I don’t know about you, but I love hearing a great story. Marketing, especially when dealing with intangibles like marketing professional services, is all about storytelling. Here are ten great tips to help you craft a crowd-pleasing story about your firm for either a listening audience or a reader.
- Start with a good title - the title is first thing the reader, or listener, sees—and it’s the teaser for the whole story, it can succeed or fail on this one detail.
- Begin your story by creating some tension. I like words like, “You won’t believe…” to grab someone’s attention and draw them in.
- Give some details—but don’t drown your audience with them, or get lost in them. You need to paint a picture in your reader’s, or listener’s, mind, evoke sounds, smells and textures.
- Have some sort of action, have your story go somewhere and have some kind of resolution.
- Inject humor – even if you aren’t funny, you can invoke a smile by offering some sort of self-deprecation or physical comedy.
- Include details about emotions—what were you feeling, how did that show “on your body”. Emotional details set the scene and give your story context.
- Don't include unnecessary details that slow the story down. If the day of the week, or the time of the day is not relevant, leave it out.
- Simple stories often work best, start out with one idea that you want to get across make one point.
- Don't give it all away in first paragraph - in general it is best to keep the twist or punchline to the end.
- Don’t assume your listener cares about your subject matter as much as you do. If you use the techniques above, your passion and technique will give them reason to care.
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