Storytelling at Every Stage of the Funnel

You wrote a story once that worked.

It got replies, it got shares, it sold a few things, and you were pleased with it. So you put it in an ad, and the ad did nothing at all. That result is confusing enough to stop people trying.

The story was good. You have the numbers to prove it was good. Then it lands in a different position and dies, and the obvious conclusion is that you got lucky the first time.

So you put it in an ad, and the ad did nothing at all.

You didn’t get lucky. The story was fine. What changed was the job you asked it to do. Stories work like tools, and a tool that excels at one task is useless at another. Nobody blames a hammer for how it performs on a screw.

A story in an ad has a different job than the same story in an email. The email version has a different job again than the version on a sales page. Each position asks something different, and a story that ignores what’s being asked will underperform regardless of how well it’s written.

There are five positions where a story has to work, and each has its own constraints.

A cold ad, a warm email, the page where they decide, the days right after they buy, and the attempt to bring back somebody who drifted off.

The reader is a different person at each of those points, and that’s the part people miss. It isn’t only the format changing. The person is changing. What they know about you, what they’ve already agreed to, and what they need from you next are all different.

Once you can see what each position is asking for, the same raw material stretches across all five.

One dug-up story becomes five pieces of writing, each doing a job the others can’t, and none of them feeling recycled.

There’s a second benefit that shows up once you start doing this, and it’s about consistency rather than efficiency. A buyer who meets the same story at four points along the way starts to feel like they know you, because that’s how knowing somebody works.

That’s a better use of a good story than publishing it once and hoping.

Good stories are rare and expensive to find, and getting one appearance out of one is a waste of something you worked hard to get.

Before the positions themselves, it helps to name what changes between them.

Three things change from one position to the next, and everything else you’d want to know about writing for them follows from those three.

None of the three are about the format, which is where most people start and why most people stay stuck. Whether it’s an ad or an email is the least interesting thing about a piece of writing, and it tells you almost nothing about how to write it.

The first is what the reader already believes about you.

A stranger believes nothing. A subscriber of two years believes quite a lot, and every sentence you write to them is landing on top of that existing belief rather than into empty space.

This is why the same sentence can be warm in one place and presumptuous in another. Writing to a stranger as though they trust you already reads as arrogance. Writing to a long-time reader as though they’ve never heard of you reads as sloppy.

The second thing that changes is what the reader is trying to do.

A person scrolling past an ad is trying to keep scrolling. A person on a sales page is trying to decide. A person who just bought is trying to work out whether they made a mistake.

Those are three completely different states of mind, and a story written for one of them will feel wrong in the others. The scroller needs to be stopped. The decider needs to be reassured. The new buyer needs to be told they chose well.

You can hear this go wrong in your own inbox all the time.

An email from a company you’ve never bought from opens with an inside joke, and the effect isn’t warmth. It’s the discomfort of being addressed by a stranger who’s pretending to be a friend.

The third thing that changes is how much time you have. An ad has about a second and a half. An email has maybe fifteen seconds before the thumb keeps going. A sales page has as long as it can hold them, which might be minutes.

Time changes the shape of a story more than anything else.

With a second and a half you can only do one beat. With fifteen seconds you can do a compressed version of all four. With minutes, you can let each one breathe.

There’s a fourth thing that changes, and it’s smaller but it bites harder. The cost of getting it wrong is different at each position. A bad email loses you one open. A bad post-purchase message loses you a sale you had already made.

There’s a fourth thing that changes, and it’s smaller but it bites harder.

Put those three together and you have a diagnostic you can run on any piece of writing before you publish it. What do they believe, what are they trying to do, and how long do I have? Answer those and the story almost shapes itself.

The story itself, meanwhile, stays the same underneath. Same events, same person, same detail, same turn. What changes is which part you tell, how much of it you tell, and where you cut it off.

So the job is mostly taking things away rather than adding them.

You already have the whole story sitting in front of you. Each position gets a different slice of it, and choosing which slice is most of the work you’ll do.

Cutting is easier than writing, and that’s the practical reason this works. Facing a blank page with an ad to write is hard. Facing a full story and choosing which three sentences to keep is a job you can do in ten minutes.

Working from a master version also keeps the details consistent, and consistency does something for you that’s easy to overlook. A reader who sees the same detail in an ad and later in an email concludes the events were real, because invented details drift.

Drifting details are one of the fastest ways to lose somebody’s trust, and it happens by accident.

