Ever wonder why some brands instantly grab attention and others barely get a glance? It’s not just about what they say, but how they make you feel.
In this episode marketing expert Tom Ruwitch breaks down why facts alone won’t convert your audience and how emotion is the real driver behind buying decisions. If you’ve been stuck in the “info trap,” thinking that tips and knowledge are enough to attract clients, this conversation is your wake-up call.
We dive into how storytelling and emotional triggers can transform your marketing from forgettable to magnetic. Tom shares his 3E Framework for crafting content that doesn’t just inform but inspires action. He also shares tips on how to choose the right stories for your content.
If your marketing feels like a struggle, chances are you’re focusing too much on what you do and not enough on why it matters to your audience. Shift the focus from facts to feelings, and you’ll create content that doesn’t just inform but inspires.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- Why inspiring beats “converting” when it comes to marketing (01:20)
- Navigating the fine line between AI efficiency and human connection (03:30)
- The 3E Framework for creating content that instantly connects (06:56)
- What Apple gets so right about emotional branding (11:47)
- How to make your brand sound more human (18:30)
- How story “characters” build audience trust (22:17)
- The secret to emails people actually want to open (27:43)
- The PLAN framework to help you choose the right stories for your content (31:15)
- Tom’s Book: Story Power Marketing (41:55)
RESOURCES
Get Tom’s Book: Story Power Marketing
Join Tom’s Email List: https://StoryPowerMarketing.com/email
Free Resources: https://StoryPowerMarketing.com/resources
QUOTES
- “Marketing is about inspiring people to work with you, to hire you. They feel inspired. They feel fired up.” – Tom Ruwitch
- “It begins with being emotionally invested in creating. And when you are emotionally connected to the creation of content or of services or of courses or whatever it is that you’re delivering, you’re going to be more emotionally connected to the people you serve.” – Tom Ruwitch
- “If you send high quality emails that people find relevant, that people find entertaining, that people open regardless of the subject line because your name is on it, you can’t send too many.” – Tom Ruwitch
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ABOUT TOM RUWITCH
Tom Ruwitch is a business advisor, storytelling standout, and content marketing pioneer who helps business leaders create, deliver, and track client-attracting content and cure tech headaches.
In 2001, Tom founded the email marketing software and services company MarketVolt. This was before most business people had even heard of email marketing, much less tried it. MarketVolt licensed its groundbreaking software to businesses around the globe, and it operated as a full-service agency – helping businesses of all sizes attract prospects and land clients with online and offline marketing strategies and tactics.
After selling MarketVolt in 2019, Tom founded Story Power Marketing. Authors, coaches, and other experts hire Tom to transform their content from boring to brilliant – without writer’s block – so prospects tune in, turn on and buy.
In 2021, Tom launched Implementum — an all-in-one marketing, operations, and analytics platform that includes customized, done-for-you campaigns, strategy, and hands-on-training. Implementum helps business leaders build automated marketing machines so they can grow and profit without tech headaches.
WHERE TO FIND TOM RUWITCH
- Website: https://StoryPowerMarketing.com
- LinkedIn: https://LinkedIn.com/in/tomruwitch
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/storypowermarketing
- Podcast: https://StoryPowerMarketing.show
TRANSCRIPTION
Samantha Riley 0:00
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence By Design. I’m really looking forward to today’s topic. We’re going to talk about how you can leverage emotional triggers to create memorable brand experiences, and we’re going to dive into that topic today with Tom Ruwitch. Welcome Tom.
Tom Ruwitch 0:18
Thank you. Sam, very happy to be here.
Samantha Riley 0:22
I’d love you to share a little bit about, very quickly, what you do and the kind of people that you work with, just to give us some context into how that plays into this topic today.
Tom Ruwitch 0:33
Absolutely. Yeah. I work with, I like to describe it as anyone who is packaging their expertise for sale to serve clients. So that could be coaches, that could be professional service providers, that could be consultants, all of whom have a unique and deep expertise in their field, in their industry, and they have some sort of model where people are paying them, and I use the word to serve clients because I’m very, very interested in working with people who have that servant’s heart, who care about the outcomes for their clients, and are not just in it for the transaction and the deal.
Samantha Riley 1:20
Love it. I just wrote about that literally just yesterday, about people, you know, we talk about converting people and like you don’t convert people, like we don’t do that. We enroll clients so that, yeah.
