Your Customers Are Trying To Survive. Is Your Marketing Helping Them?

So let’s say that you (or your business) sell high-tech, futuristic, self-lacing high-top shoes (probably something similar to what people would wear in 2015.), and you’re certain they are going to be a hit new fashion trend. And you sell these shoes through your website, and on the sales page for the shoes, you’ve got a few nice pictures of the shoes against a white background, and the name of the shoes listed next to the pictures. And then under the title you’ve got some bullet points of all the features and information about these amazing shoes, down to the materials used to make the shoes.

So you’ve got all of this setup, ready to welcome a bajillion customers intent on buying these super cool shoes. Now let’s fast forward a couple of months down the road. As you’re staring somberly at the notice of your overdue electricity bill while your upcoming rent payment is living rent-free (ironically) in the back of your mind, you are wondering: what went wrong? Why aren’t my awesome self-lacing shoes selling? I’m supposed to be rich right now!

You can clearly see vivid images in your head of teens hanging out at the mall, all of them admiring each other’s futuristic, self-lacing shoes. Of middle-aged men wearing these shoes, hoping they can hold on to their youth despite their fading hairline. Of huge family reunions where everyone from great-grandma down to 3-month-old Makynsleigh are wearing your shoes. The problem is, that these images are only in your head. You didn’t share these images with any of your customers. You left these amazing shoes in the hands of a few bullet points of information about the shoes.

It’s easy to focus on the features of our products and on feeding them to our customers hoping they buy. Especially when the product is something as cool as the Nike MAG (that’s what the self-lacing shoes from Back to the Future are called). The problem with dumping lists of features on our customers is that they don’t help our customers survive. Human brains are wired for survival, and when we throw a bunch of information at our customers, their brains ignore it because processing that information takes too much effort, and too much effort = too many precious calories burned. Now even though we spend most of our time on the couch, our brains still think a lion could appear at any moment, trying to eat us. If we burn all our calories processing a list of product features, we won’t have any calories left over to run from the lion, or to search for food after we’ve been chased by the lion into the wilderness.

So then how do we present this information in a way that will be easier for our customers’ brains to process so they can still have the energy to run from lions? Storytelling. That’s it. Just tell a story. Remember back to when you were selling your self-lacing shoes from the future and in your mind, you could visualize all these different people wearing and enjoying your shoes? That’s storytelling. You just need to take that image from your mind and put it into a tangible piece of content.

Stories require less effort to process because stories organize information into friendly, and easily processable packages for our brains. Plus, stories are much more enjoyable than bullet points. So take a look at the marketing material for the products you sell. Are you telling a story that your customer can see themselves in? Or are you just presenting a bunch of information to them in bullet points or cutesy little captions? The next time you go to create a piece of content, put together a new webpage, or when telling someone about your products, think about where they (the customer) want to go and how your product can get them there, and then tell them a story showing them the journey they can take because of your product.

At Greatness Studios, we create video content that is focused on storytelling so that we can get results for our clients, and help them grow their brands. If you are serious about growing your brand with video, click the button below to book a short discovery call with us.