The ultimate story telling formula for your Instagram content and captions

If you’ve ever sat down to create an email, a piece of content or a caption for your Instagram post, you may have struggled with what words to use and how to structure it.

I want to share with you a simple framework for better storytelling in your content.

Let’s go!

You can skip the read and watch the video here:

Story telling Method SOAR

Storytelling is one of the most effective ways to create content.

It really is a way to grab the attention of your audience, tell a story of transformation, and lead into a call to action. But how is it done?

I want to share with you one of the most effective frameworks or storytelling methods you can use in your content, whether that’s captions, your Instagram stories, videos, blog posts or emails.

That framework or that formula is S.O.A.R.

S stands for Situation

The S in source stands for situation. This is where you want to frame the situation that is happening in your story.

For example, I might share with you a story about me wanting to start my own business. I’ll start this story off with a little anecdote about when I was 25, I started to think about what it might be like to start my own business.

This is me framing history and time and my thinking around starting my own business. This is developing the situation that my story is going to be about.

O stands for for Obstacle

The next portion of this formula is O, which stands for obstacle. This is what got in the way of the situation and what is causing a problem, whether that’s for you in the story or the person you’re talking about.

You want to talk about what the obstacle is that’s causing the problem in the story. If I’m talking about my dream of starting a business, what my obstacle might have been is not knowing what type of business to create.

After situation and obstacle, we want to paint a picture of what actions can be taken or what action you took.

A is for Action

Whether you’re talking about a client’s story, your story, or a potential story of your audience, you can use action to paint the picture of how this problem is going to be resolved in your story or in this situation.

With my example of wanting to start a business and the problem of that situation being that I didn’t know how to do it, what type of business to create, and that I didn’t think I had enough time, the action would be that I started my own blog just to explore my creativity.

To explore what it would be like to create content around things that I enjoyed so that I could explore what type of potential business I wanted to create.

R is for Results

Last but not least in this framework is R, which stands for results.

Within your storytelling and within this framework, results are how you paint a picture of what can happen or what did happen once someone was in this situation, had this obstacle and took action.

What results did they get or what results could they get?

This is a great framework and a way to end with a call to action.

In my example where I’m talking about my journey of wanting to start a business, discovering what it is that I want, the action that I took was starting a blog so that I could learn a little more about what I might be interested in and what things I might want to talk about on a blog.

The result that I ended up with was having a blog that grew an audience naturally and organically around things that I was interested in and that I had a passion for.

It led me to launch my own online business of stock photography and canva templates for other small business owners online.

Remember to end your SOAR with a Call to action

This leads to the call to action for the viewer that if they would like to learn how to create content for their own small online business, they can join my free stock photos membership at the link in my bio or wherever this content is.

You can use this framework really anywhere, whether it’s in your email, on a blog post, in your Instagram stories, on a reel or in Instagram content, you can use this formula for any great content that you want to create.

Let’s recap that.

That’s S-O-A-R. Situation, obstacle, action, and results.

If you were ever struggling with writing or creating content that leads naturally into your call to action or you’re looking for a type of content to create for your audience so that you can grow more leads or get more sales, use the soar formula.

This framework will help you tell stories, whether that’s the story of your audience, the story of a past client or your own personal story.

Now that you know more, I have one last tip for you. You can get your hands on free canva templates and exclusive stock photos plus more strategies exclusive to the Ivory Mix community and it’s completely free.

There’s up to five hundred resources there for you, and you can get a link to it here.

If you like this blog post, let me know what your favorite part was and share it with your fellow content creators. If you do share it to Instagram stories, be sure to tag me so that I see it, because I may just feature you in my Instagram stories as well.

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