Internet Marketing and Storytelling

Written by: Lance D. Jepsen

For thousands of years humans have been telling stories. From the drawings on cave walls, from the story in The Epic of Gilgamesh (2,000 BC), to different religious texts that circle the Earth. The story is so central to the human experience that one can not separate the story from what it means to be human.

When it comes to marketing, one of the huge benefits of telling a story is that people can remember stories better than any other form of marketing. Marketers call this "sticky": it sticks in peoples minds long after they read or hear it. If you subscribe to the Christian faith, then you know that Jesus used storytelling with his parables for he knew that these stories would be remembered long after he was gone.

Claude Hopkins, the father of marketing, in 1919, was hired by Schlitz beer to create an ad that would save the company. Schlitz beer was on the verge of bankruptcy as was ranked a pathetic fifteenth in terms of beer sales.

Hopkins made a trip to Wisconsin to visit the brewery. He knew that he needed to know more about how their beer was actually made. Claude Hopkins knew that it was nearly impossible to create a profitable ad without learning more about the product.

The people at the Wisconsin brewery showed Hopkins the entire brewing process. They showed him how deep they had drilled their wells to find the purest water. They showed him the glass enclosed rooms that kept any contaminates from leeching into the pure water, the kind of yeast they used and where they got it. They explained to Claude Hopkins where the bottles were cleaned, re-cleaned, and sanitized a dozen times.

"My God," Hopkins said, "Why don't you tell people in your advertising about all these steps you are taking to brew your beer?"

We can't do that, answered the Schlitz executives, "all companies brew their beer about the same way."

"Yes," Hopkins countered, "but the first one to tell the public about this process will gain a big advantage."

Hopkins then made an ad for Schlitz Brewery that explained the step-by-step process that goes into making a bottle of Schlitz beer. Six months later, Schlitz went from being ranked fifteenth in terms of sales, to become the #1 selling beer in the country.

Hopkins gave this wonderful example to the world of the power of the story. If Claude Hopkins was alive today, he would literally dominate Internet marketing.

This example shows you how marketing is opposite to what you would think works. The newbie marketer thinks that most people don't have the time to read a long sales letter and so it is best to use a short sales letter. Who really has the time to read all this?--is what most new marketers think.

Many marketing tests have been done on this subject and have proven that the belief that someone does not have the time to read a long sales letter is a false belief. Hopkins did marketing research on this very topic, he writes:

Mail order advertising tells a complete story if the purpose is to make an immediate sale. You see no limitations there on amount of copy. The motto there is, "The more you tell the more you sell." And it has never failed to prove out so in any test we know.

The great 21st century marketer Ben Hart has done research that shows his two page sales letters do better than his one page sales letters, and his four page sales letters do better than his two page sales letters. Ben Hart has even written 12 page sales letters!

I am reminded of a client I had who felt that the sales letter I created for him was just too long to post on his landing page. He did not include large sections of my sales letter and then uploaded a shorter version to his website.

After several months, I contacted him to learn how his sales were doing. He said that they were doing alright but that really he had hoped for more. I recommended that he put the longer sales copy that I wrote for him up. He did as I suggested and his sales increased by an additional 40% over the next few weeks. He is now a believer when it comes to using a longer sales letter to tell a story.