Tom Ruwitch 1:36
I like to say you inspire, that marketing is about inspiring people to work with you, to hire you. They feel inspired. They feel fired up. And I didn’t get to how I help these people. The way that I help the coaches, the consultants, the professional service providers, is by transforming or helping them to transform their content from boring to brilliant, from prospect repelling to client attracting. And this group of people we’re referring to, they’re very, very prone to falling into what I call the information trap, because they are paid for what they know, they can easily fall into the trap of saying, well, in order to market my services, I’ll just share a few things I know. I’ll give you a little snippet of my expertise, and then you will fall at my feet and be dying to work with me further. And it doesn’t work that way. If all you do is dish out a little bit of information, that’s when you’re going to bore people. That’s when you’re going to not stand out and fall into that commoditized world of blah, blah, blah information, and it’s more true than ever when you can press the AI easy button and generate some robotic content that sounds like a pretty smart person, but the real question becomes, how can you stand out as the human to hiring your niche? And I think we’re going to start talking about that.
Samantha Riley 3:30
100%. And what was really interesting is the amount, and again, this happened to me just yesterday. Someone had announced that they’d written a book. And I went, love that person. I’ll download that book. I bought the book off Amazon. Opened it up straight away, the first page, I’m like, this isn’t them. This has been written by a, you know, ChatGPT, Claude, whatever it is. I’m like, actually, it’d been written by Chat GPT. I could tell, it was just so disappointing to me. Where I just put the book down and went, huh? Well, I don’t need to read that because I wanted to read her book, not a book that was checked, that was, you know, this collation of a lot of words from the rest of society, like, oh, anyway, I feel like I could rant forever. I don’t want to.
Tom Ruwitch 4:20
I’ll rant with you a little bit on that. I write emails. I teach clients to write emails. I was in a workshop recently where a really smart person who’s really good at writing emails was really pressing the idea that, Wow, I use ChatGPT now to write my emails, and was encouraging all of the people in the room to do it. And I play with this from time to time, but every time I do it, it’s not just that the output doesn’t feel like me and doesn’t sound like me and lacks that emotional depth that is so important in connecting with clients. It’s that I feel myself losing that sense of connection and that sense of meaning in the work that I do. And so, you know, we’re going to talk about emotional connection in a moment. It begins with being emotionally invested in creating, and when you are emotionally connected to the creation of content or of services or of courses, or whatever it is that you’re delivering, you’re going to be more emotionally connected to the people you serve.
Samantha Riley 5:48
100%. Now I do just want to do, want to say, I do use Chat GPT. If anyone’s listening, they’re like, I know Sam uses Chat GPT. I do. I use it a lot, but I don’t use it to write. I might use it for ideas. I might use it for frameworks. It might, a way to get started in something, all sorts of ways, but I actually don’t use it, right, and I think we need to dive into it.
Tom Ruwitch 6:16
Yeah, I think any business person who is refusing to use AI period is making an enormous mistake. The AI is an extraordinarily valuable tool for saving time and being more efficient and even for assisting you as a writer. It can help you come up with some ideas. It can help you find that right turn of phrase from time to time, but at this point, I don’t want to write a book or outline a course or do any of that stuff with AI. I think, again, you lose that emotional connection.
Samantha Riley 6:56
Totally. So why do emotions play such a critical role in marketing? Let’s dive into why this is so important, and why you and I are already on our soapbox.
Tom Ruwitch 7:06
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean the bottom line is because emotions drive people to want to buy. Now, well, emotions, you often will hear people say that people buy on emotion. I believe that people lean forward and sort of get that hunger to buy based on emotion. And then sometimes the left brain and the logical stuff begins to kick in. But if you are marketing and you want to make that connection with the prospect, you can’t just dive straight into here are the features. Here’s why I’m better. This is, here are the details. Here are the numbers. You have to connect with their heart and drive their emotions if they’re going to sit up and pay attention.
And we have a little framework that we talk about when we’re talking about creating content that attracts people. And it’s, it’s three E’s. Number one is empathize. You have to be able to meet prospects where they are. What are the emotions that they’re feeling? Are they experiencing fright or frustration or anger or whatever? A lot of people say, Oh, I don’t want to, I don’t want to get into fear-based marketing. Well, it’s not fear-based marketing. If you meet somebody where they are with empathy and acknowledge what they’re feeling. When you acknowledge what someone is feeling, their response is going to be, you get me. Yeah, you get me. But what you don’t want to do is then just do what some marketing and sales gurus, the bro marketers of the world, say, which is, put the knife in and twist it until they’re bleeding. That’s not, I don’t know what word I want to use for it.
