A friend of mine sent me an email in August of 2023 with the subject line: “I think you’re going to like this”.

So I clicked on it of course.

He forwarded me an email he got from a company he follows.

This company, who shall remain nameless due to what happens later on in the story, was holding a paid course about building relationships in business.

The email mentioned they would present proven ways to do this, and all you had to do was pay a low low price of $150 US dollars.

Everything sounded great, and right up my alley. I signed up without hesitation and so did my friend.

I eagerly waited for the week after when it was scheduled to happen and hopped on Zoom.

Honestly I can’t remember what was said in this two hour course.

All I remember is that they talked about nothing they promised in their email.

I believe they went through different ways of attracting attention and lowering the barrier of entry so you had more leads to work with (same reason why they held this course in the fist place).

Nothing about relationship building, about getting people to trust you, except maybe a “once you have their email you can do it!” approach.

It was, to say the least, disappointing…

I left that meeting early, and I never looked back. My friend filled me in the day after on what I missed, which wasn’t much.

That was my introduction to that company. I will probably never buy anything from them again.

They got my attention, but they didn’t manage to retain it.

They promised the world and delivered a pebble.

Not only did they not provide the value I was looking for (we’ll go through the importance of this in the next section), once the course ended they sent a follow up email asking to sign up for more courses.

Ha, right.

The courses they offered weren’t even related to the topic I signed up for!

I didn’t have enough of a relationship built with this company, it wasn’t smooth, it didn’t flow.

Clearly they followed the regular push marketing tactics of sell sell sell, just sugar-coated it a bit so it was easier to swallow.

They missed the mark on all three points that are required in a story to retain someone’s attention.

Quality, tension, and value.

Let’s dive in to each one.

Quality

A lot of people assume quality is perfection.

High quality often means there were bells and whistles and it wowed everyone with how cool it was.

That’s not really what quality means. Perfect doesn’t have a lot to do with quality.

Quality has a very specific definition. It comes from Edward Deming and the rest of the quality movement of the 40s and 50s, the people who gave us the Toyota we know today.

And what it means is it meets spec.

That’s it, meets spec.

So if I said what’s a better quality car, a Toyota Corolla or Rolls Royce. The answer would be Toyota, because a Toyota meets spec.

It more reliably does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

You promised something with your hook, now it’s time to deliver.

Retaining attention requires you to create a story that can consistently deliver the same result to everyone that goes through your marketing.

If people find you on social media, or through an ad, they need to be taken through the story and be delivered whatever got their attention.

Often what you deliver in person and what you deliver online are totally different. Most businesses also use different marketing channels like social media independently from the rest.

You say one thing on Facebook, your ads say something else, your website doesn’t say anything related to what you said in either except for the product you want to sell, and so on.

It’s a broken telephone situation. Your story isn’t being told reliably.

The easiest way to deal with this is funnel every channel into one central point where the story is told.

Could be a website, could be a video. Anywhere that fulfills the promise of the hook. That this journey is worth their time and attention.

Another way that’s a bit more complicated is to make everything a part of the story. That way prospects can click on any page or piece of marketing and still be enveloped in the story.

A choose your own adventure situation, where the is only one ending, but many ways to get there.

This is a great way to tell stories about your brand.

Regardless, you need to know where and how you’re story is showing up before you write it. Once you have a structure, it’s time to actually tell the story.

Tension

What TV show or movie would you pick if you could watch something again for the first time?

That one piece of content that sent shivers down your spine.

That made you feel something so visceral it instantly became your favourite thing in the world for a while.

Something you will never forget and return to it every now and again.

How did they manage to do that through a screen?

You had very little information as to the story you were going to see beforehand, and yet in a short period of time it became ingrained in you forever.

They did that through the same tool we all have at our disposal since birth, tension.

When telling stories, we naturally create moments of tension. But we are so accustomed to it that we don’t even hear ourselves use it.

• “Guess what happened to me on the way to work today…”
• “You’re never going to believe this…”
• “… and just when I was about to leave, guess who showed up…”

This is what pulls us in and keeps us engaged.

A lot of people say we have the attention span of a goldfish, yet we can sit and read an 800 page novel. Watch 10 hours of a show (10 episodes, 1 hour each), or a 3 hour movie in one sitting.

Tension is like a rubber band. If you pull on both ends, it seeks resolution. It wants to pull one side towards the other.

In marketing, this means anchoring one side of the rubber band at the end of your journey, and pulling on it to build tension.

So the resolution, the relief, pulls people in the direction you want.

Tension is created when you open loops leading towards something the audience WANTS to know.

• “On the next page, you will learn how to lose fat and keep it off forever.”
• “Brandon forgot something very important about trading in the stock market. Click on the button below to see what it is. “

A leads to B leads to C leads to D.

You can open loops throughout the story, or just at the end. Regardless, you need to create tension and deliver value at the same time. This is what retains people’s attention.

Now that we have a better idea how to create tension, it’s time to talk about how to deliver value in a way that generates trust.

After that we’ll go through some examples of brands that deliver on all three.

See what I did here?