This is the easiest phone call you’ll ever make. It’s your “Reason To Call.” It’s what you DIDN’T tell them in your letter, post card or your last phone conversation becomes important.

Sure, you’re mailing your best prospects to get them to call you, or at least that’s the objective of the mailing pieces I create for my clients.  And you’re mailing to customers all the time to make sure you keep up your relationship with them, where your calling goals lean towards continually building their confidence, loyalty… and of course to get referrals which is always nice.

Or, maybe you just want them to remember you when they need a quote or have an insurance or financial question.

So, you’re doing everything right, but still… business is slow.  And you’re kind of itching to speak with some of your better prospects because you’re good on the phone and you know how to close additional business.

But you need that key element – that one phrase that is pivotal to the campaign, to tie it all together.  You need that one reason to call.  Here it is:

“Oh, I forgot to mention…”

Yes, it’s the phrase you can pull out that smoothly and subtly lets you in the door.

“When I sent that quote I forgot to mention…”

“In my last post card I forgot to mention…”

“I forgot to mention I’ve written a new paper on…”

“I forgot to mention new coverage has come DOWN in price because…”

“In our last conversation I forgot to mention…”

Now you can feel comfortable to call anyone and tell them what you left out of your letter, post card, call, website, ad, seminar.  Oh, you’re so sorry – you forgot to mention a key point they need to know right now… and here it is.

Maybe in your rush to get your new newsletter to them, it wasn’t included.  Maybe a recent news story triggered this need (“I saw this story in the news tonight and I thought I’d better call you… because I forgot to mention…”)  Maybe a new law created information they need to know right now.

Or maybe in your latest negotiation, your new providers presented information that affects them. And in fact, it just became available (“I was speaking with one of our new providers earlier today and he advised me of a change in your policy — I thought you’d want to know about right away because I forgot to mention this in…”)

I write about marketing with letters and post cards all the time.  However, the phone is one of the best marketing tools you can use.  But unless you use the phone in a tightly controlled way it can fast become a burden to you, and an annoyance to clients.

By using this key phrase and spacing out calls at only so many per day, it becomes an effective tool to build business, relationships and longevity into accounts — without stress.

The “Oh, I forgot to mention…” technique is an incredible tool for a less stressed environment using the telephone.  It’s also great for getting past gatekeepers: simply say the reason you’d like to speak with your customer or prospect is about your last letter to him – something you forgot to mention… and your sure they’ll feel it’s important.  Gets you right through.  Any questions?

- Jeffrey

©2010All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

Mary called from Baltimore with a question about her web site. She wanted to know what was wrong with it. She had worked hard to put up a site to promote her business but she wasn’t generating enough revenue with it.

Mary had made the mistake that almost every small business owner makes; she was focused on the wrong numbers and it was keeping her from reaching her business goals.

Everyone wants to see growth in sales and net revenue. It’s important for small business owners to set income goals and to watch sales results, but too much emphasis on these numbers can prevent you from reaching your goals.

Using your revenue figure to guide your business strategic marketing is like driving by looking in the rear view mirror the whole time. That number tells you where you’ve been. It doesn’t tell you how to get where you want to go.

There are a couple of key numbers and ratios to keep in front of you that will help you get to your sales ‘destination’.

Like an Iowa farmer growing soybeans, you’ve got to carefully plant seeds and nurture plants to maturity to ensure a good harvest and a good profit. The amount of seed you plant and the percentage that germinates and grows well determines your farm’s profitability. The same is true in marketing and sales; the number or leads you generate and the number you convert to sales determine your income.

These are the two most important numbers to pay attention to in small business strategic marketing. Use them to evaluate your marketing and determine how many sales you’ll generate:

1. The number of qualified prospects in your database.
These are people who’ve told you they have a concern or problem you can help them with and who want to hear from you again.

2. Your prospect to client conversion rate
The percentage of qualified prospects you convert to paying clients.

The math is simple; the more qualified prospects you have and the higher your conversion rates, the more revenue you’ll generate.

Stop wasting time on marketing that maintains the status quo and discover a way to market that brings in more and more prospects and clients. You could let another year go by and still be stuck in the same situation, or you could do something about it today.

