Hi everyone. I’m Laura . And today I’m going to talk to you about getting people hooked with a story. I’m going to give you some practical tips and give you my four step framework for writing stories faster and easier than ever before. At this point, I think we all know that stories are the best way to captivate and convert our audience.
We hear it all the time to tell our story that stories sell and facts. Tell. But it can feel really time-consuming and sometimes even difficult if you don’t have a framework or if you aren’t good at writing or telling great stories. So today I want to make it super easy for you to know exactly what you have to do to tell a really good story.
And I want to give you a tool that I think makes it so much faster and so much easier because it’s really simple. Four step framework. Now I’m going to do something a little bit different that I haven’t tried before. And I’m going to actually show you my content plan that I do for this live, so that you can follow along with me, come up below after you watch this, or as you’re watching this.
And let me know if you like seeing this. I know a lot of folks are visual learners and just listening to a talking head is not that engaging. So I think. Why not show you how I create my content plan while I’m doing this. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen here of what’s up here for me. Hopefully you guys can see this.
Let me know. This is my content planning tool. I use this notion. They’re not at all, paying me to tell you. But I really love this because I can, I keep everything really organized. I know exactly where everything’s going. And I have my aim, my notes right here. I can create this template.
This is the content plan that I use for everything. If. I think this looks cool and would like this content planning template, just let me know in the comments and I’m happy to share it. Let’s go ahead and get started. We talked about how we’re going to get people hooked with stories. So number one here is stories are important because they create emotion and people buy on emotion.
So I think it’s easy to think. I need to create stories because everybody tells me I need to create stories. So we just started. Creating stories, we just start telling stories and we’re not really thinking of the emotional component of it. We’re just saying, first I was broken. I didn’t have a lot of money.
Then I started my business and I made money and now I get to travel the world and. Financial freedom. So there’s, we just rushed through the events, the external events of the story. And we forget that the very thing that makes stories so powerful is that it creates emotion.
I’m going to say that again. The very thing that makes storytelling so powerful is that it creates emotion when we. Watch a movie or listen to a story or a play or read a book. We are not merely spectating in that experience. There’s a reason why, in every movie, if you look around the room, if it’s a romantic comedy and when the guy kisses the girl, whether when the guy and the girl finally kiss or the girls finally kiss or whoever.
Everybody around the room is smiling. We feel that happiness for them. We also, you may have experienced, sometimes I feel anxious for a character in a film that I’m watching or in a book that I’m reading or worried about. I feel, we feel those emotions, movies regularly make me cry because I’m feeling that emotion and the same thing is true when we tell stories in our content.
So one of the things, if you want to tell great stories, and if you want to have more buyers, you want to focus on making sure your stories have emotion. Okay. It’s really important. All right. The next thing that I want to talk to you guys about today is the difference between telling the story versus telling us a summary.
This is a place where a lot of people get tripped up. Remember how before I said, oh, I did this. And then I did this. And then I did this. And that was this, people are leaving out the emotion. People are also telling summaries, right? That’s that every day I. It was miserable and my job and I just never wanted to go to work.
And then finally I started my own business. That’s a summary of what happened. The way that you can tell a story is by telling a specific story. Tiny moment. That’s what I call them tiny moments. It’s just a specific moment in time. Instead of saying every day I went to work and I was miserable. You say, I remember the one day that I got in the elevator and I drugged my desk.
And I melted into my seat at my desk and I started bawling my eyes out in my cubicle at work. That’s the moment that I realized something had to change in my life. If you’re telling me that’s not a real story, by the way, if you’re telling a specific moment in time at what I call it a tiny moment, that’s a story.
So think about the difference between being, like you’re looking at a book on Amazon. And the summary is as a general overarching, this is what happens or what it’s about. Whereas this actual story, the actual book tells it moment by moment. And so for your content, you want to get really practiced at telling specific stories moment by moment.
Okay. All right. Number three. This is really helpful to think about if you’re wanting to create better stories faster. From the Dawn of time, stories have always followed the same exact formula. There have been many people. Who’ve studied this many people. Who’ve written books about it, but you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
You don’t have to figure out a new way to tell a story. Every single time it’s actually better to use the formula that we know is tried and true and always works. There’s a reason why. These stories captivate us. And there’s a reason why we’ve been hearing stories since the Dawn of time.
They almost always follow the same structure. They almost all always follow the same pattern. So when we tap into that pattern and we tap into that structure, we start to tell really good stories. It also makes it so much easier and more efficient for us to write stories because we know exactly what comes next.
That brings me to. My really simplified formula for telling stories isn’t, you’ll see people telling storytelling frameworks, myself included, that are much bigger and much longer. This one works really effectively in social media content or even email content, because it’s very concise.
It’s very easy to follow. You can write them or tell them very quickly. So let’s get to it. The four step framework or the four step formula for grabbing attention through story. It goes like this: number one S number one is struggling right here. You can see S number one is struggle. So we want to put them right into the middle of the emotion, right in the middle of the action.
Remember. People buy on emotion. It’s conflict that creates emotion in our stories. So we want to create that emotion right from the get go, right from the beginning. We want to drop them in the middle of the action. It’s also going to captivate them and make them interested in what we have to do. So we’re going to start with the struggle.
