Whether you’re looking to run your own ads or ads for someone else, finding incredibly engaging hooks and ideas for home run advertising campaigns is essential.
One of your most important jobs is bringing big ideas to the table whether that’s for your own business or your clients.
And one of the best ways you can do that is with something we call Story Spotting.
Most likely you don’t have to invent radically new ideas for your business or clients to advertise.
You or your clients already have fantastic content, success stories, and unique ideas.
It’s your job to find them and amplify them in your marketing.
In this article I break down the whole concept of Story Spotting and how you can use it in your business to get some amazingly fresh ideas for your ad campaigns.
Table of Contents
What Is Story Spotting?
Story Spotting is when you comb through the content that is available to you or your clients to find great stories and hooks for your ad campaigns.
The goal here is to learn how to spot the stories that have true potential.
This goes beyond just a few short stories for ad copy on a single campaign.
You want to have your marketing brain turned on and look for stories that could be great for ads, videos, content amplification, podcasts, social media posts, even headlines for landing pages and hooks for new webinars.
When you or someone on your team comes across a story, you want to spot it, bring it to the team, and work towards using it to promote the brand.
Where Do You Look?
Anywhere you or your client is publishing and realizing content is a great place to look.
- YouTube Channel
- Email Series
- Podcast Episodes
- Top Blog Posts from Google Analytics
- Community Posts
- Comments in ads and social posts
- Comments on YouTube channels
- Inside their funnels, webinars and sales presentations
Most business owners are super knowledgeable about their topic, but they don’t think or have eyes like marketers.
They aren’t searching out the next great hook or the next story they can use to show their results.
When you go through the content you are being those eyes.
What Should You Look For?
You want to be looking for great ideas to use in your marketing campaigns to get new prospects interested in what you or your clients have to offer.
Here’s some great types of stories you want to keep your eyes peeled for.
1) Impact Stories
This is a story that shows the impact of the product, program, or service in a customer’s life.
It’s taking someone that has achieved great results with the business and telling the outcome of how they got there.
The key in this story is not to focus on your product but on the thing that the customer was after.
What did they want to accomplish? What challenges did they want to overcome?
What was the conflict that motivated them to buy your product and how did it help them in their journey to get what they desired?
Keep in mind, the product is a part of that story we want to tell, but the story is not solely focused on that.
2) Origin Stories
The origin story helps explain the “why” behind the company and it builds trust.
For example, you or your client is probably an expert who has had to solve the problem you now solve for your customers.
And if you can help show how you overcame the obstacle and got the results, you can show why it’s valuable for someone else to follow you down the same path to get the same result.
3) Moments of Breakthrough
The example here is the story of the apple that falls on Newton’s head, inspiring his theory of gravity.
The creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or innovatively attacking a problem.
If you or one of your customers had a big ah-ha moment that leads to a breakthrough, you could tell that story in their marketing to help show others how to get what they desire.
4) Unique Ideas Not Heard Often (Contrary Ideas)
There’s a famous saying that says, “zig when others zag.”
Often certain ideas can blow up in the marketplace and people will be hearing about it everywhere.
If you have a contrarian approach that isn’t being talked about, make sure to talk about it!
There was a buzzword that went crazy many years ago when Digital Marketer made the “Tripwire” a common thing in marketing.
(Not that a tripwire was a new thing at all, Digital Marketer just coined the phrase and sold the idea like crazy).
Another famous marketer ran a hugely successful campaign called “The Great Tripwire Hoax”
When the market was going one way he was getting noticed for telling people to go a different direction.
5) Problems With Unique Solutions
Another great story to look for is a unique solution no one has heard about yet.
Many businesses have unique ways of solving problems. And if you as a marketer can find that and tell that story, it can really help get your message out there.
Here’s another really famous story that dates back to the 1920s.
Legendary copywriter Claude Hopkins was hired by Schlitz beer to help them crawl their way up from being the number 5 beer in America.
Claude started his research by looking for the right angle to take in his marketing.
As part of his own “Story Spotting” exercise he went and took a tour of their factory.
They showed him how they eliminated the impurities from the beer by cooling it in a special way. He looked at expensive filters that removed any pulp or debris from the beer.
As he toured the factory they told him how every pipe and pump was cleaned twice and every bottle was sterilized four times before the beer could touch it.
And he saw that they had a deep well, 4,000 feet underground to make sure the beer was made with the purest water they could at the brewery.
Claude asked why they didn’t tell their customers about all their effort to make sure they are using the purest water and the cleanest equipment.
The team at Schlitz told him, “But every beer company does this.”
“But others have never told this story,” Hopkins replied.
Within just a few months of launching this new campaign with this “story” Schlitz went from 5th place in sales to tied for 1st place in the market.
That’s the power of a unique story customers haven’t heard before.
In Summary
Stories have the tremendous power to engage, educate and inspire.
And the good news for us is that we don’t have to have a ton of creativity to make them up. We just need to know what to look for when one walks in front of us.
So keep an eye out, think like a marketer, and when you see something make sure you capture that idea. It could be the perfect one to bring to life.
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