Kill All Your Darlings – How to Build Your Brand Without All the Jive Talkin’
Mark Twain had an idea about copywriting when he said to “Kill all your darlings”, meaning say it straight and say it great. The same goes for creating copy that promotes your brand.
With all the media bombardment at every turn, you’ve probably seen it all – exaggerated headlines, over the top testimonials and claims. It might be effective in catching the attention of your customers but it’s a lousy way of building long-term patronage and partnerships. What happens when the hype is over?
Here are a few rules to follow when creating your content or copy:
1. Simple = Good
Simple is always better. It’s easier to remember and harder to miss. According to Luke Sullivan (Whipple, Squeeze This)
simple breaks through all the advertising clutter. So before you start writing, don’t forget to check your cliches at the door.
2. Numbers aren’t always great
Lose 10 pounds in 7 days or 10 Tips to A New You will grab a person’s interest but this will only lead to a one-time buy (hopefully).
When your customer snaps out of the starry-eyed high and find out your product doesn’t work then the numbers will definitely spell trouble for your business.
3. Most of the time, there’s never anything more
We’ve heard of this line and some people have even fallen for it once or twice. It goes more or less like “But wait, there’s more! If you call now, you get the Super Pro Ultraxxx for a very low, low price of $99.99.” Would you seriously consider buying the product? Or for those who were cuckolded, would you want to buy another one? I don’t think so.
According to Simon Glickman and Julia Rubiner of Editorial Emergency “It’s not just a matter of making sales; it’s a matter of making lasting connections and establishing a brand that offers genuine value. And treating potential clients with respect. And sleeping at night”
The bottom line is: Don’t treat prospects like suckers born every minute. Write good copy and establish lasting relationships. Long-term clients build your brand so talk to them and communicate with them accordingly.
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Article by Guest Author: Carla Marie Adlawan
Carla Marie Adlawan, fresh from university with Business degree in hand, decided to jump into the world of advertising as a copywriter. Four years later, she’s still spitting copy at the same agency and from the same desk. She’s had years of experience working with local and multi-national clients spanning various industries from IT to F&B, Real Estate to Communications, Retail and Merchandising to Transportation and the Academe.
During her free time she prowls the streets to rid the city of crime, which is another term for freelance.
Visit her blog, Writings of a Street Rat.
How to Create an Online Branding Strategy
A lot of people get a little confused when it comes to branding, so I recorded this video on how to create an online branding strategy to help you put together a plan that will develop trust in your brand.. whether it is a product, service, company or simply your name; increase visibility on search engines and a corresponding increase in traffic from search engines; and finally increased visibility on other websites such as Web 2.0 and social sites plus an increase of referred traffic from these websites.
If you have comments or questions please use the comment form below. Please feel free to share, ReTweet or send this video to your friends who might find it helpful.
#1 Reason Why Most Websites are Not Making Money
They violate this fundamental law of marketing: “It takes more than one contact to generate a sale.” Therefore: “The more expensive the item that is offered for sale, the more contacts it will take.”
You must design a marketing program that offers a series of action steps to the prospective customer. The sooner you do this, the faster your Internet investment will pay off.
Direct markets use an acronym to remind them of what every marketing campaign needs: AIDA. This stands for attention, interest, desire, and action.
Attention is step one. If the visitor has arrived at your Web site, it had better grab his attention. I hope your site does this rapidly. Visitors get bored, fast.
I suggest that you make a promise or offer, stated early, and clearly visible on your site within a few seconds. I also suggest that you minimize graphics. Graphics reduce download time.
Let’s say that you have his attention. You must now interest him. You must find a way to present information to him that will keep him from clicking to another site.
Maybe you remind him of a problem he now faces or will soon face (fear). Maybe you present an opportunity that he has not thought of (greed). Fear and greed are the buyers’ great motivators in business-related sales.
You have his interest. You must now produce desire. The question is: Desire to do what? You are leading him to take action.
The action you should motivate him to take is to identify himself, so that you can contact him again by automated e-mail. You must persuade him to request something: a free report, a short course, a list of specifications – something. Whatever it is, by requesting it, he sends you his e-mail address.
This is the key to profitability. Your Web site should have several useful functions: to gain the visitor’s attention, to create interest, to create desire, and to generate an action step. Very few Web site designers have self-consciously applied AIDA. They are technicians and artists, not marketers. Not that many marketers understand AIDA.
His action steps should not cost him any money. You want his e-mail address. Offer him something of immediate value to get that e-mail address. Offer him several things, if you can.
Think carefully about what you would want from your site if you were a first-time visitor to your site. Empathize.
What do you want him to do after he reads a special report? What is the next action step you want him to take? Design everything in your free reports to generate one final action step per report. I suggest that you get him to subscribe to a newsletter. Then you can contact him regularly.