Samantha Riley 9:24
Like, manipulative, maybe.
Tom Ruwitch 9:27
Manipulative. Yeah, I think that’s true. And a friend of mine and a mentor of mine, Dave D says that the difference between manipulative, fear-based marketing and productive and ethical marketing is intent. You know, if your intent is to serve, to get them to a better place, to help them cross that bridge from wherever they are now to wherever they want to be, then meeting them where they are, acknowledging their fears, making the emotional connection is going to be the best way to do that. And then the second E of the three E’s is envision, and this is what we’re talking about. It’s not enough to just say, Oh, I understand what you’re feeling. I understand your pain. I can connect with your emotion. You have to envision the other side of the mountain, the other side of the bridge, and you have to help them, oftentimes, help them see where it is they can go, what it is they can achieve, what it feels like. Again, emotion, what it feels like to be on the other side and not be experiencing all of the frustration or pain or fear or whatever it may be, and then the 3rd E is enable. How do you enable that journey? And now you’re talking about a product or a service or whatever it is that you are connecting with, but it begins, you have to empathize and you have to envision, and those two things are very tightly wound with emotion.
Samantha Riley 11:17
I love that so much. What are some, actually, just to sort of give this something tangible. What are some really, some big brands out there that use this framework and use these emotional triggers to build a loyal following? I mean, there’s a couple that I’ve got in my head, but I won’t say them, just in case they’re the ones that you come up with. But what are some of these brands?
Tom Ruwitch 11:47
Well, I think there’s no better brand at this than Apple, and Apple has done it for a long, long time. If you think about the way that Apple markets and the way that Apple advertises, when have you ever seen an advertisement from Apple or a video marketing piece that speaks about technical specifications details? Never, ever, and if you, if you think back to one of the original and great ads when they introduced the Macintosh. It’s the famous 1984 ad that they purchased airtime for the Super Bowl, and what is that ad about? If you recall, it’s got a bunch of people, and they’re evoking the a scene as if from 1984 and George Orwell and a bunch of people who are kind of, you know, just robotic, controlled by the state, and a woman barges into the hall while the, you know, the dictator is droning on and on and on about, you know, compliance and being part of the, part of, you know, the single thing I forget, the language of the ad. And she literally runs down the middle of the room and throws a hammer into the screen, blows the place up, and so you think about, what is that? What are they doing? They’re selling a computer. Well, what they’re doing is they are selling a sense of rebellion, a sense of freedom, a sense of autonomy. And at the time, the big player in home computers was IBM. You bought an IBM PC if you wanted to have a computer at your house. And that was the metaphor. This is IBM and they were saying to you, be a rebel, stand up against the man. And all of that is rooted in this emotional sense of, you know, I don’t like to be ripped off by the man. I don’t want to be stuck with one choice. Nobody had any clue at that point, especially. Is this computer actually better than the one they’re selling against? None of that but, they were striking right to the heart and to the emotion. And then as time went on and the reputation, people began to understand, oh, this is high quality stuff and, but even after that, for the longest time, the debate about PCs versus Mac, I guess even today, that debate is still, right. It’s still on, but yeah, Apple does it really well. I’ll share another Apple example. It’s one that I have in my book. If you’d like me to. So this is an ad, and I encourage everybody to look this up, or I’m going to give you an opportunity to get a free copy of my book. You can read about it in the book. And the ad is called Bounce, and it never showed up on television, but it did show up on YouTube, and it was an ad that they put out for their AirPods when they first released the AirPods, and it’s black and white. And the way the ad starts is they show this guy in an apartment in what probably is New York City, or some city that looks like New York, and the guy is frowny, you know, just dragging and he’s bouncing a tennis ball against the wall, sitting on his bed, just literally dragging his feet. And he finally pushes off the bed and grabs his suit jacket and looks at the mirror in the front hall of his apartment and literally pulls the sides of his mouth up to force a smile. And then he steps out of his apartment and puts the AirPods in, and the music starts, and he begins to bounce down the sidewalk. First, just bounce in his step, but then, literally, with these incredible visual effects, he like, jumps up and hits one of those metal sidewalk basement covers that you see in big cities, and he bounces like 50 feet in the air. And he’s flying and bouncing all over New York City, and the ad is not, again, saying a single thing about the specifications of AirPods or why AirPods are better than this brand or that brand, but it talks about and portrays an emotional transformation from down and out to up, and at it, from dragging your feet to flying and bouncing, emotional transformation. And it’s saying when you pop in AirPods and fill your brain with music, this is what you’re going to experience, it’s selling the emotional transformation. And that’s what great marketing does. Even if you’re selling a product or service, you can sell an emotional transformation.
