YOUTUBE STORYTELLING TECHNIQUE 14/10 -PAYOFFS. Payoffs are rewards for promises made in your video. They’re how you make viewers trust and love your content. How to use? Let’s say you watch a video teaching a strategy to grow your business. And the strategy actually worked. You’d feel great about the video and subscribe to the channel. Even watch other videos made by the creator. This is what happens when you create videos that have good payoffs. Now, there are two types of payoffs. The major payoff and the mini payoff. The major payoff is the main reason the viewer clicked the video. The recipe, the strategy, the interview, the challenge. The mini payoff is one of the steps that lead to the major payoff. Think of a staircase. The major payoff is at the top of the stairs. Your mini payoffs are the individual steps that viewers climb towards it. Structuring your scripts like this is very important because, in my experience, this boosts retention. Also, the National Institute for Social Media stated in their study on the psychology of viewer retention that viewers must experience micro rewards, or they will lose focus and conclude that your video is boring. Even if you had the best content planned. Now, let’s talk about major payoffs. Two rules should guide how you treat major payoffs. > First, only promise what you can deliver. If you don’t really have a strategy that can save people’s businesses, don’t promise it, okay? > Two, deliver what you promised in the best way possible. This differs according to niche. It could be better depth or better storytelling. Now, on to mini payoffs. Let’s bring back the staircase analogy again. Obviously, you don’t climb one step, and you’re suddenly at the top. It usually takes a couple of steps to scale the stairs. Treat your mini payoffs this way. You need to stack them until you get to the major payoff. To do this, burn this scripting structure into your head. "Setup - Delay - Payoff - Setup" Your mini payoffs need to be teased before they’re shown/narrated. For example, your video teaches personal brands a strategy for growing on X. Before this major payoff (the strategy) is taught, a good mini payoff is 5 things brands need to stop doing with their accounts for the strategy to work. The setup would basically introduce this. The delay is during your teaching/showing, and the payoff is that viewers are now aware of 5 things they didn’t know 2 minutes ago. For entertainment videos, you’re not teasing knowledge. What you’re doing is introducing a problem/obstacle with your setup. The delay is the process of scaling the obstacle. The payoff is the resolution of this problem. For example: Your main character wants to get a picture of Mr Beast. The first setup/obstacle is knowing Mr Beast’s schedule. Achieving this or pivoting to another plan is the payoff. You understand now? Every big channel in every niche has good payoffs. You watch their videos because they always deliver their promise. In other words, the major payoff. And it’s always interesting to watch them deliver the promises. In other words, the mini payoffs. Master payoffs and you’d be like them. Rule of thumb: Major payoffs are how you get the click. Mini payoffs are how you get the retention.