You tell it slightly differently each time because you’re writing from memory, and a reader who notices starts wondering what else you’re making up.

Here’s a story from my working life: [paste the full story with every detail you have]. My buyers are [describe them]. My offer is [describe it]. Break this into five slices, one for each of these positions: a cold ad for people who’ve never heard of me, an email to my existing list, a section on my sales page, a message to somebody who just bought, and a message to somebody who stopped opening my emails. For each slice, tell me which part of the story to use, which parts to leave out, and why that cut suits that reader.

Keep the master file somewhere you’ll find it again, and put a date at the top of it. In six months you’ll want the exact detail you’re certain right now that you’ll remember, and I promise you won’t remember it.

That file becomes the most valuable thing you own after a year of adding to it. Nobody else has your stories, which means nobody else can write what you can write, and that’s the only real advantage available to you.

Cold traffic is the hardest position and the one people prepare for least.

A stranger is scrolling, they owe you nothing, and the only thing standing between your ad and their thumb is whether the first line stops them.

Everything about a cold story is governed by that first line, and the first line has one job. Not to interest them, not to intrigue them, and certainly not to promise them anything. Its job is to describe something they recognise.

That’s a hard instruction to follow, because describing something ordinary feels like a weak opening.

It feels like you’re wasting your one line on nothing. The ordinary line is the one that works, and the exciting line is the one that gets scrolled past.

Recognition stops a scroll and nothing else reliably does. A promise gets discounted because they’ve seen a thousand promises. A curiosity hook gets ignored because they’ve been burned by curiosity hooks. A description of their own week gets read.

So a cold story opens inside the problem, told from inside their experience, with a detail specific enough that it could only be about them.

No setup, no context, no explanation of who you are. Straight into the thing that happened.

Specificity does the stopping, and vagueness does the scrolling. A line about being overwhelmed describes half the population and stops nobody. A line about the third time you rewrote the same email before lunch stops the person who did that yesterday.

The instinct to introduce yourself first is strong and it’s fatal here. Nobody scrolling has any reason to care who you are yet. Your name earns their attention after the recognition lands, never before it.

Watch what happens when an ad opens with a question instead.

Struggling with your email list? Everybody has learned to read that as an advertisement before they reach the question mark, and they’ve scrolled past it before they could answer.

Statements land where questions bounce. A statement describing something real gets read as information. A question aimed at a stranger gets read as a sales pitch, because that’s the only place strangers ever ask questions like that.

After the first line, the cold story does one beat and stops.

That’s the constraint nobody wants to accept. You have hardship, and that’s all you have, because there’s no time for anything else before they decide whether to stay.

The work of the ad is finished the moment they click. It doesn’t have to sell anything, it doesn’t have to explain your offer, and it certainly doesn’t have to establish your credentials. It has to make them want to know how the story ends.

It has to make them want to know how the story ends.

Understanding that one point explains why cold ads that try to do more perform worse. The click isn’t a purchase decision. It’s a decision to keep reading, and the only thing that reliably earns that decision is a story which hasn’t finished yet.

Which means you cut the ad in the middle. Not at a resolution, not at a lesson, but at the point where the reader wants the next sentence and it isn’t there. That’s an uncomfortable place to stop and it’s the correct place.

That’s why so many good stories fail as ads.

The writer, being a decent storyteller, resolved it. They gave the reader the satisfying ending, and a satisfied reader has no reason on earth to click anything.

Where you send them counts as much as what you cut. The next page has to finish the story you started, in the same voice, with the same detail. A reader who clicks a story and lands on a generic sales page feels tricked, and the click was wasted.

The simplest way to hold the seam together is to write the ad last.

Write the page first, find the strongest moment in it, and cut the ad out of that. Then the two are made of the same material and the reader never feels a change.

That continuity is what almost everybody breaks. The ad is written by one part of your brain and the page by another. The reader falls into the seam between them and leaves without ever knowing why.

There’s a test for a cold story that takes about ten seconds and saves a lot of money. Read your first line to somebody who has the problem and stop there. Watch their face.

If they nod, you have an ad. If they look at you politely and wait for more, you don’t, and no amount of budget will make that first line perform. The line either produces recognition or it doesn’t, and the face tells you which.

Here’s a story from my own experience: [paste it]. My cold audience is [describe them, including the problem they have but haven’t solved]. Write me eight different opening lines for an ad, each one describing a specific, physical moment this audience would recognise from their own week. Don’t promise anything, don’t tease, and don’t mention me or my offer in any of them. Then tell me which one would stop the most scrolls and why.

