The Best Storytelling is a 'Frictionless' Experience

The faster you introduce friction in your storytelling the faster you lose your potential customers.

If they aren’t clear on why they should care about the story you have to tell they aren’t going to stick around long enough to figure that out they’re just going to move on to your competitor.Therefore, the most important thing you can do as a company is to make sure your storytelling is frictionless, everywhere that it’s shared.

A frictionless story includes a few key elements.

?? 1 Big Content Idea: Don’t Make Your Potential Customers Do Work

The last thing you want your potential customers to do is work. Yet, you’d be amazed how many times I visit a company’s website and I have to do work to figure out who they are, what they do, how they do it, for whom they do it…. and most of all why in the hell I should care!

When you make your potential customers work to understand your story, there’s friction. And that friction leads to frustration. And we all know how we feel about frustration. We’ll do just about anything possible to avoid it!

When I visit a website I want to be led down a pathway. I want a company to meet me where I am, show me where I can be if I choose them as a provider or vendor, and tell me about the path that they’re going to lead me down along the way. This is a frictionless experience. I’m not having to leap over roadblocks or do ‘mental gymnastics’ to understand how a company can help to make my life better or solve my burning problem, it’s all fed to me on a silver platter.

There are a couple of simple things you can do to remove friction in your storytelling.

It all begins with using simple language and killing jargon.

?? 2 Actions to Take: Simplify All Language & Create a State of ‘Positive Flow’

There are two things you can do to ensure your storytelling is frictionless:

1. Simplify all of your language
2. Create a state of ‘positive flow’

Simplifying Language

Have you ever visited a website and it’s littered with walls of text - one paragraph following the next - and also full of ‘acronym soup’? When you do, it feels like you’re wading through mud. Reading each sentence is a brutal task. You’re having to encode what you’re being told rather than it being easily understood.

Naturally, in these situations, you’ll bounce away and move on because it’s work. Therefore one of your goals as a storyteller has to be to simplify your language. Even though it can be painstaking, take the time to read what you write aloud.

Here are a few things to do:

• Pare down long phrases into one or two words.
• Use simple words in place of jargon.
• Give examples that illustrate concepts.
• Use colorful language to ‘paint pictures.’

When you simplify language, you retain attention. When you have attention it’s much easier to create a ‘positive flow state.’

Create a State of ‘Positive Flow’

When you encounter a great piece of writing - or a good story - you know it. One sentence seems to effortlessly flow into the rest, keeping you gripped, and fully entranced. This feeling is a positive flow state.

This doesn’t happen easily, it takes a helluva lot of work to pull off, but with practice it absolutely gets easier. As you craft stories, think about what you want your reader to feel next, the emotion that you want to channel. Doing this helps you build a state of tension in the story - without creating friction - that preps your reader to act on the next steps that you’d like for them to take.

When you can effectively replicate this ‘flow state’ in all of the ways that you communicate with your audience of potential customers, everything changes. One of the best side effects of this consistency is a building sense of anticipation.

Because you’ve pulled your ideal customers a little bit closer with each story you tell, they’ll actively anticipate the next story with excitement because they feel something when they read what you have to say.

Eventually that anticipation leads to a tipping point where they take the action that you want them to!

How We Help Our Clients

Our company, Zanate Ventures, is a content studio based in Austin, Texas. Our goal is to help companies tell a better company story through fractional content strategy services including, but not limited to:

• Website content refreshes - to the customer’s transformation
• Content strategy - focused on repeatable systems and processes
• Marketing funnel development leveraging:
• Social media
• Blog content
• Email marketing & outreach
• Press mentions, appearances, and exposure

We offer several levels of engagement, but everything kicks off with a 30-Day Diagnostic period to identify the quickest wins and long-term plays that will help energize your company’s story.

Interested to learn more?

Book a Discovery Call