Discover a marketing plan and a marketing strategy that works >>

Your sales will stay frozen at present levels if you focus on how much revenue you’re making and ignore the importance of building your list of qualified prospects. You could double your business in the next few months by building your database of qualified prospects and improving your conversion rates.

Business Marketing Numbers
You don’t need to be a math wiz to become an expert at marketing math. Pay attention to these numbers on a weekly basis;

• The number of people who saw your ads, read your articles or received your mailings.

• The percentage of these people that responded to your ad or article. It’s not how many ads you run, but how many people pay attention to your ads that matters.

• The percentage of respondents that actually gave you their contact information and added themselves to your database. These are the people who have identified themselves as qualified prospects who are interested in learning more.

If you’re marketing through your web site, it’s incredibly simple to identify these numbers daily and weekly to track the success of your marketing. Here’s how;

1. Look at the number of unique visitors to your web site daily or weekly.

2. Divide this number by the number of people who contacted
you. This is your conversion rate of site visitors to qualified prospects. If your site is set up correctly, at least one out of ten people should be contacting you and adding themselves to your list of qualified prospects.

If you use Google Ads to drive visitors to your site, you can send visitors to specific landing pages and increase your conversion rate to 20 or even 25%.

What should you expect from your web site? For every hundred unique visitors to your site per week, 10 to 25 should be sending you an email requesting more information about your products and services. Each month your list of qualified prospects and your sales should grow.

Before you finish this article, make a commitment to apply this simple marketing math to grow your business. Set a goal for your business. Look at how many qualified prospects your marketing is currently generating.

Write this number down, then put a diagonal line across it and next to it write down the number of qualified prospects you want to add to your database each week.

I’ve been doing this little exercise for two years with my current web site. My goals for acquiring qualified prospects get larger each month as my business grows. My goal for the first quarter is 450 500 new prospects per week.

What’s your prospect acquisition goal?

Ready to finally discover how to reach and exceed your marketing goals this year? Get the one small business marketing tool that has been proven over and over again to help people like you grow their businesses by 50% or 200% in just a couple of months.

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©2010All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

In 2008, I began incorporating stories in communications with my subscribers and customers.  As it turns out, stories are an incredibly powerful way to communicate – especially in today’s age of marketing communications saturation, where everyone is so fatigued by the constant bombardment of ads.

So, I decided to try a few story-based campaigns back then – tests designed to find out for certain just how well this story-based approach to marketing works.  In short, the results were truly remarkable, as applied to one of my niche online businesses – an online training and membership club site.

I had been emailing my subscriber list of around 25,000 regularly since 2004 (a list that still steadily grows), but I had noticed the list had become increasingly unresponsive in 2007 and 2008.  I thought at first there might be an email deliverability issue, due to spam filters, for example.

The biggest issue was in how I was communicating with this audience and how they had “tuned out”.

In short, they were simply “bored” – tired of the same old dry offers, advertisements, free giveaway promotions, and regular communications like newsletters – what a friend of mine affectionately calls “SOS” (same old stuff).

He says that unless we’re really careful, most of today’s communications ends up in the SOS bucket in people’s mind – they quickly recognize the form factor of an email, landing page or sales page as an advertisement or a cleverly disguised promotion designed to sell them something and just filter it out.

I agree with that assessment.  The old models are just that – old, boring and largely ineffective in this new age of personal channel communications.

Today, people want content – content that’s interesting and useful to them – that meets their own selfish desires as consumers.  Yet as marketers, we have our own selfish needs – to promote our products and services.

So, how can we get our message through these increasingly sophisticated “filters” that our prospects and customers have erected to protect their time from being constantly invaded and to avoid being sold?

Short Answer:  Story.

Stories provide an “envelope” within which we can deliver our messages – an envelope that will actually get opened, its contents read, understood, remembered, and even repeated by word of mouth and acted upon.

Not just any stories will work.  To succeed, stories must be interesting and relevant – and provide an appropriate context for learning about what we have to offer – but without hard or soft-selling.

For example, relevant stories about authentic customer successes (not some dry, boring “case study”) are interesting to both business people and consumers.