Samantha Riley 17:35
Love that. It’s really about diving into that story. I think Nike does it really well. Or I think you say, yes, they do, they do it exceptionally well. There is no one in the world that can inspire me to run, except some of those, some of the Nike ads go, wow. If they can do it, I can do it. I hate running. So if they can, you know, the story is so inspiring. You mentioned being human before, for people that are really struggling to have their brand sound human, and I’m putting that in their quotes, if they’re struggling to make it sound not just human, but really in the way that they speak, what are some of the like practical steps to help people to infuse that emotion into their brand so it sounds like them, and to infuse storytelling into their brand?
Tom Ruwitch 18:30
Well, you in a way, you answered the question as you asked it, because astounding the way that you speak and I think for many people, especially people who are professional service providers, high level consultants, those sorts of things. When they market, they believe that they have to show up with a certain professional veil and that writing as they speak or showing up with personality or humor, or all of those things, is somehow going to be perceived as unprofessional. And so it’s less about how I do it, and more about am I going to give myself permission to do it. So if you can, yeah, if you can, work on mindset. And I am a big believer in investing in mindset and working on limiting beliefs and really what drives you and what you’re going for, and all these, all these things. I’m not a mindset coach, so I’ll stumble over it if I go too deep into it, but you have to work on that mindset and give yourself permission to be yourself, to show up with the sense of humor and the personality and the joy that you have, because in the end, I know so many coaches and consultants and professional service providers who will tell me that, yeah, you know, once they’re clients, I go out to lunch with them. I know all about their family. They know all about me. We have laughs. I send them cards. We, you know, they know me, and I know them, and we have relationships, and yet they don’t give themselves permission to behave that way when they’re marketing for fear that somehow it’s going to diminish them in their professional standing. My best advice is practice getting over that. You have to stretch your comfort zone. The first times that you put emails out there that are feeling a little less professional, it feels hard. You feel like you’re out there, but the more you do it, the more you’ll see people are responding to you, and people begin to look forward to the content that you’re putting out there, because they know it’s not just the same old robotic blah, blah, blah information only. Garbage.
Samantha Riley 21:07
Totally. When you were talking about that, I thought about the story of one of my clients popped into my head, and I’m going to get her words here. This is not the way I portrayed it, but she said to me, she does reels on Instagram, and she says, Oh, she loves doing Daggy dancing. This is her, not mine, and she used to, did a couple. And I’m like, Man, you should lean into that. Because what I noticed was so many people, as soon as she put up her Daggy dancing videos, people would comment, oh my goodness, like, I love your videos. They make me smile. They make me happy. And what it was is, it wasn’t just her giving herself permission to put up her Daggy dancing videos, it was giving her audience permission to actually say, You know what? I love that. And I want to do that too. By her really leaning into who she was, she was giving permission to her audience to also say, I love that. It makes me happy. This is, this is my place. She’s my person. And I think that we can sometimes forget that.
Tom Ruwitch 22:17
Yeah, I completely agree, Sam, and it’s about, when you let them in, you drop the veil, you let them in, you share details, you tell them that you’re into Daggy dancing and so forth. They’ll let you in. There’s a trust that’s built. There’s a connection that’s built. And sometimes it can be very, very subtle, but in the end, you know you really feel that bond. I refer to my email list as my online family, and I don’t say that cynically and transactionally. I share details of my life and who I am. People know my, today’s email, the email that I wrote to my list today talked about the fact that my daughter Maddie flew in from Philly. Everybody knows Maddie in my emails, my daughter Maddie flew in from Philly last week for my birthday, we went out for lunch, and I tell a story about, you know, a restaurant that kind of ripped us off. And there’s a business lesson in it. But the point was, my list knows Maddie. My list knows Melissa, my wife, my list knows Jake, my son. My List knows Moose, my dog. My List knows other characters I’ve created in my emails, including B9, my AI copywriting robot, who I, when I write about AI, the good and the bad, I channel it through this character that I’ve created, my copywriting robot. And so all of that personality is partly just my quirky self, let it giving myself permission, but there’s also a conscious effort to do it. And, you know, as I said before, this is really about letting people in and letting them feel connected to you. They’ll let you in and be connected, be connected back.
