- HoneyHat

Conversion storytelling in practice

Conversion storytellers are able to create conversion stories that flow through every touchpoint. They place targeted ads on landing pages that are consistent with the message. Each landing page tells the story of an ad and enhances its conversion potential.

Conversion storytelling is an amalgamation of compelling, emotional stories and highly personal experiences that create strong relationships between potential customers and brands. This includes:

Voice-of-Customer Research
Relevant emotional storytelling
Segmentation psychographically and message pairing
Understanding the motivations and goals of customers

Each piece of the funnel is a part your overall narrative. It’s crucial to plan your campaign messaging across your ads as well as landing pages.

These steps are necessary to create a conversion story in your ads campaigns:

Define your goals, and then explore narrative ideas
Identify your target audience and create personas for them
Create relevant narratives for each individual
Use narrative flows across landing pages and ads
Keep improving by analyzing results and trying new things.

Let’s take a look at the steps involved in creating a conversion story.

1. Define your goals, and then explore narrative ideas

Aligning your persuasive narratives at this stage is the first step. These questions will help you to ground yourself and set your goals at this stage.

What product or service are you advertising?
Which audience are you speaking to?
Why are they caring? What are they trying achieve?
What makes your product or service better than others?
How can this solution make the audience feel happy? What is at stake if they fail?

These questions will allow you to keep your story focused on what is important to your audience. A conversion story that is effective must be focused on a particular goal and segment of your audience.

Your ads should be able to present the right product at the right time to the right people. This will create an emotional response and the beginning of a story that the viewer will want more.

The advertiser made Maya click by tailoring their message to a target audience. This kind of advertising targeting requires an in-depth understanding of your customers and prospects.

Maya is a good example of a brand that appeals to her personal interests. It is equally important to her what happens after clicking the ad.

2. Identify your target audience and create personas for them

Knowing your audience is key to predicting which stories will be the most successful. You must first identify the most valuable segments in your audience. Then, create a persona to each one.

Personas are a combination of qualities taken from real customers. When it comes to conversion strategies, your personas will be the stars.

It takes careful customer research to develop audience personas. You will need to take into account a variety of data in order to do this.

Demographics (e.g. age, gender, income).
Psychographics (e.g. values, attitudes and interests)
Firmographics (e.g. company, industry and title)
Geographics (e.g. city, state or country)
Behavioral (e.g. page views, downloads and signups).
Transactional (e.g. purchase history)

Maya is an individuala. She represents a group that is based on established data. We know Maya’s occupation, income level, age and leisure activities. We know that she searches online for outdoor weekend spots and local hiking spots. We know she uses social media during work hours to search for local hiking spots and outdoor weekend destinations. This information allows us to locate Mayas around the globe and provide them with the ads they desire.

We can understand Maya’s interests and create a story that suits her needs. Our product can be presented as a solution for many of her problems.

Psychographic segmentation of the brain and the human mind

Psychographic segmentation is a key component of conversion storytelling. People see themselves as the main character in their lives. They won’t respond well to messages that don’t reflect their values or attitudes.

Marketers who use psychographic data to personalize ad campaigns see positive results. Personalization results in stronger customer relationships, higher purchase intent, and increased brand loyalty.

These have resulted in:

Sales increase 20%
Marketing-spend efficiency of 30% or more
ROI of 40% and higher

Psychographic segmentation is essential. Psychographic segmentation is a powerful tool that allows you to communicate with your audience in a way they see themselves.

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman argues that the human brain has two modes of thinking. One is fast and one is slow. It is a split between the rational and instinctual brains. Our brains can enter autopilot or fast mode very quickly. This allows us to rely on our intuition and instinct to navigate our environment.

The slow brain, on the other hand, requires a lot of cognitive energy to function. This is a good idea. It’s much easier to focus on the present than to zone out. Marketers can use this speed to increase sales and converts.

How does it look in practice? Let’s talk to Maya. Maya switches from slow brain to faster brain when she leaves her spreadsheets and goes on a Facebook break. She is responding to input by instinct in this mode. The ad for hiking boots speaks to her subconscious and triggers an instinctive response. Storytelling can be used to guide passive readers towards new ideas.

If you use authentic stories and match your message with the customer’s thinking, you can address their goals and needs. You will gain trust over time and increase the lifetime value of your brand and product. To be successful, your conversion story must have a compelling emotional narrative and a compelling value proposition.

3. Create relevant narratives for each individual

After you have identified your core audience personas, and learned what motivates them to take action out of that audience for conversions, it is time to begin crafting your narratives.

The classic storytelling structure may be familiar to you. Let’s examine.

A conventional story has the protagonist starting their journey and experiencing tension and challenges through rising action. Then, they reach a climax that leads to a resolution that leaves them in better shape than they started.

Conversion storytelling structure

These milestones are also in line with conversion storytelling. The model may look more like this:

In Maya’s story

Maya starts her journey by clicking on a catchy ad offering to solve a problem, or help her achieve a goal.

Clicking indicates her intent to achieve the desired outcome.
Maya is directed to a landing page which answers her questions as well as validates the claims of the ad.
Maya is happy to make the purchase after she has made the decision.

How can we make this structure work in advertising campaigns? Let’s start with the basics.

Tension. To what end? What are their problems?
Solution. What does your product/service do to give people what they want?
Solution. How should they feel now that you have solved their tension?

These questions are likely familiar to you, so let’s do an exercise. Write a one- or two-sentence story about the product or service you offer and how it benefits a specific persona. Here’s an example.