Personal stories about what we’ve been through that our readers can use to relate to us as fellow human beings are even more powerful.  Stories of our biggest triumphs – and our biggest failures and lessons learned – are another favorite.

Stories make use human to our readers.  And people will make time to listen to a good story!

Stories help to build trust with our readers.  And properly-crafted stories build a relationship – one that creates enough interest and desire to cause our reader to actually want to listen to what we have to say.

The key is in how we carefully weave our marketing messages into these stories so they are readily consumed by our readers – while our readers are in a receptive frame of mind.

So, back to my story here…

I sent an email to my subscribers, telling the story of one of our members who was frustrated and desperate for a solution.  The story took my readers through the emotions this person experienced, creating empathy and the desire to see the situation resolved.

Then the story shared the solution – how this person discovered this site, which helped him overcome what had seemed like insurmountable obstacles – by joining a particular membership site, meeting like-minded people and learning to avoid the costly mistakes that he had been making, it virtually turned his life around.

The support this member received from other members on our site via our private forums, as well as direct personal assistance by one of the site’s coaches who reached out and helped this member, was the key to his rapid turnaround.

At the end of this story, our member had transitioned from being a “drifter”, losing thousands of dollars a month, to being a respectable “member” who was paying off credit card debts and enjoying thousands of dollars in excess profits – in just 6 weeks.

As soon as I published a couple of these stories, a number of things happened:

1. Our blog started getting comments – people were now interested enough to get involved, and THEY became a part of the story themselves.  This provided my readers with an outlet – a way to be heard, to share their feelings and points of view.  Prior to this story, the site’s blog had rarely garnered any participation by its readers (who were obviously bored to tears with my random ramblings and musings before that).
2. Our private membership site forums came alive – our members became more passionate, engaged, starting talking more about the site, and referring more of their friends to join us.
3. Sales started pouring in. Our new sales during the month we sent just two of these email stories to our subscribers tripled.  Let me say that again.  We TRIPLED our sales – by sending just two stories to our subscribers over a 2-week period!

Over that same quarter, these same stories doubled our sales.  That’s when I knew for certain that I was on to something important and valuable.

Now, there’s an art to crafting stories so they have the desired effect, and combining the power of the storytelling with social media to produce an interactive environment that creates and fuels “social proof” – one of the by-products that causes increased sales results.

Story-telling in marketing communications is something that companies need to do more of.  Our listeners, prospects and customers are tired of the SOS and broadcast style communications we’ve grown accustomed to using with them.

I have used this story-based marketing methodology long enough now to say for certain that it really does work – and it works surprisingly well, too.  Since 2008, I have learned a lot more about the key underpinnings responsible for these methods’ success – a combination of story-telling, relationship-building and authenticity.

Storytelling provides marketers with a way to show up in people’s personal channels and fit in naturally.  Good stories are interesting, engaging content that commands an audience’s attention.  And stories can teach people about the virtues of your product or service without selling.  People learn by way of example by reading stories and seeing how others have applied a product or service in their business or life.

When your company, product or service is involved in a story, it gets noticed.  People pay attention to it because it’s an integral part of the story.  So we can use stories to convey our marketing message in a much softer, more subtle way so that our messages actually get heard, consumed and acted upon.

Finally, the reason stories work so well is that it “frames” the decision-making processes within our prospects mind – setting up a framework for that decision-making that creates influence over how facts are interpreted and how decisions are made – “implicitly” instead of explicitly.

Explicit decisions are what traditional advertising attempts to do – to “sell you” into submission through repeated exposures, compelling copy, impressive claims, strong benefit statements, great offers and solid calls to action.  While these traditional methods certainly have their place, it’s increasingly difficult to use these traditional approaches as the “starting point” – or we risk falling into the SOS bucket and being ignored.

Implicit decisions happen when we’ve shared a few authentic stories with our prospect, and she decides for herself that she wants to take action.  She makes her own decision to take action, without the need for prodding, cajoling or hard-selling tactics.  And once she makes this kind of decision, she’s much more passionate and active than if we’d pushed her into taking an action *we* wanted or requested directly.