Test the winner against your own instinct before you spend money on it. If the line that scores highest is one you’d be embarrassed to say out loud to a customer, it’s probably clever rather than true. Clever doesn’t survive contact with a stranger.

The line you want is the one that made you wince slightly when you wrote it, because it was too close to something real. That wince is the sound of accuracy, and accuracy is what stops a thumb.

An email to your own list is the easiest position and the one people waste most often.

These people opened you on purpose. They’ve already decided you’re worth a few seconds, which is a privilege that took months to earn.

What you do with that privilege is the question, and the common answer is to squander it on announcements. New product, new post, new offer. Every one of those emails spends trust and buys nothing, and eventually the opens fall and nobody knows why.

Announcements also train the list to expect nothing of value, which is the real cost and it compounds.

After eight announcement emails, a reader stops opening on the assumption that there’s nothing inside worth the four seconds.

A story email spends nothing and builds. The reader gets something worth having whether or not they buy. A person who received something for nothing opens the next one with a little more willingness than before.

The email position has a different constraint than the ad. You have more time, but their expectations are higher, because they know your voice and they’ll notice the second you start performing for them.

So the email story can run all four beats, and it should, but at a size that suits fifteen seconds of attention.

Hardship in two sentences. Help in one. Proof in one. Hope in one. Then a single line about the offer if there’s one.

The proportion changes with how warm they’re, and this is where most people never adjust. A subscriber of two years doesn’t need three sentences establishing that you understand their problem. They know you do. Spending words there bores them.

For a warm reader, weight the email toward proof and hope.

They believe you understand them. What they haven’t got is evidence that the thing works and a picture of what happens if they act, and those are the two beats that make them decide.

Getting this wrong in the other direction is just as costly and much more common. Writing to your longest readers as though they need convincing insults them, and the insult is subtle enough that they won’t tell you. They’ll just stop opening.

For a cooler part of the list, people who joined last week and haven’t bought anything, weight it back toward hardship.

They’re closer to strangers than to friends, and treating them like friends is how you lose them in the first month.

Which means one broadcast to the whole list is nearly always wrong for somebody. Segmenting by how long they’ve been reading, even crudely, lets you weight the beats correctly for each group without writing two different stories.

Weighting the beats isn’t the same as writing different emails, and that distinction saves a lot of work. It’s the same story with different proportions, which is twenty minutes of editing rather than three separate drafts.

Which means one broadcast to the whole list is nearly always wrong for somebody.

The other thing an email can do that no other position can is be unfinished. You can tell part of a story on Tuesday and the rest on Thursday, and people will wait for it. A sales page could never ask that of anybody.

Cliffhangers get a bad name because they’re usually done badly, with a manufactured stop that the reader can feel. A real one is different. You stop where the story truly turns, and the reader wants Thursday because something is unresolved rather than because you withheld it.

Serialized stories work in email because the reader has already invited you in.

They’re not deciding whether to trust you, they’re deciding whether to keep reading, and an unfinished story answers that question for you.

There’s a discipline that makes serialization work and it’s the one people skip. Each email has to be worth reading on its own, even for somebody who missed the last one. If Wednesday only makes sense to people who read Monday, you’ve lost half the list.

The same rule applies across a whole year of writing, not just a three-part sequence. Every piece you send should be worth the four seconds on its own, because a good number of your readers will only ever see one of them.

So each installment restates just enough to stand alone.

One sentence of context at the top, done lightly, and then straight into the new part. The reader who’s been following doesn’t mind, and the reader who missed one can still follow.

Here’s a story: [paste it]. My list has three groups: people who joined this month and haven’t bought, people who’ve been reading for six months or more, and people who’ve bought from me before. Write one email for each group using the same story. For the newest group, weight it toward the problem. For the long-time readers, weight it toward proof and what happens next. For past buyers, weight it toward what they can do with this that they couldn’t do before. Keep each under two hundred words.

Send all three and compare the open rates against each other rather than against some benchmark you read on a blog somewhere. Your list is the only list whose behaviour will tell you anything useful about your list.

What you learn from three emails is worth more than a year of reading about what works in general. General advice is written for an average audience, and you don’t have one of those.

The sales page is where a story earns its keep and where most stories are ruined.

It’s ruined by the same instinct every time, which is that a page selling something should sound like it’s selling something.

