A few months ago, I began using more stories in my communications with my subscribers and customers. As it turns out, stories are an incredibly powerful way to communicate – especially in today’s age of marketing communications saturation, where everyone is so fatigued by the constant bombardment of ads we’re exposed to daily.
So, I decided to try a few story-based campaigns – tests designed to find out for certain just how well this story-based approach works. In short, the results were truly remarkable in one of my niche businesses (an online training and membership club site).
I had been emailing my subscriber list of around 25,000 regularly for years (a list that steadily grows), but that I’d noticed had become less and less responsive over the last 12 months or so. I thought at first there might be an email deliverability issue, due to spam filters, for example. It turns out that is a part of the issue, but not the biggest issue.
The biggest issue was in how I was communicating with this audience. In short, they were simply “bored”. Tired of the same old dry offers, advertisements, free giveaway promotions, and regular communications like newsletters – what a good friend of mine calls “SOS” (same old sh**).
He says that most of today’s communications ends up in the SOS bucket in people’s mind – they quickly recognize the form factor of the email, landing page and/or sales page as an advertisement or a cleverly disguised promotion designed to sell them something. I think I agree with that assessment. The old models are just that – old, boring and less effective in this era of permission-based marketing.
Today, people are hungry for content – content that’s interesting and useful for them – that meets their own selfish desires as consumers of content. Yet as marketers, we have our own selfish needs – to promote our products and services.
So, how can we get our message through these increasingly sophisticated “filters” that our prospects and customers have erected to protect their time from being constantly invaded and to avoid being sold?
Short Answer: Story.
Stories provide the “envelope” within which we can deliver our messages – an envelope that will actually get opened, read, understood, remembered, repeated by word of mouth and acted upon.
Not just any stories, but stories that are interesting, that provide context for our products, but without hard or soft-selling.
Relevant stories about customer successes (not dry “case studies”). Personal stories about what we’ve been through that they can use to relate to us as fellow human beings. Stories of our biggest triumphs – and our biggest failures and lessons learned.
Stories make use human to our readers (as do typos). And people will make time to listen to a good story! Stories help to build trust with our readers. And properly-crafted stories build a lasting relationship – one that creates enough interest and desire to cause our reader to actually listen to us (for a change).
The key is in how we carefully weave our marketing messages into these stories so they get consumed by our readers – while our readers are in a receptive frame of mind.
So, back to my story here…
I sent an email to my subscribers, telling the story of one of our members who had been losing a lot and was extremely frustrated. This story took the readers through the emotions this member was experiencing, and created empathy and understanding. Then the story shared the solution – how this member managed to overcome what had seemed like insurmountable obstacles (prior to joining our membership site).
The support this member received from other members on our site, via our private forums, as well as some personal assistance by one of our coaches, who reached out and helped this member directly, was the key to his turnaround.
At the end of this story, our member had gone from losing thousands of dollars a month to paying off credit card debt and generating thousands of dollars in profits – in just 6 weeks. In fact, this member was so successful, he actually quit his job to pursue his dream of working from home.
As soon as I published a couple of these stories, three things happened:
1. Our blog started getting comments – people were now interested enough to get involved, and THEY became a part of the story themselves. This provided these readers with an outlet – a way to be heard, to share their feelings and points of view. Prior to this story, the blog had rarely garnered any participation by its readers (who were obviously bored to tears with my ramblings before that).
2. Our private membership site forums became more active – our members became more passionate, engaged, starting talking more about the site, and referring more of their friends to join us.
3. Sales started pouring in. Our new sales during the month we sent just 2 of these email stories to our subscribers actually tripled. Let me say that again. We TRIPLED our sales – by sending 2 stories to our subscribers over a 2 week period!
Over that quarter, that same story resulted in doubling our sales for the entire quarter.
Now, there’s an art to crafting these stories so they have the desired effect, and combining the power of the stories with social media to enable the interactive environment that creates the “social proof” – one of the by-products that results in rapid increased sales results.
Story-telling in our marketing is something that companies need to do more of. Our listeners, prospects and customers are tired of the SOS communications style we’re using with them.
I have done enough experiments with this story-based methodology to say for certain that it really does work – and it works surprisingly well, too.
I wish I could take full credit for having come up with this technique of using stories to take our prospects on what I now call a “magic carpet ride” – a magic carpet that’s powered by the stories we use to ensure our messages get through and have a real impact.
I learned to incorporate stories into my marketing from Frank Kern – a brilliant Internet marketer who’s probably best known for having sold over $23 million of product in less than 24 hours on 3 launches where he wrote the copy (using storytellig techniques).
Besides being extremely funny and entertaining, Frank’s approach to story-telling absolutely rocks – and it gets amazing results. He calls these techniques “Mass Control” (a course that’s now sold out).
I attended Frank’s Mass Control seminar in San Diego a few months ago (along with 600 others), where I learned even more about his approach to story-telling and other powerful online marketing techniques, which I tried as discussed above – which turned into immediate, amazing results.
Since then, I’ve been learning a lot more about the key underpinnings responsible for these methods’ success – a combination of story-telling, relationship-building, trust and some aspects of NLP.
This is an area you’ll be hearing more about, as I continue to refine these powerful techniques and share my findings. I’m doing a number of experiments to refine these techniques into a methodology that I can share with others.
The power of story in marketing provides us with access to an additional “segment” of our market that rejects traditional advertising and promotions – a part of the market we can readily tap into by expanding our marketing to include more use of relevant stories. Creative storytelling is certainly an approach to copywriting that provides many advantages.
Finally, the reason stories work so well is that it “frames” the decision-making processes within our prospects mind – setting up a framework for that decision-making that enables us to influence how facts are interpreted and how decisions are made – “implicitly” instead of explicitly.
Explicit decisions are what traditional advertising attempts to do – to “sell you” into submission through repeated exposures, compelling copy, impressive claims, strong benefit statements, great offers and solid calls to action. While these traditional methods certainly have their place, it’s increasingly difficult to use these traditional approaches as the “starting point” for campaigns - or we risk falling into the SOS bucket.
Implicit decisions happen when we’ve shared a few stories with our prospect, and she decides for herself that she wants to take action. She makes her own decision to take action, without the need for prodding, cajoling or hard-selling tactics. And once she makes this decision, she’s much more passionate and active than if we’d pushed her into taking action *we* wanted or requested directly.
Incidentally, If this success story sounds interesting and like something you or your company could benefit from learning to incorporate into your marketing campaigns, contact me and let’s discuss how to craft a story-based campaign for your business.
(see how that works)
I hope you find the power of story as interesting and useful as I have in my marketing. Until next time, all the best in your online business efforts.
Here’s another interesting perspective on why certain email communications is interesting to us and our readers. And a great Top 10 truths in branded story-telling article.
To great story-telling,
Rick
Tags: Precision Marketing, story, storytellingRelated posts:
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 1 trackback }