Incidentally, if this success story sounds interesting and like something you or your company could benefit from learning to incorporate into your marketing campaigns, let’s discuss how to craft a story-based campaign for your business.

See how that works?

I hope you find the power of story as interesting and useful as I have in connecting with people who are tuned into their personal channels.

- Rick

©2010All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

Stuart from Colorado had talked to a number of marketing firms and gotten estimates for designing and printing his marketing materials and building a web site for his business producing promotional cds. One firm quoted $100,000 to build his web site alone. He sensed something was missing or wrong, but couldn’t put his finger on it, so he called me.

I asked Stuart how the various marketing pieces and activities were going to work together to help him generate leads. I asked him what his business marketing strategy was. He drew a blank. The small business marketing firms he had talked to had provided detailed information on what they were going to produce for him, but none had discussed a coordinated plan to generate leads and sales.

Marketing without an integrated strategy is like playing poker, tennis or football without knowing the rules, keeping score or having a game plan. You could put in a lot of time, energy, and capital, and still end up losing the game. Has this happened to you?

Winning at business is the same as any other game, whether your objective is to beat the competition or just to be the best in your industry. To be successful, you need to know the rules of the game, have a clear strategy and track your progress.

Learn how to attract more clients to succeed at the small business marketing game >>

The Rules for Winning at Strategic Marketing and Sales
Here are some of the most essential rules to follow to succeed at marketing your business.

1. Written goals are motivating and can help you succeed. Define your objectives for revenue, lead generation and conversion rates for the year and then break those down for each quarter. Commit them to writing. Next list the weekly and daily tasks you and/or your employees need to accomplish in order to reach your goals.

2. The more qualified prospects you can attract, the more clients you’ll have. A clearly defined lead generation strategy will bring in the new prospects you need to be profitable.

3. It’s easier to convert prospects to clients when they are looking to solve a problem. It’s much harder to convert people who don’t have a current need or concern, even if they are members of your target market. Instead of seeking prospects, prompt prospects to look for you.

4. You’ll get a better response from marketing messages that are focused on client problems and concerns, not on your credentials or descriptions of products and processes. If you’re not getting the response you’d like from your mailings, ads or web site, take a second look at your marketing message. A few changes in your marketing copy can increase response by factors of ten or more.

5. Integrate your tactics and message across your marketing materials, ads, and web site to prompt people to seek you out and contact you. Trying to generate leads without an integrated strategy is like playing football without a set of plays for the quarterback to use with the team. He’d end up throwing the ball only to find the receiver had gone the other direction or go for a field goal on the first down.

6. The purpose of having a web site is to generate leads. Once you have a lead you can use it to generate sales. Once you get prospects to your web site or reading your marketing materials, make sure you prompt them to contact you.

7. Most sales are the result of a relationship based on your credibility and the value of your products or services. Developing these relationships can take weeks or months to build. Your marketing strategy should facilitate this process of building relationships over time, with multiple opportunities for contacting prospects.

8. The easiest people to sell to are past customers. Prompt first time clients to buy from you again and again.

Keeping Score
In order to know if your strategic marketing is working you need ways of keeping score. Which marketing results are you tracking? Which additional ones should you define each month and quarter to track? Keep track of these important ’scores’ to evaluate your
marketing:

1. How many prospects seek your firm out each month? Is this number growing each month by five to ten percent?

2. What percentage of people who are exposed to your ads, your web site and other marketing materials give you their contact information so you can stay in touch with them?

3. How many people are on your house list of qualified prospects? How fast is this list growing each month?

4. How many people buy from you each week? What is the dollar volume of each sale?

5. How many sales come from repeat customers?

Whether we’re talking poker, tennis, or marketing your small business, the objective is to improve your performance and succeed more often. When you have a game plan, know the rules and track your scores, you can continually find ways to improve your marketing and be more successful.

- Charlie

©2010All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

It was the tweet heard around the nation. Movie Director, Kevin Smith, tweeted that he had been booted off an Southwest Airlines flight. He was mad because flight personnel said he was too fat to fly.

He tweeted during the ordeal and posted pictures of himself. It happened faster than any news crew could have reacted without being on the flight poised for the story. Twitter is a PR liablity to be reckoned with.