A story on a sales page has a job the other positions don’t, and it’s a job of removal. The reader arrives with a set of doubts, and the story’s task is to take those doubts off the table before they harden into a reason to leave.

Sit with that for a second, because it changes how you build a page from the ground up.

Stop asking what would be persuasive. Start asking what’s worrying them at this exact point on the page, and then answer that worry with something true.

Doubts are specific and they’re predictable. Will this work for someone like me. Have I tried this before under a different name. Is this person going to disappear once they have my money. Is it going to be more work than I have time for.

Each of those doubts has a story that answers it better than any argument could.

That’s the design principle for a sales page. You’re not decorating the page with a story, you’re placing stories where the doubts are.

The doubt about whether it works for someone like them is answered with a story about somebody like them. Not your best customer. Somebody who started where the reader is standing, with the same disadvantages, told with their starting point included.

The doubt about having tried this before is answered with a story about what you tried that didn’t work, and why this is different.

Naming the thing they already failed at is the only way to prove you’re not about to sell it back to them.

The doubt about whether you’ll vanish afterward is answered with a story about somebody you helped after the sale. It’s a small story and almost nobody tells it, and it removes a doubt that kills a lot of purchases without ever being spoken.

The doubt about price is the one everybody expects and it’s rarely the one that stops the sale.

People find money for things they believe will work. What stops them is doubt about whether it will work for them, and that’s a different problem entirely.

The doubt about time is answered with a story that shows the work being done in a realistic amount of it. Somebody sitting down on a Sunday afternoon and getting through the first part, rather than a fantasy about overnight results.

People find money for things they believe will work.

Place each story next to the section that raises the doubt, and the page starts working differently. The reader’s objection forms and is answered in the same breath, and it never gets the chance to become a decision to leave.

There’s a version of the price doubt that no story can answer, and you should know it so you stop trying. If the buyer truly can’t afford it, nothing you write will change that. Trying to write around it just reads as pressure and costs you their goodwill.

What a story can do is make the price feel proportionate.

A person who has just read about somebody like them getting somewhere is judging the price against that outcome rather than against the number on its own.

Placement is the part most people get wrong, and they get it wrong by putting all the stories in one place. A testimonial section is a pile of stories with no doubts attached to them, which is why readers scroll straight past it.

A story that answers a doubt the reader is having at that exact moment gets read.

The same story, sitting in a block with nine others under a heading, gets skipped, and the difference is entirely about where it sits.

Order the doubts by when they arrive rather than by how important they seem to you. The reader has a sequence, and it starts with whether this applies to them at all and ends with whether they can afford it. Answering price before relevance wastes the answer.

There’s one more story a sales page needs and it goes near the end, after the offer.

It’s the story of what the first week looks like once they’ve bought. Not results, but the ordinary experience of starting, told plainly.

That story does something the others can’t, which is to make buying feel like a small step rather than a leap. A reader who can picture their first Tuesday with your product has already half-started, and starting is the thing they’re afraid of.

There’s one doubt that almost nobody addresses and it costs a surprising number of sales. It’s the doubt about being the sort of person who follows through. They have bought things before and left them unopened, and they remember.

A story about somebody who also left things unopened, and who used this one anyway, answers a doubt they would never say out loud. It works precisely because they were too embarrassed to raise it.

That method is slower to plan and faster to write than starting with a blank page and a headline.

You spend twenty minutes listing doubts and the page assembles itself, because each section has a clear job and you already know what it is.

It also explains why some pages feel long and read fast while others feel short and drag. A page that answers doubts in the order they arise feels like a conversation. A page that lists features feels like an application form.

My offer is [describe it] and my buyer is [describe them]. List the eight reasons this buyer would hesitate to purchase, written in their own words, in the order those reasons would occur to them while reading a sales page. Then, for each reason, tell me what kind of true story would remove that specific doubt, including whose story it should be and what detail it would need to contain to be believed.

Rank the doubts by how many buyers would have them, then put your strongest story against the doubt that stops the most people. Everything else on the page is secondary to that one section.

Most sellers spend their best material on the doubt that bothers them personally, which is usually price. Price is rarely the one stopping the sale, and the good story ends up answering a question nobody was asking.

Almost nobody tells stories after the sale, and the reason is that the sale felt like the finish line.

The money arrived, the job seems done, and whatever gets sent next is usually a receipt and a download link.

The days right after a purchase are the most emotionally loaded days in the whole relationship, and treating them as administrative is a mistake that costs refunds. A person who just spent money is asking themselves, somewhere below the surface, whether they were foolish.