Samantha Riley 24:16
Had an interesting thought come in when you were sharing that story, but you haven’t, you said your AI robot is a character, and then you’ve got the character of you and the character of Melissa and the character of Maddie. It’s almost like you’re creating like a show or a storyline where people like, well, now we want to know what happens next to the characters, like so they’re just leaning in and following along. How intentional were you in the beginning to create those characters? Was it intentional? Or did you experiment and notice how that came to play?
Tom Ruwitch 24:57
Well, what I would say is that I was writing emails that had personality and that shared details long before I articulated the idea that you just recapped, I will give some credit, a lot of credit, to Daniel Throssell, who’s there in Australia, lives in in Perth, I think, who’s a great, great copywriter, and who talks about the idea of emails being almost like an ongoing television serial. So he talks about the fact that you’re building characters, and you’re letting people in, and they know the character over time, and there may be details that you exaggerate a little bit to have a little more fun with them and people, and so in answer directly to your question, it took a little time. I was working on, for a long time, on bringing my personality and being more entertaining, and I’ve been doing that for many, many years, but this idea of consistently bringing these characters back in and having evolving storylines, especially, you know, especially to make the lead ones. There’s an evolving storyline in my emails with B9 and I share all that, I don’t want to frighten people who are listening, because, in a way, a lot of what we’ve talked about is 100 level, 200 level stuff, personality, lower the veil, and so forth. This idea of characters and a through line and so forth, that can be a little trickier and harder to pull off on a consistent basis. And I don’t want anybody who’s out there thinking, you know, I’m starting from scratch. What are you talking about? I don’t want to scare them off, but you’re absolutely right to jump on that idea. And yes, now it’s very deliberate. Now it’s a big part of the strategy, and it matters in the end, what this all adds up to, I like to tell this story that I hear all the time from people who are asking me about subject lines, subject lines, subject lines. How do I write better subject lines? And what I say to them is, yes, absolutely, understanding the formulas that work for subject lines is important. Writing good headlines, writing good subject lines.
27:43
But what you really want to master is how to create these emotionally hooky, entertaining, informative and entertaining emails. Because when you get good at that, the subject lines won’t matter anymore. The most important factor, yeah, the most important factor in your emails getting opened is going to become, when you’re good at this, the from name. When they see an email with your name on it, they’re going to open it, and that’s the place you want to be, where they want you to be in their life, and they look forward to hearing from you, and when they don’t, they’re wondering, Where was your email today? And it really can get to that point where the subject line doesn’t matter.
Samantha Riley 28:37
You know, I am so glad you mentioned this, because I didn’t even think about it until you talked about this. There’s two people, and I’m not going to mention their names, but there’s two people that when they come open my emails, I automatically open it, and it wasn’t until you said that, I hadn’t actually paid attention to the subject lines, I just see their name and I open the email, and they both send a daily email, so that just go that, to that point when people say, Oh, should I send daily, weekly? Like, I think daily is too much. It absolutely is not too much if you’re adding value, because I open because I want to read whatever it is that they’re saying, because it’s interesting.
Tom Ruwitch 29:17
That’s exactly right. And the people who ask that question with a sense of foreboding, oh, I can’t send daily. I can’t even send weekly. That’s too much. They’re framing it as a quantity problem, when actually it’s a quality problem. Yes, if you send high quality emails that people find relevant, that people find entertaining, that people open regardless of the subject line, because your name is on it, you can’t send too many. I mean, I guess you could, if you send 10 a day, at some point it gets, but daily emails, when I went from weekly a long time ago to thrice weekly, a long time ago to daily, my open rates went up, my opt out rates went down, my complaint rates went down. Bottom line rate sales, click throughs and sales and enrollments and so forth went way up, and it’s because people enjoyed the quality, looked forward to hearing from me, and were engaged time and time again. Does everybody read every email or every social post or watch every video? No, but if you can get to a point where you’re putting content out there, and people have a sense of, oh, this is going to be good. I’m opening Tom’s email, or I’m opening Sam’s email, or I’m watching Bill’s video, whoever you may be, if you get to a point where your audience hungers to hear from you, you’re going to be able to sell to them and serve them. You’re serving them already. When your content is serving them, and that’s why they want to pay you to serve them more.