Was Smith really too fat to fly? Allegedly, Smith’s girth expanded into the seat next to him, which of course was not convenient for the other passenger. Southwest officials said as a safety measure, Smith needed to purchase another seat to handle his alleged extra poundage which was not available.

So airline personnel asked him to deplane in order to accommodate him on a flight where he could have more space. No harm no foul – right? Well, not with the all-in-one marketing proliferator/slash business nemesis known as Twitter on standby 24 hours a day.

When someone is asked to get off a plane because they are deemed too fat, embarrassment sets in and rage follows. Now you are in Twitter bashing territory.

The availability of social media makes it incredibly easy for customers or clients to create a perfect storm of bad pr. It is very important to do all you can to prevent customers from being so enraged with your business practices that they take their grievances to the web and possibly ruin your reputation or make your life a living hell.

So what’s the lesson here?

Best Business Mastery Tip: Make sure you establish a policy for sensitive issues and ask your customers to read it and sign it. Train your employees to know it from beginning to end and enforce it all times. Print copies of it to hand to your customers on the spot when an action is questioned.

Policies are not going to prevent anger, but they will certainly demonstrate to your customers that they are not being singled out. With a signed policy in hand it will be harder for your customers to tweet in anger when they fail to abide by it.

- Shakira

©2010All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

We each have both strengths and weaknesses in every job we do. Our strengths are the things we are naturally good at and the weaknesses are the things we can only ever make limited progress in. For managers and team leaders, the aim of understanding people’s strengths is to help people excel.

Here are 7 ways to use people’s strengths:

1. Help People To Discover Their Strengths

Most people do not know what they are naturally good at. They either don’t believe they are better at something than others, or they have been led to believe that they should be good at a range of things regardless of their personal talents. Awakening people to their inherent strengths can be an eye-opener for many people. It is one of the key tasks of the modern-day manager.

2. Get People To Appreciate What They Are Good At

If you want to discover what you are uniquely good at, answer the following 5 questions:

a. what do you love doing?
b. what things come easy to you?
c. what things do you look forward to doing?
d. what things do others say you do well?
e. what tasks make you feel good?

Now, just ask the same questions of those in your team.

3. Build on People’s Strengths

The wise people manager does two things. First, they get people to identify their strengths from reviewing past performance. Then they look for ways to get the person to do more of what they are good at. In doing this, appraisers get both superior performance and motivated employees.

4. Combine People With Complementary Strengths

People sometimes wonder what makes a winning team. The answer almost certainly lies in bringing people together who have complementary strengths and are allowed to do work that uses their respective strengths. So, in a good team, you can have a natural-born leader fighting for the team; a natural-born grafter who likes to do the donkey work; and a natural-born coordinator who has a gift for creating team spirit. Then, all you have to do is to let them loose on the things they’re good at.

5. Get People To Excel

When you get people to do more of what they are naturally good at, you work “with the grain” of people not against it. It is like paddling a canoe with the current rather than against it. When you allow people to go where their natural gifts take them, they do all the running because they want to. You’ll quickly discover that, when you do this, people do what they love and love what they do. And, in performance terms, they’ll excel with surprising ease.

6. Help People Discover Their Weaknesses

Just as there are indicators to people’s strengths, so there are indicators to people’s weaknesses. If you want to discover what your weaknesses are, answer the following 5 questions:

a. what do you dread doing?
b. what things do you put off?
c. what tasks rarely get easier?
d. what tasks provoke anxiety in you?
e. what tasks make you feel inadequate?

Now, just ask the same questions of those in your team.

7. Manage the Weaknesses

Many managers want their team to be good at everything. But this is a mistake. First, you divert people from focusing on their strengths. And second you waste time trying to turn weaknesses into strengths. Weaknesses will always be weaknesses whatever you do. It is like forcing rabbits to swim, (they hate it), instead of developing their skills at hopping, (which they love). Instead, manage the weaknesses, either by limiting them to the bare minimum or by giving them to somone else for whom they are strengths.

As a manager of people, there can be no greater service you can do to someone than to help them discover their strengths and then build on them. It is like discovering diamonds in rocks and polishing them until they sparkle.

