By Jeffrey Hedquist
What is the goal of your radio commercial? What do you want your audience to do?
After you get their attention so they’ll listen and then include enough cues from their lifestyle so that they’ll stay with you, and provide enough seeds for their imagination so that they’ll co-create your story, then what?
At the end of this wonderful sharing experience, hopefully they’ve fallen in love with your product or service. At least you want them to call a number, visit your place of business, tell a friend, or go to your web site.
How can you help insure one of these activities takes place? Create a story about the listener taking the desired action (making the call, coming into the store, clicking on the site) and getting the result that will change his or her life.
The story is about the listener walking into that place of business, that restaurant, a story about the listener buying that book, participating in what the advertiser has to offer. Tasting it, seeing it, feeling it, touching it, making it part of their life.
If you tell the story in an imaginative and engaging way, then taking that action won’t be as foreign to the listener, because in their mind they’ve already done it. If you can get the listener to take the action in their imagination, then it’s a smaller leap for them to take the action in their lives.
Remember, the story that you tell is about your listener and the advertiser—a team participating together to enjoy life more. Rather than asking someone to do something, tell a story about them already doing it and the result that it will have in their life. Have them see it in their mind’s eye. Use the power of their imagination to help them make the decision.
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© 2001 Hedquist Productions, Inc.