If you’re not familiar with “All My Children,” it’s a long-running American soap opera.
Most posts with a title like that would compare characters in the show, and how they behave, to some aspect of marketing.
This isn’t one of those posts.
Instead, I’m going to talk about how soap operas work, how they keep their audience for years and years, and how you can apply those techniques to your own marketing.
Soap operas started with a closer relationship to marketing than you may think. The program was incidental. The real purpose was so that the sponsors and producers could sell.. soap!
So, it was important (for the sponsors) that viewers returned every day to watch the next episode. In order to do that, they needed a way to end each day’s story without really ending it.
Use a Cliffhanger
The soaps often used cliffhangers, ending a day’s episode at a shocking or scandalous point. You had to tune in the next day to find out what happened. Each show would move the story forward, but only a little bit, so you had to keep coming back for more.
They also used overlapping stories. One day an affair, the next day, a terrible illness. To find out if the character recovered, you had to tune in again. Same thing if you had to know whether the cheating spouse would be discovered.
Make Your Own Series
For example, set up a series of blog posts. This can be a three-part series on writing a creative brief. Or, a ten part series on getting your blog up and running.
Or, create an auto-responder. An auto-responder is a message that’s sent automatically from your email box. It could be a reply to an inquiry (we got your message, we’ll get back to you!), a confirmation of an order, or a series of lessons (an e-course) delivered over the course of several days or weeks.
The continuing story (or series of posts, or classes) keep your readers loyal. They come back to find out what happens next or to get the rest of the lessons.
(More on auto-responders tomorrow – see, it’s a cliffhanger! You have to come back to find out the details).
What other aspects of soap operas can be adapted to marketing? Scandals? Controversy? Outrageous stunts? Have you tried any of them? How well did they work?
Image thanks to morguefile
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