Laughter and My Story Marketing?

Listening to the Prairie Home Companion program today, I experienced a bit of home sickness. The program aired from the Minnesota State Fair. As Garrison Keillor spoke of fall, apples, harvest moons, and the fair, all the sights, sounds, and smells from my home state and that event rushed to my senses. These are all pleasant memories. You can take the girl out of Minnesota but you can’t take Minnesota out of the girl, I guess.

Garrison Keillor is a delightful story teller. He may even be remembered with the likes of Mark Twain, eventually. His stories have a way of creating empathy for his predicaments and the laughter that bubbles up when imagining his scenarios is totally spontaneous and impossible to suppress.

How does this relate to Online Marketing? We’ve all heard of “My Story Marketing” by now. This is a method used to evoke empathy, build excitement and gain sales as a result. I’ve sure read some long-winded sales letters in my day. None of them were happy stories, like Garrison Keillor’s witty tales, and most were so tedious and predictable that I didn’t even finish reading them, let alone feel compelled to press the buy button.

In fact, the recipe for “My Story Marketing” is to begin with a problem that you have faced in order to grab people’s attention. After doing this, you can explain what you’ve done to effect a change and how your life is now. Supposedly, this will inspire your visitors to buy your product or join your business. Having never tried it myself, there is no way to know how effective it really is but there are enough proponents of the tactic that it is worth evaluating.

In my former career as a Realtor®, I learned that there were two ways to write compelling advertisements. One was to use a headline that evoked fear.  The other type of headline permitted people to imagine or dream.

Statistically, most of my guests came to an open house because they saw the sign while they were in the neighborhood or were neighbors who were merely curious to see the inside of the house but, in my experiments with print advertising, I found that using the positive headline drew more people in, if they came as a result of seeing the ad. If “My Story Marketing” is effective, it would be interesting to see the split test results, assuming they tried a page with a positive and happy story too.

So let’s apply my real estate marketing experiment to Internet Marketing. When we have internet real estate, we use many different methods to bring our websites to the attention of surfers. In a way, some of our website traffic is similar to people driving by an open house sign and deciding to stop in along their way. How are they affected by their visit?

Generally, you have less than a minute to entice someone to stay at your site and have a look around so the look and feel of your site is your curb appeal. This includes color, font, image, and layout choices. If your page is too slow to load, uses garish colors, or has too many blinking ads, visitors will abandon it quickly. But that is aesthetics and one person’s “ugly” is another person’s “beautiful” so you’ll need to experiment with things to see what works best in your niche.  More importantly, look and feel is not what helps you to get income from your website.

For several reasons, the most important part of your page is your content. The area above the fold (i.e., seen without the need to scroll down) is critical real estate so you need to use it wisely. Do you want to frighten your visitors into reading on and possibly taking action or would you rather build a relationship with them established through interest, truth, value, and trust? From my viewpoint, the latter goes miles further than the former.

I’m advocating that Internet Marketers start creating “My Story Marketing” stories that are entertaining. We all need more joy in our lives, don’t we? Enlightenment or laughter must be equally compelling and writing about things like that certainly is much more fun for the author too. Current studies indicate that leveraging humor can lead to a potentially big payoff. Social scientists have long documented that people who are perceived as being witty, clever and funny are destined for popularity and greater success in their work and relationships.

If you actually have had a difficult problem and your business or product has resolved it, by all means write the traditional “My Story Marketing” story. I caution you to be honest in the results you claim, however. Credibility is very easy to lose and nearly impossible to recover.