You felt this yourself the last time you bought something expensive online.

The confirmation page loaded, the money left, and there was a small hollow second before anything else happened. That second is where refunds are born.

That question doesn’t announce itself. They don’t write to you and ask for reassurance. They sit with a small unease, and if nothing arrives to settle it, the unease grows into a refund request about four days later.

You can see the shape of it in the refund data of almost any product.

Refunds cluster in the first week, and they cluster there because that’s when the doubt is loudest and the buyer has heard nothing from you to settle it.

A story settles it faster than any onboarding sequence. Not a story about how great your product is, which will make the unease worse, but a story about somebody exactly like them on their first day with it.

Here’s what’s going on underneath, because it isn’t obvious.

The new buyer’s fear is that they’re the wrong kind of person for this. A story about somebody who had the same fear, and started anyway, and got somewhere, takes that fear off them directly.

Notice what that story can’t be. It can’t be about a spectacular result, because a spectacular result deepens the fear. The new buyer reads about somebody’s enormous success and concludes they’ll never manage it, which is the opposite of what you needed.

The story that works is a modest one.

Somebody sat down, they were confused for twenty minutes, they got through the first part, and one small thing worked. That’s all of it, and it’s the most valuable email you’ll ever send a new buyer.

Small stories reassure a new buyer and large ones frighten them off. So send the smallest true story you have of somebody starting, and send it inside the first twenty-four hours while the unease is still taking shape.

Small stories reassure a new buyer and large ones frighten them off.

Timing carries more weight here than the words do. The same story sent on day one settles the unease. Sent on day six, it arrives after the person has already decided they made a mistake, and by then a story is a poor substitute for a refund.

There’s a second story worth sending a week or so in, and it’s about the point where people usually stall. Name the place in your product where buyers commonly get stuck, tell the story of somebody getting stuck there, and tell them what got them past it.

That email does something remarkable to your refund rate, and the reason is simple.

The person who’s currently stuck was on their way to blaming your product, and now they know they’re where everybody gets stuck and that there’s a way through.

There’s a version of this that goes further, and the buyers who receive it tend to remember it for years. You send the story before they hit the wall. It arrives as a warning rather than a rescue, and the wall stops feeling like a wall at all.

Nobody sends that email, because it means admitting your product has a place where people struggle.

Every product has one. Naming it costs you nothing and saves you the buyers who would have given up without a word and asked for their money back.

There’s a third story worth sending, and it goes out around the time they should be finishing. It’s about somebody who completed it and what they did next, and it exists to hand the buyer a reason to keep going once the novelty has worn off.

Post-sale stories do something beyond preventing refunds, and it’s the part that pays off over years. A buyer who felt looked after is a buyer who opens your next launch email with a bias in your favour.

That bias is worth more than any acquisition strategy you could run, and it gets built in the four days right after a purchase.

That’s the exact window almost everybody spends sending nothing but a receipt and a download link.

My product is [describe it]. My buyers are [describe them]. Write me two post-purchase emails. The first goes out within a day of the sale and tells a small, modest story about somebody like them starting for the first time, being briefly confused, and getting one small thing to work. No big results. The second goes out a week later and tells the story of somebody getting stuck at [describe the place people commonly stall], and what got them through it. Keep both warm and plain, with no selling of anything.

Send both emails to yourself first and read them the way a nervous new buyer would read them. If either one makes you feel further behind rather than reassured, the story in it’s too big and you need a smaller one.

Smaller is nearly always the correction. The instinct is to impress a new buyer with what is possible, and what they need on day one is proof that somebody ordinary got started without falling apart.

The last position is the one everybody dreads, which is writing to somebody who stopped opening you.

The instinct is either to pretend nothing happened or to apologise for existing, and both of those are wrong.

Understanding why they drifted is the beginning of writing to them well. It’s rarely because they decided you were bad. Something got busy, an email got missed, and then the next one was easier to ignore because the last one had been.

That’s not rejection, it’s inertia, and a story breaks inertia more easily than an offer ever will. An offer asks them to get up and do something. A story only asks them to read the next sentence.

Treating them as strangers feels wrong and it’s correct.

Whatever relationship you had has gone quiet, and quiet relationships have to be restarted rather than resumed. Picking up where you left off assumes a warmth that’s no longer there.

So the win-back email opens the way a cold ad opens. Inside a moment, with no preamble, describing something they’d recognise. You’re treating a drifted reader closer to a stranger than to a friend, and that’s the correct instinct.

