Storytelling/Copywriting Tips For Writing Engaging Social Media Content

(upbeat music) How is it going everybody? Welcome back to Social Media Marketing School. For those of you that are new here, I am your host, Ethan Bridge. And before we dive into today's episode, I just want to make sure that you've hit that follow button or that subscribe button, depending on what platform you are listening on and if you are listening on Apple Podcast and you enjoy what you hear today, I would really appreciate it. Head over to the show page, scroll to the bottom and leave the podcast a five star rating and review. But now we've got that out the way. I just want to start off by saying thank you all for tuning in and let's dive straight in to today's episode. (upbeat music) Now, if you want to become a good content creator, especially somebody that writes written content or scripts video content, to be honest, this applies to all content when you think about it in the grand scheme of things. You need to know how to be a good storyteller. Storytelling is something that people will often only associate with physical books. But in reality, when you think about it, even your social media content has elements of storytelling about it. It's the way you present the points you talk about. And if you don't present the points you talk about in a way that has effective storytelling, if you don't do that properly, then people aren't going to want to consume your content or people won't actually be engaged by your content and therefore won't enjoy consuming it. So today, I wanted to just talk through a few of the principles of good storytelling. So without any further ado, let's dive into principle number one, that being clarity of purpose. What is the point in the piece of content you are creating? What is the value it provides? What emotions do you want it to strike into the people that are consuming it? Why are people consuming it? What are they going to feel about it? What are they going to learn from it? What are they going to take away from it? Because if you don't have a clarity of purpose about the piece of content you create, it's going to effectively be pointless. This means no point in creating that piece of content because it's not got an end goal. It hasn't got an end product about it. So if you don't know the use of this piece of content you are creating, don't create it. You need to know what this piece of content is for and what it's going to do for the people consuming it. And if it's not going to do anything for the people consuming it, what is the point in it? And to tell a good story, something obviously needs to have a purpose. It needs to have a meaning. Because if you don't have a meaning, where's the story going to come from? How are you going to structure this story? How are you going to build emotion on it? Because you're never going to be able to get to the end point where somebody can take something away from it. And this is often something that people forget. It seems incredibly, incredibly simple and to understand, but it doesn't always work. The best storytellers always define a clear purpose before even writing the story. What's it going to achieve? What does success look like within the story? And commit to answering these questions yourself before you even start writing it. Because when you know that you'll then be able to structure an incredibly, incredibly engaging story. So principle number two, you need to define the audience. Every great story has a target audience and every great storyteller knows exactly who that audience is. So ask yourself, who is the audience? What problems do they have? And what do they subconsciously or consciously want to learn from the piece of content that they're going to consume from you, and be honest with yourself. It doesn't have to apply to everyone. You can get really specific with the audience you want to target with your piece of social media content, especially if you're trying to convert someone to buying a product, because you want the exact person. You want the warmest lead because that warmest lead is most likely to buy your product or service. So be intentional about it. Be cutthroat. I want this audience member and therefore I need to write my story in this way, because that is most likely to attract the audience member I desire. So know who the audience member is. Define your audience before you start writing. Now, moving on to the next one. And this is one I talk about quite often and I've spoken about it in other elements of content creation. And that is establishing structure within the story. And there's actually a really good quote from Steven Spielberg. And it's that people have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don't have a middle or an end anymore. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning. Stories need structure because a clear narrative works well. You need a star and that star needs to have a roadmap that leads to an end. And this is why I often talk about the Ada formula when structuring your social media content. And for those of you that don't know about it, Ada, AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, action. And now this is one of the most basic structures you can use, but it works. Attention is essentially your title, your headline slide. It grabs the attention of your audience. Interest, you're building up the interest. You're building up the emotion within the person that's consuming the piece of content. What do they need to know? Why do they need to know it? What are the consequences of not knowing what you're about to teach them? D, desire. You're providing them with the thing, with the thing they desire, the actual value of the post, because if you didn't provide them with the desire, the value, then the point of the post is pointless because there is no value within it. And then finally, action, because you have all of those steps before, you provided them with value, you've led them up, you've built up that emotion inside of them. You can call them to action because they're far more likely to do something now you've done something for them. So establish structure within your story. If it's all over the place, as is the person going to be that's reading it, they're not gonna understand what's going on, where they are, what they're learning about. So it's never gonna work and it's never gonna grab attention. So you need to establish structure. It needs to have a flow about it. It needs to have a start that leads to an actual end. And you know what I mean. I don't need to overcomplicate that. Now finally, and I spoke about it, ever so slightly right there before in the ADA formula, but you need to have emotion in the story you are telling. This is what makes social media content engaging. And that's why interest is part of that ADA formula. Emotion is what makes somebody stick with you. It makes people want to read on. Think about your favorite stories. How do they make you feel? It doesn't even necessarily have to be a book or a social media piece of content. It could be a film. Your favorite films will have levels of emotion to them. They make you feel some kind of way. And because they've made you feel that way or they've really hooked you in, you've wanted to watch the entire movie. And you've often probably found the movies that you don't like don't grab your attention. They don't make you any more emotional. And that's why you didn't enjoy them. So subconsciously, you may not have thought about this before, but there's a lot to learn from the films, the books, and the social media content. You actually like yourself. Understand why they made you feel the way they made you feel. Why did you learn from them? Why did you want to read on? Why did you want to watch that entire movie? Because when you can understand that, you then understand the emotion within them and then how you can implement that into the content you actually create. Because here's an example. You may say to someone with your headline, "You need to learn this." And then go straight into the providing of the value. Where's the emotion in that? Why do they need to learn that? Why is that value that you've just provided them with actually useful? Build in some emotion. Why do they need to learn about it? What are the consequences of them not learning about it? Because when they are given a negative, then they go, "Oh, I don't learn about this, "then this might happen or I might miss out on this." Then they know that they then want to consume the value because they don't want those negative things happening to them. But that slight psychology change happened from the fact that you just built up the emotion. You didn't go straight into the providing of the value, but it's made your social media posts as a whole far, far more engaging and your story so much more interesting. So those are the four things I want you to consider. When you're writing your social media content, they are the principles of good storytelling. There are far more, so I could make this into a little series to be honest, but to quickly recap, clarity of purpose, define your audience, weave in the emotion and establish some structure. If you don't have those at any of your content so far, please make sure that you start implementing those in the future. Now, before you head off from this podcast, I just wanted to say that I am looking for the most motivated members of the social media marketing school community. And as a thank you for listening to the podcast, I want to offer you with the opportunity to book a free one hour strategy session with one of the social media business academy team members so that we can actually uncover some true pain points and work out what is actually holding you back from building this business that you truly, truly know that you are capable of building and see if we can help you fix those things. So if you're a coach consultant or a service provider who is looking to uncover their true value, build a high ticket offer. That means selling something to your audience for more than $2,000 and attract ready to pay clients by leveraging Instagram and other organic social media marketing methods. Book that call now. I must say, these slots will fill up quickly. So if you want that opportunity, if you want to learn how to do those things, how to craft that high ticket offer in less than a day, how to land your first clients organically without even spending a penny and create high quality content that attracts, nurtures and actually converts your viewers into clients, this call is something you need to book. So head to the top link in the description, book that call in with one of the SMBA team members and let's see what we can do to help.