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Tag: Tips

  • Ten Tips & Truths For Marketers

    Ten Tips & Truths For Marketers

    For those of you who are marketers, or if you’re a business owner or solo practitioner who acts in a marketing capacity (and who doesn’t), here’s a few things I’ve picked up over the years – they don’t have anything to do with social media, channel support, SEO or anything to do with a particular media.

    10) If you’ve worked hard to evoke an emotional response to your product in an ad or direct mail piece, for goodness sake give people a way to actually buy it! Make the response mechanism obvious, it avoids delay in responding.

    9) Put your address and phone number on your website, in an obvious place – not everybody trusts everything they see on the internet, and sometimes you just want to send somebody something or talk to an actual person. Why make me work at it?

    8) ASK for the order. Don’t assume that the audience will understand what you want them to do, no matter how obvious you think it is.

    7) Take the offer seriously in your ads and direct marketing communications – the audience will, and they will hold your feet to the fire for every possible interpretation you can imagine. The more transparent and clear you make the offer, the less confusion you’ll receive from the audience, and confused audiences tend not to buy things.

    6) Treat your house list like the gold that it is – you’ll never find a more receptive set of eyes and ears for your message than someone who is already predisposed to hear it. Respect the power it represents, and the people behind it.

    5) You can never know too much about the people you’re trying to reach – but you can interpret data incorrectly. Trust but verify, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, and vet your data with real people and anecdotes – you’ll be glad you did.

    4) Make your copy simple enough that your 80-year-old grandmother can understand it. People’s attention spans are increasingly short, and they don’t have time to analyze your obtuse copy to extract your message.

    3) Sales letters should be long enough to compellingly tell the story, and not a word longer.

    2) Lists, design, artifice and devices don’t sell products and services, feelings do. Evoke an emotional response in your audience and you’ll move the needle.

    1) A target audience never bought anything – PEOPLE buy goods and services – whether it’s online, through the mail, over the phone or from a billboard. Reach out in an accessible, human way, meet a need or solve a problem, and the sales will follow.

    Seems like basic common sense, but ignore such simplicity at your own peril. You’d be amazed how many top flight professionals can’t apply these basic tenets to their everyday work and score a good number.

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  • 10 Things Marketers Can Do To Help Them Succeed In 2014

    10 Things Marketers Can Do To Help Them Succeed In 2014

    As the year 2014 hits the mid-point, I wanted to give readers some forward thinking, rather than reviewing the past year’s events – we all know what happened, and we can’t change it anyway. So, here’s a few basic things to keep in mind as you move forward through the new year:

    10) A “Market” Never Bought Anything – people buy things and services and ideas. When you think about or talk about your “Target Market” keep in mind that a market is actually a group of people, with ideas, moods and feelings of their own. If you can conjure up a visual image of a representative of that group, it can help focus your ideas and your copy.

    9) It’s The List, Stupid! All the creative design, top quality printing, conscientious mail services or hot offer in your direct marketing fails miserably in the wake of a bad list. Do your homework, check all the possible angles, find lists that make sense, that are fresh and accurate, and that have a recognizable reason to buy your product.

    8) Sheep Get Slaughtered, eventually. If you’re trying a new technique, a new media, a new idea or trend that’s being touted as the next big thing, ask yourself “How does this help me reach my stated goals, and how will I measure its impact?” If you can’t answer those honestly, you really don’t have a good reason for doing whatever it is. Just because a competitor is doing it, or “everyone’s” doing it, doesn’t make it right for you.

    7) Be True To Your Brand. Period. When you get ready to launch a new campaign, or start a new service, dust off your brand characteristics inventory (you have one of those, right?) and review those traits, and see how well your new idea matches up or illustrates those attributes. If you miss more than 25% of them, rethink the idea. You’ll do more damage putting out off-brand stuff than you can make up in incoming revenue or awareness.

    6) Test, Test, Test – You can’t do enough research, you can’t know enough about your customers, but their buying behavior in a real situation tells the strongest tale. Test as many variables in your mail campaign as you can, and trust the response data. When it comes time to review your results, the data will back you up a lot better than your “gut”.

    5) The Harder You Work, The Luckier You’ll Get – Ideas are like those tempera paints you used in grade school – the more you throw at the wall, the more color you get to stick. Keep churning out ideas and executing them as best you can with your time constraints and budget – if you throw out ten ideas and three of them bomb, that means the other seven were good enough and made up for the three duds. You win.

    4) Strive for “Works Well With Others” comments – the more people you involve and get ideas from, the better those ideas will become. It spreads the workload, spreads the blame, and takes advantage of cooperative vibe that really generates the good stuff. Don’t try to be Superman and do it all yourself.

    3) Lead By Example – Show buyers why you have great products or a superior service, don’t tell them. Don’t talk about features, illustrate benefits. Demonstrate, don’t describe – you’ll be surprised how much more powerful your approach becomes.

    2) Good Enough In the Mail is Better than Perfect On the Drawing Board – You can massage copy all day long, try different shades of blue until you’re blue in the face, but it’s not making you any money if its not in the mail. That doesn’t mean hurry through it, it just means don’t worry it to death.

    1) Trust The Data, Listen to Your Gut, Value Others’ Ideas – It all comes down to pushing more work out the door and having it be productive, effective and impactful. Don’t let ego make you an impediment to your own success. Keep fueling the idea machine with every resource you have, and you’ll succeed in spite of yourself!

    Now, go forth and market effectively in the balance of 2014!

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