn’t enough. Ads have to create belief — which means leaning into emotion, story, and proof.

Here’s the truth: You can’t “out-algorithm” unclear messaging. The algorithm will amplify whatever you put in — but if the foundation is shaky, the return will be too.

So before you spend another dollar on ads, step back and ask:

Do we truly understand our customer?
Do we sound different from our competition?
Are we building trust, or just running promotions?

Because in 2025, clarity isn’t a nice-to-have in marketing. It’s the edge.

People do want to know about your company history… but not in the way most businesses think.They don’t care about the ye...
08/27/2025

People do want to know about your company history… but not in the way most businesses think.

They don’t care about the year you were founded or that you’ve been “family-owned since 1998.”

What they really want to know is:
Can I trust you?
Do you have enough experience to help me?

It’s the same reason you might hesitate with a doctor who just walked out of med school.

Nothing against them — but when you’re sitting there in a paper gown, you want to know they’ve done this before.

I’ll never forget one of my own moments of unease:

There I was, sitting on the edge of the exam table, trying to keep my hospital gown from opening up and exposing my backside… The doctor walked in, barely made eye contact, and started rattling off a script.

No context, no reassurance, no story to show me he’d been here before.

As a transplant patient of 20+ years, this wasn’t my first experience in an exam room.

And you know what? I didn’t trust them. Not because he wasn't competent — but because I couldn’t see his experience.

It’s the same in business. Your audience isn’t looking for a history lesson. They’re looking for proof that you’ve walked the path before and that you can guide them where they need to go.

That’s what your “About” section, or your company story, should do:
It’s not a résumé. Not a timeline.

It’s a signal: We’ve been here before. And we can help you, too.

So here’s the question:
Does your company history read like a dusty bio or like a story that builds trust?

One of the hardest things in business: knowing if something’s “working” when you’ve never done the groundwork to know wh...
08/25/2025

One of the hardest things in business:

knowing if something’s “working” when you’ve never done the groundwork to know what should work in the first place.

This happens all the time in marketing. Business owners assume their ads don’t perform because the algorithm is “working against them” or because they didn’t spend enough.

But here’s the truth: if you’ve never researched your customer or your competition, how can you even tell if the ad is the issue? You’re essentially testing in the dark.

I had a client who came to me frustrated that their Facebook ads were “a waste of money.”

They’d tried running promotions, discount codes (the list was long). But nothing stuck.

When we dug deeper, the real issue wasn’t the ads at all — it was the foundation.

They had never actually defined who their best customer was. Their messaging sounded exactly like every other competitor in their space. And their offer didn’t feel believable, because they weren’t proving they could actually deliver results.

Once we went back and did the research — mapped out the audience, clarified their unique value, and built messaging that actually spoke to their customers’ emotions — everything changed.

Their very next campaign didn’t just perform, it pulled in higher-quality leads at half the cost.

Three strategic gaps I see most often:

• Audience Clarity — Businesses haven’t gone deep enough into understanding who their customer really is.

• Differentiation — They never study their competition, which means their ads sound identical to everyone else’s. No edge. No reason to click.

• Trust Gap — Prospects don’t believe the business can take them where they want to go. Logic isn’t enough. Ads have to create belief — which means leaning into emotion, story, and proof.

Here’s the truth: You can’t “out-algorithm” unclear messaging. The algorithm will amplify whatever you put in — but if the foundation is shaky, the return will be too.

So before you spend another dollar on ads, step back and ask:

1. Do we truly understand our customer?
2. Do we sound different from our competition?
3. Are we building trust, or just running promotions?

In 2025, clarity isn’t a nice-to-have in marketing. It’s essential.

It was our first night living in Nashville. Fast asleep, I was suddenly awakened by my wife slapping her arm across my c...
08/22/2025

It was our first night living in Nashville. Fast asleep, I was suddenly awakened by my wife slapping her arm across my chest.

I’ll never forget the words she whispered next: “Someone’s in our house!”

My eyes sprang open with a shot of adrenaline that sent my heart slamming against my chest.

But I didn’t dare move. As I lay there holding my breath, I thought, “Is he in our bedroom?”

Then, my thoughts turned toward our daughter’s room across the hall. Her room was right next to the stairs.

The only protection I had was a rungu, a wooden club used in East Africa. My wife picked it up on her last trip to Africa. She thought it was comical – some guys sleep with a shotgun or baseball bat under the bed. Me, I slept with a rungu.

I grabbed the wooden club, still holding my breath, and tip toed to my daughter’s room.

Thankfully, the intruder wasn’t in her room. I proceeded down the stairs, waiting to catch a masked man making off with the few earthly belongings we had unpacked earlier that day.

But no one was there.

Then I heard it: A loud crash coming from the kitchen. I flipped on the lights to discover the masked intruder hadn’t made it inside after all. Instead, it was a pair of raccoons pilfering our trash cans right outside our kitchen door.

It reminded me that new things come with new problems, often unforeseen obstacles that must be overcome. Instead of remaining paralyzed by fear, sometimes you just need to shed some light on it.

08/20/2025

Nobody cares about you logo as much as you do.

Unless you’re MSNBC, people aren’t wasting their time talking about your logo.

Logos, colors, and fonts are important…

But imagery only accounts for 10% of your brand.
The other 90% has to do with how you make someone feel.

Here’s the question you need to address:
How do you make someone feel?

If you’re struggling with this piece of branding👇

Comment GPT and I’ll send you my custom GPT that walks you through the process of making a brand people love.

08/15/2025

action.Beautiful branding won’t save your confused messaging.

Your perfect logo, your expensive website, your gorgeous color palette…

Won’t matter if you can’t explain your offer in a sentence that makes people say, “I need that.”

STORY has become a marketing buzzword.

But what does it mean to tell a compelling story with your marketing?

(HINT: It doesn’t have anything to do with your company picnic.)

To make “story” an approachable, implementable concept, I created a custom GPT that walks you through the process.

Comment ‘GPT’ and we’ll send it to you.

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