We’re going to start with the problem. We’re going to start with the pain point. Even if you’re telling your story, you can be telling the same problems or struggles or pain points that your ideal client is experiencing now. Or you can tell the same pain points or struggles or problems that they can relate to.
So I have some go-to posts that I like to repurpose and recycle because I know that. Perform really well for me. And one of them starts out with the struggle of crying myself to sleep at night because of my student loan debt. So even if my ideal client doesn’t have student loans, which they may or may not, they probably know the feeling of the financial burden, the pressure and the burden of having something like that.
I also. I also have one, that’s a go-to where I talk about being super self-critical. So that’s another one that even if they can’t relate to my specific tiny moment, they can relate to the human experience. And so that’s what I really want you guys to do is think about what are the pain points or problems or struggles that they can relate to that human experience.
All right. The second one that I want you guys to do is the solution. So if your business is problem solving, I want you to be in the business of creating a solution. I want your content to create a solution for somebody. I want your story to create a solution for somebody. We want them to experience going from being in the emotional state of having the problem to being in the emotional state.
There is a solution. And then wanting to take action for that. So you want to tell them that you solve the problem, right? If you were, if you were a business coach and you’re helping them. Create and build a bigger business. You want to tell them that you got out of that, struggling with the pressure of all the student loan debt and you built a thriving, successful business.
If you are a software company that helps people do things more helps business owners. Run their business more efficiently. You want to tell the story of how you created your software to run your company more efficiently, right? So you want to tell them that you made it to the solution. And this is all in one post.
One story. The next step is soul. And what I mean by soul is I want you to literally impair your soul, right? So Simon Sinek tells us people don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. And this is that. This is where you very genuinely, very authentically you share why this is so important to you. Why is this your mission?
Why? You help them solve this particular problem. So for me, when I talk about helping people spread their message, it comes from a genuine place. It comes from, I don’t want to be at the grocery store and hearing people talk about problems that I know businesses can solve because they just don’t know.
People just don’t know that there are solutions to their problems out there. And I want to help businesses get their messages out, that we can solve your problem, that we can, that, that you don’t have to be stuck in a fixed mindset of. It’s always going to be this way, that there is a solution. We’ve just got to get those messages out to the world.
And I’m very driven by that. I’m very driven by it. There was a former me who just did it knowing that there was a solution to my problem. And that version of me, there are people still like that. There are people who just don’t know that there are solutions out there, that we can start looking for possibilities, that we can start looking for opportunities, that we can start looking for solutions.
And that there are businesses out there that provide those. That’s very much my, I should have solely highlighted here. That’s very much my reason. And so at this step, I want you to talk about your why. And then the last one is a cell, right? I want you to make calls to action. If you want to make more sales, start making more calls to action.
The easiest and best way to make more sales. And once you sell, clearly, I want you to sell directly. I want you to sell confidently. Now I know not every single social media post that you make is going to have a call to action. Every single social media post you make might tell a story. So you might be able to do it.
The framework always, but you want to always make a call to action, to purchase with you. So sometimes selling can be selling them on your belief system, your ideology, what they need to believe in order to work with you. If you are a software company that helps business owners build systems, they need to believe.
That they need to build systems, right? If you run a content repurposing agency, then I need people to believe that they should be repurposing their content really efficiently and really effectively and creating really effective content. I need them to believe those things. So sometimes what you’re selling them on is what you need them to believe.
And sometimes what you’re selling is a really clear and direct call to action, like here, visit Remedia wave.com to start creating your content really efficiently. So it’s a very clear and direct call to action versus. Selling them on your belief system. So there you have it. I’m going to run through the steps of the simplified four step framework.
One more time for you right here. Actually, I’m going to come on off here. So that I can talk to you guys about it. The four step framework for writing simple and effective stories to grab attention on social media is this number one, struggle. Tell them the problem. Tell them the pain of dropping them right into the emotion, conflict of the story.
Step number two, the solution. Tell them how the problem got solved, business is problem solving. So especially when we’re telling our stories and marketing, we need to tell them that we came to the solution. Because number three soul people don’t buy what you do. They buy, why do you do it? Simon Sinek’s famous.
Ted talk is great about that. And so you need to bare your soul. You need to genuinely and authentically tell them why it’s so important to you to solve this problem. And number four is to sell you, get to call them to action. To either take a purchasing action or transact transitional call to action with you, or to believe what you need them to believe in order to make them a buyer.
No. The fifth point on here that we didn’t get to was that having a simplified framework can make your store writing stories for your content so much easier. So having this 4s framework can make your content so much more efficient and so much more effective, but also. Then you want to repurpose it, right?
You want to take this piece of content that I have here and there can be so many other additional posts, blogs, all different kinds of things. You can either do that yourself. We can help you do that. So as you’re becoming efficient or effective at telling stories and creating content, you want to start thinking about using that content in a way that’s really going to help.
Reach more people and have a bigger impact, right? Grow your online presence. Multiply your online presence and have a bigger impact. You can use this for S storytelling posts to grab attention and do that today. Thank you so much for joining me. Leave me a comment or, have a great day.
