In the past, I have written about how powerful storytelling can be at breaking through the extreme market noise and clutter to get our marketing message through more effectively and generate more sales.  In this multi-part series, I am now going to share concepts on how NLP can be used to amplify the power of storytelling to sell virtually anything.

These techniques have, for example, been used in several launches that generated more than $23.8 million in sales – in less than the first 24 hours! (so this stuff works and is well worth your time to learn and apply)

The next installment will cover how to apply the concepts discussed here in the design of effective stories that sell.

The Precision Marketing System is a set of tools for creating story-based campaigns.

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Earlier in 2008, I wrote about the power of storytelling in permission marketing and how these techniques had enabled me to:

• Generate more than ten times as much interaction and comments posted to one of my blogs
• Triple our new sales during the month I ran a single story-based campaign to my lists
• Double new sales during an entire quarter this same story ran on our websites and auto-responder

I think I giggled like a little girl when I saw all those blog posts coming in the first time!  And I remember we celebrated tripling our sales with that first story-based campaign. I know there was alcohol involved, I just don’t remember what kind or how much

Anyway, these great results caused me to dig deeper into how and why storytelling worked so well, and how to use the power of storytelling most effectively in all kinds of campaigns. 

In the process, I discovered that certain neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques can be combined with storytelling to do what I’ll call “amplifying” the impact a story has on the reader – which stirs the deep emotional responses needed to get people to stop what they’re doing and take action; e.g., read and post comments on blogs and buy products online.

At first this NLP stuff seemed like hocus pocus or something.  I remember when I told one of my PhD friends (who now leads usability research at Microsoft) what we were doing…  He said:

“Storytelling and NLP, eh?  Throw in some herbal healing, drums and rattles and you have the basic formula for shamanic ritual — that’s been in demand among homo sapiens for millions of years… should be a winner!”

Well, this kind of reaction to NLP seems to be fairly common.  I suppose NLP has both positive and negative connotations on the surface. Nevertheless, storytelling certainly HAS been used by humans as long as we’ve been on this Earth – and probably will continue to be. 

And NLP simply provides us with a proven methodology for anchoring our product’s benefits, key features, etc. into the story and tickling some key emotional responses (sorry – no hocus pocus here). 

Interestingly, while discussing this with some top marketers at a major online software business recently, I learned how they’re beginning to incorporate NLP in their telemarketing efforts (in particular, “embedded commands”).  It’s becoming clear that a number of “advanced marketers” are quietly using NLP increasingly in their marketing and sales motion, for one simple reason - because it works.

Anyway, these early successes led me to hook up with my long-time friend and former collegue, Jeff Sulma, an accomplished copywriter and screen play author (screen plays are basically stories), to learn as much as I could about these techniques.  I wanted to have an expert on storytelling on board to supplement my own capabilities in this core area.

Jeff introduced me to the standard techniques that Hollywood writers have used in crafting their stories for decades – proven story “models” and methods used to create blockbuster movies, shows and the like (I had no idea this stuff even existed – but it makes sense now that I’ve seen it).

This isn’t “rocket science”, but there are definitely some best practices and formulas that are proven to work and that should be used to generate above average results and to ensure your stories remain interesting and achieve their intended results.

So, why do stories work in our marketing?

Foremost, because they’re more interesting than other methods of communicating. 

I think most people are “bored to tears’ by the majority of advertising and marketing we’re exposed to.  Let’s face it.  It’s hard to get passionate about many of these products, too! 

But when you discuss how a product affects someone’s life, by way of a story, it’s now much more interesting.  Stories bring the “human element” of real life into focus, enabling us to “bond” with the character in the story, often without even realizing it.

Because stories are much more interesting than most advertisements, product web pages, data sheets, case studies and the like, they capture people’s attention and draw them in – into becoming “consumers” of the information.

And once a person becomes an information consumer of the story, they’re probably ”hooked”.  And in this age of information hyper-overload we live in today, that’s half the battle – getting people to give you a few minutes of their precious time and actually “listen” for a change.

