SCARY is an initialism that stands for Situation, Cause, Answer, Result and Your Turn.
These are different phases that your content piece must guide your reader’s attention through. Write up the content piece in this order and you’re guaranteed to have a more persuasive and higher converting piece in your hands.
How the SCARY Technique works
- Situation refers to the problem that they have at the moment. It describes how their world is broken and what they can do to fix it.
- The Cause section examines the root cause problem that leads to the Situation. It explains why the root cause is making the customers miserable.
- Then, you talk about the Answer. The Answer is usually the product, offer, service, solution, idea, network, whatever it is that you want to sell, and it is positioned as a solution to the problem that the customer is facing.
- In the Results section, you talk about the future. You speak about paradise and a world where the problems don’t exist. Show how your customer’s life will be once they have implemented your solution.
- And finally, you wrap it up with Your Turn. Invite your customer to take a significant action. This could be something as simple as a question for them to think about, an action you want them to take, or the next step in your conversion funnel.
I often use this to structure my persuasive emails, videos and workshops.
Here’s a video that explains it again.
Here’s an example of a content piece created using this structure. I’ve highlighted the sections accordingly.
Example Content (Sent as an email)
Hey XXXX!
I was speaking to my customers last week when I noticed that there was a recurring pattern.
Many of them were trying to build out a business in terms of their authority and their expertise, but most of them didn’t have an audience, and quite often they were feeling stuck.
As I was doing these discovery calls, I realized that most of them had fantastic ideas, powerful ideas that could change the world. But then again, they didn’t have any traction.
It broke my heart because I’ve been there. I’ve been in that place where I’m doing a ton of hard work, but there is no payoff.
After making plenty of mistakes, and by speaking to plenty of founders, I realized that there is a fundamental cause that’s leading to all this headache.
Founders are ignoring the power of marketing.
A combination of a skills gap and a strategy gap leads to founders missing a connection with their audience.
In my conversations, it became clear that many founders, though well-intentioned, were just looking at trees all day, not having the time, or the mental bandwidth, or the opportunity, or even the right lens to look at the forest.
That’s why I created Marketing Coaching as a service.
It’s essentially a service that’s designed to unlock bottlenecks in marketing.
It’s a way for me to help founders grow and amplify their voice.
When my clients have implemented this, they have not experienced massive growth in audience.
I’ll be honest about that.
What they have done is they’ve been able to get their first few clients. They have been able to increase their sales. They’ve been able to talk about their ideas in a way that makes sense to their ideal audience.
Best of all, they’ve been able to see a world where the results that they’re getting is commensurate to the work that they do.
Now, if you are in such a place where you feel that you’re just spinning wheels, and you’re just stuck, and you’re not able to get that traction you want, I’m going to recommend that you check out Marketing Coaching.
It’s one of the fastest ways to apply growth.
One of the easiest ways, and the least painless ways for you to transform your business into something that’s not just something that you’re playing around with after working on the weekends, but something that can become a way of life.
Book a call with me below.
https://puttheplayerfirst.com/chat
Talk soon da.
Arv