Shoppers turn into buyers when they hear a good well thought out, truthful and compelling story.
Honestly, it is that simple. If your story is engaging and you present your brand, your product or your service in a favorable light, you’re almost always going to see shoppers turn into buyers. There are a few exceptions to this rule of thumb, so let’s run those down right fast –
[LISTEN: Crafting your story: compel shoppers to become buyers – PODCAST EPISODE]
First – if your story doesn’t ring true, you can pretty much forget it. In this day and age, Google, Yelp, etc make it way too easy for people – anyone – to find out whether or not you’ve had complaints, gotten bad reviews, or been accused of some sort of malice aforethought.
Second – if you have a shi**y product, your service isn’t any good, or your brand is off kilter in some way, then you can hang it up. The days of tossing up a few radio ads or a 60 second TV spot and watching the money roll in? Gone. The days of getting a few good search engine listings and riding on your backslapping ways of trading good links with your buddies? Not so much now.
[READ: Project planning vs project execution: reality check – BLOG ARTICLE]
Third – if no one ever hears your story, regardless of the veracity, no matter how compelling it may be, well, that’s like a tree falling in the forest. Shoppers turn into buyers when someone presents them with nice stories about trees falling in the forest, not when they are left to guess on their own whether or not a bear poops in the woods.
Um, ok. I think I get that. What’s some helpful advice?
Just like anything else in life, you need to make sure your story fits your audience. In the same way that you wouldn’t use a third year residents medical text to explain a blister to a ten year old, you need to adapt your basic story to fit your audience. And if you have many audiences, that means you need multiple stories that are geared towards your demographic.
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I’ll go out on a limb here and assume that your product works, or you are able to adequately perform some kind of service, and that your brand hasn’t been dragged through the mud and back with any kind of crazy allegations – true or not.
With that said, the most important thing you can do is find out what it is about your product or service that makes a portion of your demographic want to hear the story. Shoppers turn into buyers when they are reassured that the rest of their cohort is also engaged with your brand and therefore you become a more desirable brand.
I mean really, that Fyre Festival bulls**t should prove that if you create a compelling enough story, people will buy anything. Going back to point 1 above – make sure you’re telling the truth or you’ll be doing six years in jail like the guy that started that Fyre debacle.
It’s really hard to get noticed in the crowd right now!
People love romance, and the more difficult things are in their own lives, the more romantic they like for the stories they are told to be. I don’t mean that everything comes down to a girl and a boy and a wedding ring, or even an Irish pirate, the kidnapped daughter of a British lord, and an adventure in an 18th century barque. OK, maybe that last part is true, Irish pirates are a cure for most anything… Poldark, anyone?
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And it is very hard to get noticed in the crowd these days – it’s almost like the entire world has turned into one big app discovery scam akin to the ones in the ’00s that created so much new found wealth for tons of people selling access to AppStore traffic. This is the other place where you have to really define the target demographic and look at alternate ways to reach out and engage with them.
Mobile? Did you say mobile again?
Well, yes, I did. That’s my job, since our story is all about how using mobile makes shoppers turn into buyers so much more easily. As a matter of fact, I got an email from Starbucks the other day stating that all of their happy hour specials were moving off the email blast and solely onto the mobile app. Like seriously, Schultz runs for president and now they want to wreak havoc on the way things have always been done?
Never mind that you can effectively use location, proximity, or time (heck, you can use all three at once if you like) to trigger meaningful messages to your core demographic base or other interested parties who might have seen you in passing but not had time to check you out. You can continue to reach out to those people until you’ve either bugged them into buying something or caused them to delete you from their iPhone or Android wallet app. Either way, you are narrowing your prospect field into people who are actually interested in what you are saying and want to hear you say more.
Is there anything better than that???
Yes, I know that making actual sales is much better than working your butt off to get to the point that you make a few sales at a time. But everyone starts somewhere and with a bit of luck, some serious effort at making your prospective customers see you as a great opportunity with a brilliant, romantic story behind a fabulous product or service, you’ll be off in no time flat towards making your next million bucks!
Really, that’s how it goes.