5 Persuasive story formulas you can use

Learning how to tell a good story is one of the most persuasive skills you can have as a copywriter. Great copywriters have proven once and again that knowing how to tell a good story can make the difference between a complete money-losing dud and a multi-million dollar success. But how exactly do you come up with a story that is good for sales?

When it comes to stories that boost sales, substance matters more than style. In other words, what you say matters more than how you say it. So instead of focusing on telling the story elegantly, you should be taking the time to plan your story and strategically selecting the points it will drive home.

Let’s take a look at 5 different formulas you can use to craft your stories. By learning the concepts and core ideas about each one, you’ll see how you can use them to influence and motivate your readers to buy from you right away.

Introductory stories.
You can use this type of story to tell your prospects more about who you are, why you are here, how you’ve helped others in the past and why you may be the solution to their problems. Knowing more about you builds rapport and makes the prospect feel at ease with someone they find familiar (or at least not a complete stranger).

Attention-grabbers.
These stories are usually more dramatic and tell people why they should listen to you. They can also help illustrate how your products have “saved the day” for others in the past. Any story will work fine as long as it helps you grab the prospect’s attention and focus it on your sales presentation.

Fear-killers.
This type of story is one of my personal favorites. Using it lets you tell the tale of how someone (surprisingly similar to your prospect) had the exact same fears that your prospect is facing – and how they learned that after all, there was no reason to worry at all. You can also use this type of story to quickly overcome common objections.

Benefit-boosters.
This is probably the easiest type of story to write. All you need to do is tell and illustrate how your products or services helped a prospect reach her goals quickly and easily. Here are some of the most common goals you can use in a benefit-booster story: make money, save money, enhance ego or increase self-confidence, improve productivity, increase security, become healthier, have more fun, have more sex and last but not least, be smarter.

Closer stories.
The “closer” is a story that you can use to convey a summary of your product’s benefits, close the sale and get the order. I would only recommend using this type of story when you have achieved proficiency in story-telling… closing the sale with a story is not for the faint-hearted!

How to use these persuasive story formulas:
There is no real way of predicting which of these story formulas will work best for your particular product or industry. You should come up with at least 2 different stories for each formula, write them to the best of your ability and test them on separate prospects to measure their reactions. After testing your stories on a few prospects, you will start to recognize which of them have the most persuasive power. Take the ones that work best, polish them and weave them into your copywriting – the results will be clear as water.