36: Storytelling for Squarespacers: how to weave a powerful narrative into your website copy
EPISODE SUMMARY
Have you ever felt like your Squarespace website content is missing that special something? It conveys the facts, but it doesn't quite resonate with visitors? In this episode of Think Inside the Square, we’ll dive into the magic of storytelling and how you can leverage it to create website copy that truly connects with your audience. Here are the top 5 takeaways from this episode:
Find Your Brand Voice with AI
Before weaving captivating stories into your website, establish a consistent brand voice. Imagine a conversation with your ideal customer; what tone would you use? Friendly and approachable, or perhaps professional and authoritative? Choose 2-3 adjectives that best describe your brand's personality and ensure this voice shines through all your website content.
Embrace the Hero's Journey
Think of your website visitors as the heroes on a transformative journey, and your product or service as the guide that helps them reach their goals. This popular storytelling framework provides a roadmap for structuring your website content. Remember, you're not the hero – you're the trusted helper empowering your visitors to overcome challenges and achieve success.
Tap into Emotions
People connect with stories that evoke emotions. Identify your ideal customer's biggest worries and deepest desires. Do they yearn for security, crave accomplishment, or simply want to feel more confident? Use storytelling to address these emotions, showcasing how your product or service can help them transform their lives.
Craft Compelling CTAs with Storytelling
Facts are important, but stories sell. Instead of dry, technical headlines, use storytelling techniques to craft captivating calls to action (CTAs) that resonate with your audience. Highlight the challenges they face and position your solution as the answer to their problems.
Integrate Storytelling Throughout Your Website
The power of storytelling extends beyond your homepage. Infuse your About Us page with the story of your brand's journey, highlighting the passion that drives your mission to help others. Even your blog posts can benefit from storytelling. Craft captivating headlines that tap into emotions and use intros and outros to showcase the transformative power of your content.
Conclusion
By following these tips and embracing the magic of storytelling, you can transform your Squarespace website from merely informative to truly engaging, fostering deeper connections with your audience and encouraging them to take action. So go forth and weave your brand story into the fabric of your website, and watch your Squarespace website flourish!
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Rebecca Harpain: In a world that is quickly being dominated by AI content, I want to help you harness the power of your unique voice to create content that really resonates with the humans who visit your Squarespace website. And that's exactly what we'll do in this episode of Think Inside the Square. Welcome to Think Inside the Square, a podcast full of tips and tricks to help you create a Squarespace website that you're proud of. I'm your host, Becca Paine, Squarespace expert and creator of Inside the Square doco. In this episode, we're going to explore how to use storytelling to transform your website content and encourage more people to interact with you and your business online. For a transcript of this episode, along with the links to any resources mentioned visit Inside the Square Darko Forward Slash Podcast. The term Squarespace is a trademark of Squarespace Inc. This content is not affiliated with Squarespace Inc..
Rebecca Harpain: I've been designing websites for well over a decade and getting copy. The actual text from my clients to put on their websites was always one of the biggest struggles. It seems like no one really knew exactly how to talk about themselves online, and that's why I wanted to create this episode.
Rebecca Harpain: We're going to talk about how you can find your tone, how to establish your point of view. And I'll share one of my favorite storytelling tactics that can help you really create amazing and engaging copy.
Rebecca Harpain: Before we jump into storytelling, just a quick word about branding. Your brand is essentially your company's personality. It's so much more than just a logo and a cool color palette. It's the feeling that you evoke in people when they encounter your business on Squarespace. You can build your brand through your design choices, but also the languages you use a strong brand. It goes beyond just the esthetics, the cool fonts and the interesting images. Your brand is about what you stand for. The value you offer, the story you tell, and how you tell it. Stories. They're powerful because they tap into human emotions. They allow you to connect with visitors on a deeper level, making them feel something and remember you think about it. Have you ever been captivated by a tale, some heartwarming anecdote or a product's origin story? That's the magic of storytelling.
Rebecca Harpain: The storytelling tactic I'm going to share with you totally transformed my business when it came to how I created copy to really resonate with my audience. But before we talk about that, I wanted to talk really quickly about the tone of your brand voice. Keeping your brand voice consistent throughout your Squarespace site is super duper important.
