What is worldbuilding for small business?

Deep down, we all just want to connect with people who light up about the same stuff as us.

We all want to be part of something bigger, even if it’s about something seemingly small. Whether it’s simply the way we prep our morning coffee, or as huge as how to simultaneously navigate motherhood and entrepreneurship, any brand can offer their audience a flag to rally behind and say, “people like us do things like this.”

The way forward is to create a world people can connect with and feel seen by. Where they can understand that they are not alone. Creating a brand world gives your audience agency to explore at their own pace and raise their hand when they are ready to say, “I want to be part of the story you’re writing.”

Now more than ever, consumers are actively searching for brands that deliver them real, sustained value over time and are actively rejecting brands who have not taken a stand for anything meaningful. They want to be a citizen in a world that aligns with their core values & beliefs. They want something to be a part of.

With this in mind, we have one primary question to answer: how do we become meaningful to the people we seek to serve?

My personal answer to that question is: worldbuilding.

Marketing is more effective & more enjoyable for everyone when businesses put PEOPLE first. The mechanism by which we create people-first marketing is what I call a brand world.

For those of you unfamiliar with Encontro — around here we believe in building a business that feels easy & exciting to show up and share about every single day. We believe that marketing your business can feel balanced and peaceful for you AND make your audience feel safe, welcome, and pulled magnetically into your world.

Basically, we believe that worldbuilding is the best marketing solution for both us AND our audience, because it grants agency & autonomy to everyone involved (including us, the business owner).

I will preface this article by stating that worldbuilding for business is admittedly esoteric. There are few resources available on the topic, but I have made it my mission to create a public body of work that exists as a resource for worldbuilding and business. My audience & I are still learning and discovering from experience as we move forward. But what we HAVE found is that worldbuilding is the perfect solution for people like us.

So, with that groundwork laid, let’s talk about worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding – the better way to market your biz

Worldbuilding is how entrepreneurs help people imagine an exponentially different future that they always hoped for, but never knew was achievable.

It is an approach to marketing that prioritizes creating an environment where people can enter & explore at their own pace, make decisions on their own time, and opt to move forward when they feel ready.

It’s narrative-based and highly relational.

You create a world when you speak to your audience about the problems they are facing and the potential solutions they’ve tried, then introduce to them a different, more innovative solution and challenge the conventional wisdom they’ve always listened to. You start building a world in your audience’s mind when you show them there is a better way to meet their desired outcome than what they’ve always assumed.

Your internet world is where a group of creative people can come together around shared ideals, values, goals, and dreams.

Everyone in your world (especially you) has an aligned answer, at least in part, to the question “what is a life well-lived?”

Some worlds are built around massive, world-changing (no pun intended, ha) answers to this question. For example, Patagonia’s world is built around the position that a life would not be well-lived without a dedicated commitment to save the planet. They have accumulated a global audience of people who seek to be an insider in the Patagonia tribe, aligning their identity with the ideals, values, goals, and initiatives of Patagonia’s world.

Other worlds are built around smaller, less earth-shattering answers to the question of a life well-lived, but these worlds are no less meaningful to the people they seek to serve. One world that I am a proud citizen of is Flair. Those of us in the Flair community (a small world, primarily hosted in a Facebook group) believe that the tedious art of brewing and refining manually pressed espresso dramatically increases the quality of our day. Could we just brew Nespresso pods with the click of a button? Yeah sure, I guess. But the routine and the art of manual espresso are part of our definition of a life well-lived, so we are part of a world where we can come together with others who share our belief.

We build our world around our own answer to the question, as it pertains to our market & our offer. The core connection point of our world has a magnetic pull for those who align with it, and creates a desire in them to step forward to become an active community member of our world.

As I said earlier, consumers are actively seeking out brands who provide a meaningful experience they can connect with and be a part of.

By establishing a core connection point, we create a shared “identity” that those who are in our world can step into and align with long-term.

Our job, then is to create a world that people want to be part of. Define a vision they can get behind and feel excited about. Share values and initiatives they want to identify with.

Basically, we establish that “people like us do things like this,” to borrow the words of Seth Godin.

And if you are like US, and want to be part of this world… well, here’s how we do things.

I believe that marketing is more effective & more enjoyable for everyone when businesses put PEOPLE first. I believe that creating a relationship with someone is always more valuable than generating a transaction from them, which is why, in my world, the primary goal of business is to create relationships with people rather than chase sales & opt-ins.

I don’t use lead magnets, and I don’t “optimize” or “strategize” many things because I have seen it lead to one of two outcomes: 1) inauthentic, robotic messaging that people tune out bc it’s the same as everything else they see online, or 2) messaging that preys on people’s survival brain, putting them in a hyper-emotional state that leads to impulsive buying decisions. Generating a bunch of opt-ins or sales from people who aren’t invested in the journey is counter-intuitive to my long-term business goal of creating relationships, which is why I stopped optimizing for transactions.