What you don’t do is mention the drift.

No noting that it’s been a while, no observing that they haven’t opened anything, no guilt of any kind. The moment you reference the silence, you’ve made the email about them owing you something.

Nobody responds well to being told they owe you attention. It puts them in the position of having done something wrong. A person who feels slightly accused reaches for the delete key faster than one who feels nothing at all.

So write as though the last six months didn’t happen.

Tell a story, make it good, ask nothing. The whole purpose of the first win-back email is to get one open, and one open is enough to put you back in their habit.

The subject line follows the same rule as the body, which is that it should say nothing about you. It should describe a moment, plainly, the same way a cold ad would, because to this reader you’re effectively a cold advertiser again.

The story you choose for a win-back should be the strongest one you have, and most people do the opposite.

They save the good material for the active list and send the leftovers to the people who need the most convincing.

Turn that around. The drifted reader is the hardest audience you have. They need the best thing you’ve got, and the best thing you’ve got is the story that made you feel something while you were writing it.

The drifted reader is the hardest audience you have.

That instinct comes from a reasonable place. You feel like the good story is wasted on people who might not read it. In practice the active list will read almost anything you send, and the drifted list will read almost nothing, so the good story belongs with them.

Send three of them, spaced a week apart, before you offer anything at all. If somebody opens two out of three, they’re back, and you can write to them normally again. If they open none, you have your answer and you can stop spending on them.

That patience is what separates a win-back that works from one that annoys people into unsubscribing.

Offering something in the first email tells them exactly why you’re writing, and the reason isn’t about them, which they can see immediately.

Clean the list afterward without hesitating. A person who ignored your three best stories isn’t going to be won back by a fourth. Keeping them costs you money every month and drags your open rate down for everybody else.

There’s one more thing about the drifted that changes how much effort you’ll want to spend on them. A person who once bought from you and then went quiet is worth more attention than three new subscribers. They’ve already proven they’ll spend money with you, and that’s the hardest thing to prove.

Which means the win-back sequence deserves your best writing, not your fastest.

Most people give it the least, and then conclude that win-backs don’t work, when what didn’t work was the three minutes they spent on it.

Here’s the strongest story I have: [paste it]. I want to write to people who used to open my emails and stopped. Write three emails, one week apart, that tell this story across the sequence. Don’t mention that they’ve been away, don’t reference the silence in any form, and don’t sell anything in any of the three. Open each one inside a moment. The only job is to be worth reading. Then tell me what a fourth email could offer, if two of the three get opened.

Look at the five positions together and something becomes obvious that isn’t obvious one at a time. The stranger, the subscriber, the buyer, the new customer, and the one who drifted are all the same person at different distances from you.

That simplifies a lot of decisions you’ve been making one at a time and getting wrong. You don’t need a different approach for ads and emails and pages. You need one story and an honest answer about how far away the reader is standing.

The distance is the only variable.

Everything you change between the positions is a response to that distance. The length, the beats, the proportion, and the familiarity in your voice all follow from how far away they’re standing.

That reframing solves a problem people wrestle with for years, which is knowing what tone to take with whom. You stop guessing at tone and start measuring distance, and the tone follows from the answer without you having to think about it.

It also means your library of stories is worth far more than you thought.

The one you published in an email isn’t finished. It has four more jobs to do, and each one only needs a different cut of the same material.

There’s a practical habit that comes out of this and it takes almost no effort. When something you wrote does well, put it in a file marked for reuse rather than letting it disappear into the archive where good writing goes to be forgotten.

Go and look at whatever story of yours performed best this year. It’s sitting in an archive somewhere, used once. It has an ad in it, a sales page section, a first-week email, and a win-back sequence, and none of them have been written yet.

One story can become five videos, each cut for a different moment in the buyer’s journey.

For people who’ve never heard of you, cut a six-second opening that drops them into the problem. For your list, tell the fuller story in 30 to 60 seconds inside an email. On the sales page, place a short clip right beside the objection it answers.

Most marketers stop there. A welcome video in the first week, showing the buyer exactly which file to open first, does more for refunds and reviews than any launch clip. A short “what to do next” video brings drifting customers back without a word about missing them.

Here’s my master story: [paste it]. Plan five short videos from it, one for each stage: a cold social audience, my email list, my sales page, new buyers in their first week, and lapsed subscribers. For each, give me the length, the opening line, one simple scene to generate with an AI video tool, and the single next step the viewer should take.