Rebecca Harpain: Imagine for a second that you're having a conversation with your customer in line at a coffee shop. Wouldn't it be super weird if you started out really friendly and chatty and then suddenly you switch to like stiff, informal language? That conversation would be a little jarring, right? That's exactly what happens when they read content on your website that doesn't have a consistent tone. So in your copywriting, think about having this signature voice and try to come up with 2 to 3 adjectives that clearly describe it. Are you playful and approachable like a friendly neighbor offering advice? Maybe you are more professional and polished. You're this trusted expert guiding the way. Whatever your brand's personality is, it should shine through consistently in your content.
Rebecca Harpain: my content and inside the square, I try to be friendly, supportive and informed. I hope that's the vibe that you get. Now, if you aren't sure what your tone is, here's an AI trick for you. Take your best performing content, like your top converting sales page or your most popular blog post. Maybe the email that got you the most sales. Copy that text and open up a chat bot. Let GPT or Google Gemini. Tell that I. I'm going to share some written content with you. I want you to use three adjectives to describe the personality and tone of this content If it doesn't describe it in a way that you like, that could be an indicator that you really need to shift your focus in the way you're writing your copy and telling the emotional side of your story. So again, 2 to 3 adjectives. And for Inside the Square, I focus on friendly, supportive and informed.
Rebecca Harpain: Once you have a clear understanding, those established definitions of your brand's personality, your brand's tone, its time to work on the narrative, the actual storytelling part of your copy. the narrative technique that I want to talk to you about in this episode is called The Hero's Journey.
Rebecca Harpain: Have you ever noticed how a lot of your favorite stories share the similar rhythm? They've got this hero just living a normal life. And then a mysterious challenge throws everything into disarray. The wild adventure happens. There's tests, there's triumphs, there's new friends. And finally they return home. Forever changed. That's it, my friend. That's the hero's journey concept in a nutshell. Now, I've got a lot of other content to share with you about this. I'll include some links in the show notes. If you want to read more about the Hero's Journey concept, but I want you to think about that as kind of a roadmap for your own website content. But here's the trick that a lot of people miss when they're creating their own copy. You are not the hero. Your website visitor is the hero. You are the thing that they're missing. You're the support with the goal that they're aiming for. You are there to help them along their journey to reach this point of transformation in their lives. So when you write copy for your website, remember, you're not the hero. You're the helper. They are the hero.
Rebecca Harpain: Again, this is a super high level overview of this complicated storytelling framework, and we'll have links in the show notes if you want to learn more. But this narrative technique that you can intertwine with the hero's journey is focusing on building an emotional connection through your storytelling. Now we all know the feeling of getting swept away by a good story. One that tugs at our heartstrings or makes us laugh out loud. You remember Chicken Soup for the Soul. That entire corporation was based on the idea that good stories are what people want to read, and we can weave that same magic into the content for your Squarespace website. Think of your ideal customer or your ideal client. What are their biggest worries? Their deepest desires? Maybe they yearn for a sense of security or crave the feeling of accomplishment. Or maybe they just want to feel more confident. The key is to tap into those emotions through your website stories. Don't just tell people what you do. Show them how your product or service can make them feel. I want you to paint pictures with your words, share relatable anecdotes, let your passion shine through, and where you can share success stories from people who have taken that transformation. Show them the heroes that have gone before them so they can follow in their footsteps. When people are reading the content on your website, I don't want them to think they're reading a website. I want them to experience a feeling and that kind of connection that will build loyalty and keep them coming back for more. So let's talk about how to tie this hero's journey and this emotional storytelling into some common places on your Web site, starting with your home page.
Rebecca Harpain: Let's start with the homepage of your website. Now, this will be different for everyone because we all have a different reason for starting a Squarespace website. But the concept is still the same. Remember, you are not the hero, the person who is going to be working with you, your ideal customer, your ideal client, they are the hero. So the very start of your homepage, don't start by talking about you start by talking about them and identifying them exactly where they are. Use emotional terms to connect with them at their level for where they're at right now. Maybe they desire something better. Or maybe they're frustrated with where they're at in their job, their career, their health journey. Anything along those lines? Truly identify where they're at and speak to that through language. So the second they read that first part of your home page, they think, Hey, that's me. I need that. And then you can present yourself as the solution to their problem. Think of structuring this in three parts, starting off with identifying who they are and where they're at. Then identifying that you have the solution and then sharing maybe an anecdote or a success story that can really explain why you're the proven solution. Something along those lines to structure your home page. Now, when it comes to that social proof part, a lot of people like to showcase logos for clients that they've worked with or partners that they have. On my own website, I need to position myself as this Squarespace expert that I am. So I like to feature my Squarespace badges to show people that I have these certifications that I know what I'm talking about. It makes them feel better about understanding I'm the person to help them because I've got proof that I can help them.