- Eric

©2010All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

“Who was that?,” my son Evan asked. We were standing out on our front lawn, throwing a football, and Evan had just seen me smile and wave to a passing minivan.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t have my glasses on, and I can’t see through the tinted windshield anyway. I wave at everyone who drives by.”

Evan gave this some thought, and then, with the precise blending of disdain and amusement that teenagers reserve exclusively for their parents, said, “So, are you getting to be an old guy now?”

The answer, of course, is yes, but that’s not really the point. I wave at passing neighbors because while I can’t usually tell who they are as they drive by, they always know who I am, as I stand there in front of my house. The way I look at it, I’d rather wave to a stranger than ignore a friend.

When it comes to my business, I apply this very same “old guy waving to the neighbors” approach.

What I mean, is that if you call or e-mail me, and you can successfully string together a couple of friendly sentences, I’m happy to interact. I don’t need to know much about who you are, or whether you might one day become a paying client. Drive by, and I’ll wave to you.

Not everyone agrees with this approach. Some of my professional service colleagues consider this kind of behavior an enormous waste of time; time that could be better spent with paying clients, or at the very least, with qualified prospects.

Many (I won’t name names) even take explicit steps to “discourage the freeloaders.” Things like screening all inbound calls (and only returning the “important ones”), not replying to emails, and posting rules on their web sites about how long they’ll chat before the door slams shut and the meter starts.

Not me. I just wave to everyone.

The funny thing is (and I have to confess that I came upon this insight accidentally, since I just happen to like chatting with people), many of those who initially get in touch with a question or problem end up hiring me months – or even years – later.

What I’ve discovered is that “waving to people” (i.e. answering a few questions and/or pointing people in the right direction, with no attempt to sell them anything), is actually an incredibly effective way to acquire new clients. They get a free sample, and I, simply by picking up the phone or dashing off a quick e-mail, grow my business.

But what about the guy who keeps calling… burning your time, bending your ear, expecting to get something for nothing? You know what, I’ve heard about that guy, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually met him. Most people are unbelievably respectful and courteous.

Here’s the bottom line: It’s true that if you stand at the front door, only letting in those who are ready to write a check, you won’t “waste much time.” What you will do, however, is cut off lots of future revenue generating opportunities in the process. A better approach, I think, is to invite everybody in, answer a few questions, and send them happily on their way, secure in the knowledge that some of them (or their friends) will be back.

If your experience is anything like mine, not only will you have more business, you just might end up with more friends too.

- Michael

©2010All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

One of my favorite places to go is my printer. Tony Grech and Paul Degrazia, co-owners of Grecko Printing in Plymouth, MI make it a point to create an upbeat and energetic atmosphere for their clients and their employees.

When you walk into their lobby, it is alive with activity, sound and eye popping color displays. Everything from the mascot, a live gecko by the name of “Grecko”, to their clients laughter that echoes throughout the building.  Tony, Paul and crew do their best to make it an enjoyable experience to do business with Grecko Printing.

People like to have fun. They like to be able to enjoy them­selves. One of the best opportunities for pleasure can occur when they do business with your company or organiza­tion.

Laughter is one of the few languages that is spoken by every human being. When your customers are met by cheerful, personable, and positive employees, chances are those custom­ers will enjoy spending their money and do even more business with you.

Let’s examine the psychology behind that kind of thinking. One of the main reasons why customers quit doing business with a company is a feeling of indifference they receive from the frontline personnel that serve them. Many times, your custom­ers take personally the type of service they receive.

If they receive poor service, it can very easily be interpreted as a form of personal rejection. Conversely, if it is very good service, it can be interpreted as a sign of respect and acceptance. Naturally, our customers prefer the latter form of service.

Taking this discussion one step further, when a person experi­ences joy or laughter, endorphins are released from the brain. An “endorphin” is a natural morphine-like substance that is produced within the human body. It creates a euphoric-like state that allows a person to experience physical and mental feelings of pleasure. A person feels good.

In a similar way, when a person receives the kind of service that can be interpreted as a sign of respect and acceptance, he or she can actually experience a release of endorphins. Thus, when a customer comments to you on how they like doing business with your company, recognize that there is more to it than just words.