Putting people first is how I believe business should be done.

Relationships over transactions, quality user experience over cute design, and people over metrics.

When relationship building becomes the primary goal of our business, everything we do becomes more people-focused and we start to put people first in our marketing.

This makes US and everyone we are marketing to feel like a real human with real value (because we ARE, but a lot of marketing tactics have lost sight of it).

Which leads me right into the next section of this article.

Funnels vs Worlds

Let’s start by talking about funnels.

The marketing funnel we’re all familiar with has been, until recently, the most predictable and efficient way to make sales on the internet. It has been the gold standard of online marketing.

Pretty much anyone could make big bucks by quickly amassing thousands of followers or running paid ads to cold leads, point those followers/leads toward an attractive freebie offer or webinar, then funnel those who opt-in through a linear sequence that lumps on upsell after upsell.

Follow it up with an email sequence peppered with countdown timers, high-pressure scarcity tactics, and plenty of FOMO, and you have (what used to be) a high-converting marketing funnel.

I say “used to be” because, since around mid-2023, a ton of businesses have seen their (previously thriving) funnels start to take a nosedive. People are clicking off, conversions are lower and anything with high urgency or high scarcity makes most people immediately exit the funnel.

I’m not trying to discredit this method, because it’s worked really well for a lot of people over the last decade. And it can still work really well for the right people.

But what made it so popular is also the reason why conversions are starting to decline.

It was popular because it was easy to send a ton of people down the funnel and get super predictable results. 1,000 leads translated to 30 customers. 3% conversion rate, boom. Rinse and repeat with anyone you can find.

Because of this predictability, with funnels, sales and customers have become the product of our marketing. But when people are seen as the product of something we do, it’s easy to start viewing them as a commodity and forget that they’re real humans with real lives on the other side of the screen.

Funnels have become less effective because people are tired of feeling like they’re being treated as a commodity.

Funnels have had their moment of fame and success but consumers have begun to feel like nothing more than a number and are craving marketing that feels more human & relational.

This is what makes worldbuilding so effective. The primary goal of worldbuilding is to create relationships with people, not to generate transactions from them.

We seek to create genuine relationships with people and serve them as best we can even before they become a paying customer of our business.

So we simply focus on keeping as many people in our world as happy, engaged, and involved as we can. We no longer do business in a way that treats people as a number. We aren’t creating a funnel and trying to see how much output we can get.

And when we make this shift, people become the center of our business and marketing, rather than an output of it.

To sum it up in a nice little phrase, people become the purpose of our marketing, not the product of it. So now, marketing feels exciting and empathetic for us as the business owner and for the people we market to.

Another key difference between funnels and worlds is how we approach growth and expansion.

With the funnel, success is measured by output, which means the more output (sales/opt-ins) your funnel produces, the more successful it’s considered.

To increase the output of our funnel, all we have to do is make the mouth wider and have more input. More input equals more output.

So with the funnel, growth and expansion simply means pouring more people through the mouth of the funnel and seeing who comes out the other side.

It’s relatively predictable, BUT this approach heavily relies on volume. And in 2024, volume is expensive and time consuming. Social media is crowded, ads are expensive, and finding leads who are open to purchasing quickly from someone they’ve never heard of is really hard.

With world building, as I mentioned, the goal is to create relationships rather than to generate transactions. This means success is measured by how well we retain loyal fans of our brand inside our world, rather than on the “output” we are producing.

Keeping people around in our world and making sure they are happy, involved, and engaged is what we aim for.

The funnel is less personal than worldbuilding. People enter in and out, in and out, and a very small amount of them become a customer. Conversion rates with a funnels are quite low. Between 1%-3% is seen as a good conversion rate for a funnel.

With world building, since our goal is to form genuine, long term relationships with the people in our audience and keep them sticking around, it requires less volume. The way we expand our world is not by “dumping” more people through a funnel — we expand our world by bringing in more people who want to stay.

Those people, when they decide to stay in our world and continue to engage with & be served by us, will become loyal advocates of our brand and eventually begin bringing new people in to become part of our world.

In fact, a Harvard Business Review study found that increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95% — that means you could double your profits by simply focusing on the PEOPLE you serve and making them want to stick around in your world, rather than trying to brainstorm how to get them to buy.

This is exactly the reason why I decided to ditch all of my lead magnets.

My goal was to make sure the people joining my email list and exploring deeper into my world are extremely aligned with my values, and attracting people with free opt-in incentives just wasn’t getting me closer to that goal.

If you want to read more about why I got rid of my lead magnets, the next best place to head is this blog post: Why I stopped using lead magnets, and what I do instead

Happy reading!