Samantha Riley 31:15
You talked about, for people that hunger to read that email, and that’s what we’ve been just talking about. I know it, and obviously you and I are both on the same side here. You do need to practice. It’s not going to be something that you can do right off the bat. But what are some, what are some ways that people can lean more into storytelling? And I guess what I’m asking here is, what sort of stories do we share? There are some stories that I read of people where I was just like, Oh, that was too much. I did not need to know that. Right? What’s that balance between a really, a story that adds value, and a story that’s just like, regurgitating all over you?
Tom Ruwitch 31:56
Like, yeah, yeah. That’s a, it’s a great question, and I use the phrase informative and entertaining a moment ago. And so there are people who fall into the trap of just saying, I’m going to share, you know, whatever story, entertaining story, and if at the end of that, there’s no connection to anything meaningful or relevant related to sort of the promise of your business, and people are going to begin to tune out and wonder, what’s the point, especially if you’re just sort of doing it in a way where you’re just sharing all sorts of details that, you know, why are you sharing them, if not, or some connection to some lesson? So couple of things to keep in mind, especially if you’re listening or watching and feeling like this sounds hard, I’m not sure where to begin. I love a quote from a copywriter named Eugene Schwartz, who was one of the great copywriters of the 20th century, and he said, copy is not written, copy is assembled. And I love that quote because at the heart of it, the meaning there is that this is not some mystical, magical art. This is a craft. It’s an act of systematic assembly, meaning that if you can gather the building blocks, which don’t require a muse to strike, do not require you to be some kind of creative genius, just require you to understand systems of what am I trying to build here? If you can gather the building blocks, then the business of creating an email or a social post or a video script or a webinar or whatever it might be becomes much more easy, simple, and your confidence and your consistency can grow. And so what is, how do you define those building blocks? And it goes back to your question, we have a framework that we call the PLAN framework, and it’s four letters. P stands for promise. So what is the promise that I am making in this email? So whether it’s explicitly stated or it’s just implied, there always has to be some relevant promise related to the purpose of your business. Go back to the, go back to the Apple Bounce ad. What’s the promise? Transform from dragging your feet to a bounce in your step. That’s a big promise, a big emotional promise. Second, L, what’s the lesson? What must you know or do or get to enable that promise to occur? And in the case of a retail advertisement, in the case of a retail advertisement, the lesson is, get AirPods and pop them in your ear. In the case of, I’ll demonstrate this with a business coach story. We work with a business coach who works with CEOs, and she wrote a blog post before she hired us, and the blog post was all about delegation, and it was one, a classic example of the information trap. I know how to delegate. I’m going to share some tips about delegation. People are going to be so impressed about my delegation tips that they’re going to want to hire me. And here was the post. Delegation is a very important skill for CEOs to master. Here are five tips to delegate more effectively. Tip one, Tip two, Tip three. There’s no emotion, there’s no promise. So when we sat down with her, we said, well, let’s talk, Why delegation? What’s the point? What’s the promise that you’re making to the people you’re going to teach how to delegate? Oh, well, the promise is to escape the hamster wheel, to operate without the weight of everything depending on you. So transform from stress to relief, from stuck at the business seven days a week to being able to, you know, be free and have other people do the work for you. Again, emotional transformations. What’s the lesson? Well, in order to achieve that, you have to learn to delegate. Here are some tips. That’s P and L. What’s A? A is the anecdote. Wrap it in some story. And now we’re back to your question, which is, how do you know if, how do you choose the stories? Well, you can choose any story you want. It could be a scene from a movie. It could be something that you did in, you know, in your own life. It could be a funny story you heard from a friend. You can choose any entertaining anecdote you wish, as long as it serves as a vehicle to deliver the promise and the lesson. And so again, building blocks and, so we said to her, All right, great promise. Avoid the hamster wheel or escape the hamster wheel and so on and so forth. Do you have any good stories about that, about escaping the hamster wheel? Oh, Tom I have a great story, one of my clients, he owned a business for 20 years. He never went on vacation longer than a long weekend for 20 years, because he feared that all heck would break loose if he left. And he, when he ever went away for even a day, the phone would ring, Hey, boss, we need your help with this and that. And then he finally, after 20 years, took a two-week vacation, went to the beach, had the