What does all of this have to do with your business? The key is to let the fun side of your personality show. Your example will serve as a good role model as well as a reminder for your employees and co-workers. By setting the pace in your business in terms of behavior, your customers, employees and co-workers will appre­ciate it.

The little poem that follows illustrates the point:

By filling your shop with smiles
your customers will come for miles
Ahh, but alas,
if it’s a frown upon your face
your customers will shop
some other place
- Tom Borg

- Tom

©2010All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

You slaved over writing an ad or sales letter, and you really thought it was going to work miracles. But then, the moment of truth comes, and your ad did poorly. You’re left wondering if it’s the economy, or the media you advertised in or if your competitors are outflanking you. Does this sound familiar?

You can’t control the economy or what your competitors or suppliers do for the most part. But you can control your advertising. And one of the single-best ways to turbo-charge your advertising is by making your ads more emotional. What do I mean by “more emotional?”

You see, there’s an old axiom in sales that goes like this, “Buying decisions are based upon emotion and backed up by logic.” This isn’t just the opinion of a bunch of grizzled old sales veterans; it’s based on Behavioral Psychology.

There are two primary reasons why you want to make your advertising more emotional. The first is because getting a human being you’ve never met before to read your ad is a feat in of itself. Most ads that are not emotional are dull and boring, consequently those ads will not sell for you.

The second reason is when you know how to get a hold of someone by his or her emotions; you can dramatically increase the probability that they will buy. So how do you do this? Start by removing jargon and complex concepts from your advertising. Try to replace most multi-syllable words with simple, one or two-syllable words. Replace left-brain, logic-oriented words with emotional words. Here are a few examples:

Replace “accelerate” with “speed up”

Replace “donate” with “give”

Replace “immediately” with “right now”

Replace “ill” with “sick”

Replace “learn” with “find out”

Replace “difficult” with “tough”

This is just a small example of words you can replace. You can also use dashes and ellipses throughout your ad for more emotional impact. Here’s an example:

“Hurry – before this sale expires at midnight.”

Another way to make your copy more emotional is by inserting stories or metaphors into them. You can also use moving pictures. You can also work to stir anger, jealousy, excitement, hope and love by the words you write.

It’s important to make what you’re selling seem exciting (emotional) but many people end up using too many exclamation marks. By using too many exclamation marks, you hurt your credibility and the value of your exclamation marks is reduced.

Don’t think that emotional advertising works only for B2C markets, it certainly works for B2B. Most people don’t realize this, so this gives you an instant advantage if you can properly make your advertising more emotional than the competition’s.

- Mike

©2010All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

So, you think you know how to write press releases?

Answer true or false to the following statements:

• I write press releases primarily to encourage journalists at newspapers and magazines to write articles about my company, or for broadcasters who will feature us on the news or invite us as guests on talk shows.

• I write press releases only when I have legitimate news that the media think will be worth covering.

• Because journalists are busy and don’t have time to read long press releases, my releases are always as short as possible.

• I try to include “who, what, when, where, why and how” high in the press release, preferably the first paragraph, so journalists don’t have to spend valuable time hunting for it.

• When I write a release and journalists never print it, or I get no calls for interviews, I chalk it up as a failure. Then I start all over again and find something better to write about so I can get the media coverage I need.

• I measure the success of my press releases by the number of clippings I have generated, or the number of TV and radio shows that have covered my organization.

Now, give yourself one point for every statement that you marked as true. Now tally up your points.

If you scored 5 or higher, you’re writing press releases the old way–only for journalists–and you’re completely overlooking an audience that you should be targeting with your message: the end user who will find your press releases online, read them, and buy what you’re selling, even if journalists think your story isn’t worthy of their time and attention.

If your score is 1 to 4, you’re doing some things right but you’re still missing the chance to really make your press releases as effective as possible.

If you scored zero, congratulations! You understand why you are writing press releases. You’re writing them not only for journalists, but for people who are in a position to buy your products and services. Twenty years ago, the old way worked just fine. Today, thanks to the Internet, everything we’ve learned about writing press releases has changed.

- Joan

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