A-I-D-A

AIDA is an acronym that stands for Attention-Interest-Desire-Action, a process we marketers go through to grab a prospect’s attention, build interest and desire for what we’re selling, then trigger the prospect to take action (e.g., opt-in on our landing page, click through to read our offer, click the Add To Cart button, etc.)

Stories begin by grabbing the prospect’s “Attention“, as described above.  Next, when properly crafted they create “Interest” and drive a curisoity to know more (e.g., to know how the story turns out).  Next, stories can actually build “Desire” for your product within the mind of your prospect; e.g., they see the benefits the character in the story is getting from your product – and they begin to want those same benefits.

Stories “frame” the opportunity our product represents within the mind of our reader (prospect), and can be used to stimulate the prospect to take “Action” – to buy a product, to subscribe to your list, etc.

A Product Is Born

It didn’t take long for Jeff and me to realize that we were onto something big here.  I mean, a formula that enables marketers to break through the spam, market noise, sales resistance and advertising fatigue we’re all suffering from today… and get people to Listen and Buy… 

I quickly recognize a product opportunity when I see one, and this one didn’t take a genius to figure out!  In fact, as I recall, Jeff and I were on a fishing trip this past summer at my lake house, discussing the amazing results these campaigns were achieving when we realized – we should package this stuff up and make it available for other businesses and marketers to use!

With my Web marketing and corporate marketing background, coupled with Jeff’s copywriting and storytelling knowledge, we turned all of this knowledge and experience into a simple “system”, or methodology, for marketers to use in creating these powerful story-based campaigns.

Jeff was insistent that we make the system dead-stick simple – easy enough for anyone to put to use in their business quickly.  So that’s what we did…

We now call this product “The Precision Marketing System”.  The product contains virtually everything (that matters) that we know and have learned about developing story-based marketing campaigns that get results.  The product is for anyone who’s responsible for developing marketing campaigns, writing copy, or developing ads – for email marketing campaigns, direct mail, and more traditional ads.

What’s really interesting about all this is we actually discovered something unexpected.  Stories “break through” the noise and apathy level in the marketplace and get a marketer’s messaging both heard and consumed – certainly something nobody else is claiming today!

Assuming you have a meaningful message and a product that resonates with your target audience, this precision marketing system enables this “tuned out” audience to be reached and sold – it’s that simple, when you follow the step-by-step instructions and “playbook” we created. 

There’s also a 2 hour overview video that explains everything and takes you through exactly how to apply these techniques in your business.

Pretty cool!  This was a fun product to develop, and it’s also turning out to be a lot of fun helping people learn it and apply it in their businesses.  I’m certainly looking forward to 2009!!

Read the rest of the Precision Marketing story here to get more details…

Related posts

• The Power of Story in Permission-based Marketing (3)
• Story: Struggling organic farmer saves the family farm (1)
• How To Create Stories That Sell, Part 1 (8)
• 14 Best-Kept Killer Hook Secrets That Grab Your Audience And Hook Them (7)
• When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories (9)
• The New Rules of Launch (11)
• The 7 Rules Bestselling Authors Use To Hook Their Readers (1)
• Storytelling Tweet goes viral overnight (11)
• Story marketing: Why it works and why you should try it (6)
• Psychology of Social Product Launches – Part 3, Storytelling (10)

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

Related posts

• Creative storytelling – A savvy marketer’s competitive edge (1)
• Story: Struggling organic farmer saves the family farm (1)
• How To Create Stories That Sell, Part 1 (8)
• 14 Best-Kept Killer Hook Secrets That Grab Your Audience And Hook Them (7)
• When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories (9)
• The New Rules of Launch (11)
• The 7 Rules Bestselling Authors Use To Hook Their Readers (1)
• Storytelling Tweet goes viral overnight (11)
• Story marketing: Why it works and why you should try it (6)
• Psychology of Social Product Launches – Part 3, Storytelling (10)