How Storyselling is the Future of Marketing with Yara Golden
On today’s episode of Just the Tips, we “celebrate” Dean turning 34, and give a shout-out to our one true fan who bought him a Bond license plate for his birthday. And we celebrate having Yara Golden on the show. Yara is a storytelling expert who helps businesses up their communications game, build effective product launches and tell the right stories that will click with the right people. And speaking of clicking, she’s writing the entire indoctrination sequence for ClickFunnels. Yara knows stories inside and out, so today we’re talking with her about what goes into a good story, how entrepreneurs can leverage story, and what “storyselling” really means. And of course she gives Dean plenty of shit.
What is Storyselling?
Like so many of us, Yara gets offer after offer emailed to her by marketers, and as she says, so much of those offers just say “Buy my shit, buy my shit, buy my shit.” Which is not the most effective pitch. So she came up with this idea of storyselling, which wraps a story from the seller’s life around the product being sold. The audience then gets to know, like and trust the entrepreneur, and then the next obvious step is that the audience reaches out to that entrepreneur to help them with their problem. This is a foolproof method. Even if you’re as unlikable as Dean, if you have a cute puppy, you can just tell stories about the puppy. We cover all the bases here at Just the Tips.
You don’t have a list, you have people
Yara brings up a really important point on this week’s Just the Tips: You can’t treat your “list” as though it’s made up of numbers and not people. You may be tracking numbers and data, but that’s just an expression of people’s behaviors. People get into internet marketing as though you can throw out all the rules of normal human behavior, like you can just sell and market to people and they’ll opt in without you ever having to genuinely engage with them. But that’s only going to take you so far. As Dean says so many people behave as though they need to beat their list over the head with their message and get as much money out of them as possible, rather than trying to build a long-term relationship.
How storytelling translates to selling
Everyone is worried about their indoctrination sequence, but as Yara says, if you know the story you want to tell, and you tell it like your audience is comprised of people you want to hear it, then everything falls into place. You can tell that story for your indoctrination sequence, you can tell it in videos, you can tell it in emails, blog posts. Once you get that down, then you have loads of content you can use to connect with your audience. And Yara is full of amazing tips on how that all comes together, but you’ll have to listen to Just the Tips to get them.
Familiarity mixed with curiosity
Yara makes the great point in this episode of Just the Tips: The salutation that happens at the beginning of every email “Hi [YOUR FIRST NAME] is the fakest way to sound authentic, and it’s the first thing she edits out of any copy she edits. She drops the salutation and gets right into what she wants to talk about, the same way you would do if you were talking with a friend. The second thing she does is instill curiosity. Present a problem or a question to the audience that will make them want to click through. And from there, you have to make each sentence heighten the drama on the last sentence. This is a really great, meat-and-potatoes episode of Just the Tips that you have to hear.
Outline of This Episode
- [3:30] What does “storyselling” mean
- [6:01] You don’t own the list
- [9:30] Why nurturing your list is so important
- [15:20] How to repurpose your story
- [17:36] How to talk with your audience like their people
- [24:10] How to educate without condescending
- [25:53] How to find the right story
- [33:15] The biggest mistake we make in running our businesses
Music for “Just The Tips” is titled, “Happy Happy Game Show” by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