Persona: Active backpacker millennials
Looking for comfortable, durable and wearable boots?
Emotion: Challenge, adventure, confidence

The first step in creating your story is to create it. Your landing page must tell a story to convert customers.

4. Use narrative flows across your ads, landing pages, and other media

We have discussed how to look at your advertising strategy through a storytelling lens. All the elements of a story are there: audience, character, conflict.

Now, you will need to combine it all.

Your campaign’s landing page is the heart of your campaign’s story. Let’s take a look at the graph again. The landing page is where most of the story happens, between the beginning (advertising) and the climax (conversion). Your landing page cannot tell the whole story. Your characters will be less likely to convert if your landing page isn’t personalized for each persona.

It is not impossible to convert on cluttered landing pages. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist, says that people are susceptible to the paradoxof choice. Too many choices can stress a person. This friction can lead to analysis paralysis and confusion in decision-making. Your narrative has a natural flow that fits with how we process information. Your story bridges the gap between the initial interest you created and the conversion on the page.

This narrative flow is a guideline for how the landing page will tell the story. These questions can be answered using data, storytelling principles and creative insights.

Who are we speaking to?
What is the matter?
What’s their problem?
How do we solve it?
What do they feel when we have solved the problem?

We’ll now examine how it works in practice.

Above the fold

Let’s begin with the story that you wrote in the previous section. We created a story to identify the tension, solution, then resolution. This story may look similar to your product tags or ad copy.

Rewrite the story to make it as concise as possible. This copy can be edited to become the hero text for your page. The purpose of this copy is to quickly reinforce your ad’s emotional message.

Your message should match the message in the ad that the visitor clicked. This example shows you could have used an ad that talked about healthy, quick food delivery.

Get involved

Your campaign should be able to help your audience convert from the moment they click your ad. You should place your call-to-action button prominently on your landing page.

Your story should include your call-to-action text. Your CTA text should evoke an emotion.

The CTA to “order food now” on the landing page should be easily found and should create a sense of urgency.

Narrative flow

Your landing page should be clear and simple to navigate. Your potential customer will expect consistency in the tone, visuals, and copy when they land on your landing page. Keep your eyes on the reason they clicked in the first instance.

If they scroll down, it’s a sign they want more information.

The squint test reveals that the headline is what visitors should read.

This is your chance to grab their attention and create a narrative flow. It’s a more fleshed-out version than the short story that you wrote earlier. These questions will be answered as you scroll down the page.

Why?

Describe the tension. Explain why the person has a need. This is important. What evidence or data supports this challenge? What emotions is the persona triggered by the tension?

How?

The solution is revealed. What’s unique about it? What is the secret to its success? What can it do for them? What are the emotions it will inspire?

Who?

Indicate trust. What other people use this product? What are their results? What emotions were they feeling?

This information hierarchy is the cascade. This order allows you to preempt any questions and address objections naturally and logically. They will have all the information that they need to convert by the time they reach the end.

After you have refined your copy, you can collaborate with UX designers and visual designers to design the pages in a way that supports what you have written.

Our ebook on landing pages that convert well is a deep dive into the world.

Analyze the results and experiment to improve.

Ad platforms such as Facebook and Google dominate the pre-click phase of the ad channel. Advertising has been transformed by the ability to cut and dice data into user demographics. The results are amazing when you combine data with machine learning innovations and experience design.

Advertisers know that personalization leads to better results. However, scaling it can be costly, even for experts marketers. It is expensive and time-consuming to create and maintain custom landing pages. Not every company has the budget or headcount to hire a web developer team. There are additional requirements such as customer data insights and conversion UX designing. Many advertisers have had to accept poor results and low returns for their advertising spends.

Companies have lost as much as 96% on their direct response budgets over the past decade, which amounts to $870 billion. This is a clear indication that digital advertisers must move beyond the “get-more clicks” mentality.

Marketers who are looking for the future of the industry’s economy can see the signs. You must examine your data to identify strategies that break the mold of the past decade if you want to succeed.

There are many opportunities in the post-click stage. This is where smart marketers are increasing their efforts. The leaders of a conversion-focused advertising era are pushing for higher ad-to page relevancy, conversion focused storytelling, and granular audience segmentation. This combination delivers both measurable ROAS (return on investment) and dramatic increases in conversion rates (CVRs).

Conversion storytelling is a major departure from digital advertising’s current state. Marketers can no longer rely on design or testing methods. They must tell stories that resonate with their target audience. It is essential that advertisers keep conversion storytelling principles at the forefront of their digital strategy.

Here are some examples of landing page layouts that you can experiment with. You’ll discover which elements are most popular by continuing to iterate.

Instapage uses conversion storytelling for results

Instapage can help you scale your landing page experiences.

Instapage provides a proven, strategic framework for conversion storytelling. It can help increase ROAS in any industry. Easy-to-use software creates landing pages that are relevant to each audience. This allows you to avoid wasting advertising spend.

Our strategies let you tell stories to each segment of your customer rather than focusing on one page that is all-encompassing.

Our approach is based on demographic, psychographic, and geographic data. To tell brand stories, we use data such as age, gender, location, interests, climate, and general attitudes.

Our industry experts stay on top of changes and keep pace with them to create stories that drive conversions. Instead of just chasing clicks, our conversion journeys are designed to drive growth for brands.

Learn how the #1 landing-page platform for marketers can help increase conversions and decrease your cost per click. Get an Instapage demo today.

Author: Hunter Sunrise

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