time of his life. When he got back, the place was running like clockwork. The employees were fired up, and what a great story. So the blog post and the email, the subject line was, how a stressed out owner, emotion, stress, stressed out owner let go and got away. That in itself, is a little bitty story of transformation. And so people are going to read that, anyone who is feeling like I’m stressed out, I’d like to let go. I’d like to get away. They read and it starts with, I know a business owner who never went on vacation for 20 years. The story begins. And anyone who is a stressed out owner, a good prospect for her is reading this, thinking, wow, she gets me. She understands what I’m going through. And then you get to the part, he went on vacation. And then there’s a line, what changed? Well, he learned to delegate. And here are five tips that he, five things that he learned to do. Tip number one, tip number two. Now people are tuned in and reading because the promise has been firmly established and delivered in an entertaining way. Promise, escape the hamster wheel, lesson, delegate anecdote, whatever story you want. But that was a great one to deliver that promise in it, and lesson. And then N stands for next step, and this is a huge one, because most people who are putting content out are really afraid to sell. They think that, they think that if they tell you that you can schedule a consultation or buy my book or sign up for my thing, that somehow you’re being a pushy pest. But you’re not being a pushy pest if you establish a meaningful promise and share a meaningful lesson wrapped in an interesting and entertaining anecdote. You are serving them when you provide those lessons and that information, and then you’re saying, if this resonated, if you’d like to learn how to get away and spend more time away from the office, here you go. Schedule a consultation with me. There is this pervasive and dangerous myth that you’re supposed to have some content that’s valuable and some content that pitches, as if pitching is sharing a service or a product is somehow unvaluable. If you buy into that, your business is dead. You have to recognise that what you are doing every time you put content out there is sharing a promise, sharing a lesson, wrapping it in an anecdote, building blocks, and then offering that next step that if this resonated, if this was meaningful to you, here’s the way that you can do this yourself, by schedule, whatever it may be. So four building blocks, you’ll always know the story works if it’s connected to a promise and a lesson.
Samantha Riley 41:55
Love that so much. Now you mentioned before that you have got a book, story, and that book is story, power marketing. Can you share a little bit about what’s, you know, what people, why would people want to get it? What will the reader get out of reading?
Tom Ruwitch 42:10
Yeah, so, so the subtitle of the book, I have it right here in my hand is, Proven methods to create client attracting, get more clients, profit generating content without getting stuck. I talked a moment ago about, you know, you don’t need the muse. You don’t need the, you don’t need to be a creative genius. So many people, when they hear about creating content, creating more content, they feel like, I can’t do that. It’s hard enough. I sit in front of a blank computer screen and I’m thinking once upon, once upon a time, now what? It’s hard. And cry, yeah. And then I push the AI easy button, and I generate content, and somebody tells me, I sound like a robot. It’s hard and so the promise of the book is to transform that feeling of I don’t have what it takes, this is hard. I don’t know where to begin, to I have at my disposal a system and a methodology that I can master so that I can produce and create content that will draw people in, that will transform them from cold leads to warm and engaged client or warm and engaged prospects, to raving fan clients who stick with me, who I love to work with, and who refer me. And in the end, it’s all about, how can you create content with personality in ways that don’t feel so darn hard, and actually can be done in a systematic way, where you even can delegate bits of it to people and just make the whole thing so much easier.
Samantha Riley 44:12
Love it. And where can people go to get a copy of your book?
Tom Ruwitch 44:17
Yeah, so I have a simple website called, with the address yourgiftfromtom.com, so it’s all mushed together, your gift from tom dot com slash samantha, yourgiftfromtom.com/samantha, that will take you to a page where you can get a free copy of the book, a PDF copy of the book, and then if you want to buy a copy, it’s available, the paperback copy or Kindle copy, it’s available on Amazon. And you also could go to story powermarketing.com, if you’re intrigued and want to sign up for my, I call them my never boring one daily emails.
Samantha Riley 45:03
Love it. And of course, if you’re on the treadmill right now or driving the kids to school, then that link will be right below wherever you’re listening. Tom, thank you so much for coming on today. You’ve shared so much value. I think that if anyone, or whoever listened to this episode is stuck writing, I’ll be extremely surprised, there was just so much actionable content there. So thanks for coming and sharing.
Tom Ruwitch
Sam, thank you.
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