Rebecca Harpain: Facts tell stories. So it's a quote from Brian Eisenberg. At least that's what the Internet told me. I'm not sure if that's true, because it is a super common quote that is heard across sales and marketing blogs all over the Internet. Facts tell, stories sell. So as much as you want to just share all of the facts about your business or what you're offering, especially on your home page, start off with the story, identify that emotion and show how you can really relate to them and help them solve their core desires. Okay, we talked about the home page. I've got two other pages I want to talk about where we can incorporate this Hero's Journey framework and some storytelling. The next one, it's got to be obvious. The about page. Right. You knew I was going to go there. All right. Let's talk about your about page thinking with this hero's journey concept you're about, page is a good spot to share your own call to adventure that led you to create your business. How did you identify a gap in the market or a problem you wanted to solve? Highlight the emotions that drive your passion. Did you find joy in helping others succeed? Are you driven by this desire to empower or inspire and explain how your business solves the problems faced by your ideal customer? Using that Hero's Journey framework, you position yourself as that guide who helps them achieve their desired transformation and use emotional storytelling to connect with your audience. On my own about page I like to talk about the first time I discovered success for Squarespace. I found out that I could create a code that would make my website do something I couldn't do. Just using the design menu. I felt empowered, I felt intelligent, and I realized that so many other Squarespace designers like myself could create code too. So I wanted to start teaching people how to do it. That right there is what turned me from the hero into the helper in my own Hero's Journey framework. So think about that emotional aspect to your own story and use it to connect with your audience. Okay, we talked about your home page and your about page, but there's one more page I want to cover your blog. I think every Squarespace should have a blog, but I will save that tangent for another podcast episode. Keeping this content to storytelling tactics. Let's talk about a blog post framework. My blogs are step by step tutorials for specific things like how to customize the design of a digital product block and Squarespace. But what you can do and what I should start doing is include at least one emotional term inside your blog title. A captivating headline gets clicks. But if you have to keep that title technical like I do, you can still use the Hero's Journey technique for the intro and the outro. You can really paint a picture of why this article will help them by clearly stating where they're at. Don't forget to tap into those emotions your ideal customer feels related to the problem. Are they frustrated, overwhelmed, insecure, bright in a way that honors those feelings? Then present your solution as the solution that's going to empower them to overcome those feelings or challenges and achieve their goals. I don't really do this for my own blog, but I need to start. Instead of a tutorial that says how to change the fonts on your Squarespace checkout page. How much more compelling would it be if I said, What if you could decrease the amount of abandoned cards with one line of code? Or maybe a tutorial for making a landing page in Squarespace? My intro could include facts about how creating a custom navigation for your landing page and increase my conversions by 10%. Wouldn't you want to learn how to do that? Two stories sell my friends. Stories sell. All right. I think it's time for a recap. In this episode of Think Inside the Square, we explored the power of storytelling in creating compelling Squarespace website copy. We discussed the importance of defining your brand voice before weaving storytelling techniques into your website. You learned about my favorite tactic the hero's journey, the framework that positions your website visitors as the hero on their journey of transformation with your product or service as the helper to get them there. We talked about creating an emotional connection with your audience by tapping into emotional terms in your storytelling. We want to foster a deeper connection with your audience to make them invested in the story they're reading. And no matter how much emotion you add or how closely you follow the Hero's Journey framework, it's important to clearly identify the problem your customer is facing and showcase how your product or service is the answer, and make sure that you keep the same tone across all of the pages of your website. For links to more copywriting content that I love, check out the show notes for this episode of Inside the Squared Eco Forward Slash Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed this content. If you did leave me a review and be sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you happen to be listening to this episode. But most importantly, have fun with your Squarespace website. Bye for now.
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