Another possibility: get him to sign up for a free e- mail course. For this, you should probably use a sequential or follow-up autoresponder. You can offer a course using only free one-shot autoresponders, but you must rely on the reader to click a click-and-send link to receive each subsequent lesson. He may forget. It’s usually better to have an automated system mail them at regular intervals. Your goal in sending a course is simple: you gain additional contacts with him. He requests these contacts.
Assume in everything you do on your retail sales site that your number-one assignment is to get his e-mail address. If he leaves your site without having identified himself, your site has failed to achieve its most important goal.
It’s nice to make a sale on your site from a first- time visitor. It’s also incredibly rare. Don’t try. Get him to order a free report.
For more tips go to www.WebMediaExpert.com
“Powerful Internet Marketing Solutions for your business!”
Megan Fox Emailed Me: The Top Three Email Marketing Problems
A couple of things happened tonight which compelled me to write this post on the top three email marketing problems that businesses encounter. If you need to know it is 1:21 AM, Thursday. I often act impulsively when it comes to a new idea, like a new post or article. As a musician and song writer… back when I used to write songs, an idea may come any time of the day.. or night, and you got to be ready for it, maybe that’s the reason for that habit.. I need to act on it immediately for if I don’t, I would end up forgetting about it… the idea would slip my mind.
So what are those two things… I had recently completed a brief for a client which involved organizing and sorting out their huge mailing list of confirmed customers, which they have been unable to either maintain a relationship with nor leverage on it. The second thing was, I got an email from Megan Fox.
So we know for fact that a mailing list is an asset that any business or individual can leverage on, and that a business has a better chance of surviving with their own mailing list. If you have a mailing list, you can simply send out an email about a sale or promo, or about some product you are promoting; they get that email, the product appeals to them, they buy it, you make money… badda bing badda boom!
But what problems can you expect to encounter with email marketing?
Let us take a look at the processes that take place; first you got to send those emails out, then hope that people open and even read your email, and then click the link in that email that sends them to a web page with information on what it is you are promoting.
Email Delivery Issues
First problem here is something to do with your system or web infrastructure. I know some people who actually did this manually, mailing out to maybe a handful of people. Things start to get a little crazy when you actually have to mail out to hundreds or even thousands. But those who sent these en masse often found that the system they were using did not send out those emails to all recipients. Even if you try sending manually to multiple addresses, some email services will flag your activity as a spam attempt. So the remedy here is to actually use an email marketing system from a service provider, that is reliable, and by reliable I mean the highest delivery percentage possible.
Email Open Rate
Alright, so you are certain your automated email messages plugged into a reliable autoresponder service that you use to deliver your messages is indeed sending out your message, but “are your recipients even opening and reading your email”? They might be getting your messages but are they actually reading them? There are a couple of tricks a lot of marketers use to get people to notice their emails, but the bottom line is to catch attention. A catchy “subject” line can make it stand above all the other emails people get, or a catchy name.
Yes, I did get an email from Megan Fox… but well, not from actress that every man in America probably fantasizes over. Actually I got this email on my Entourage email client and the sender name was “Megan Fox”, of course I opened the email. It turned out it was a direct message notification from someone on my LinkedIn network. Do you see how that worked?
Click Through Rate
So your emails are getting received and getting opened and read, but are the readers clicking on the links that send them to a web page with the information you are trying to promote? If they aren’t then, your mail out, despite getting sent, received, opened and read.. is still a failure.
Remember that you mail out with the purpose of getting the reader to an offer, and readers not clicking on the links in your email can be attributed to either non-relevance of the email to the reader, or simply a poorly crafted email.
A poorly crafted email is self explanatory, so let me expound on non relevance. If you are a wedding cake creator with a mailing list of brides to be preparing for their wedding, if you send them an email with a story about bicycles and a link to an offer for bicycles, is that email going to appeal to them at all? However, if you send them an email about the top honeymoon vacations, that has a link to a travel agency that offers a big discount on honeymoon packages, this email would likely not only get a higher click through on your links to the offer, but even decent conversions/sales.
If you have questions or comments about Email Marketing, please post them in the comment section below. You can also send me questions through the Contact Form.
3 Simple Online Branding Tips that Won’t Break Your Budget
I thought I’d record a video and dish out 3 online branding tips that are both simple, easy to do and best of all can actually significantly improve your brand online, despite being really simple ideas. Also these are definitely cheaper alternatives to hiring an advertising agency that will cost you an arm and a leg.
There are three key points I try to deliver on the video below…
- constant personal interaction leads to brand retention
- brand buzz increases and sustains brand awareness
- brand awareness and retention PLUS consistent delivery of your offers via advertising = SALES
To know how to accomplish those three… watch the video below.
If you have questions or comments about Online Branding, please post them in the comment section below. You can also send me questions through the Contact Form.
YouTube Marketing for Musicians
So you might have not heard of YouTube marketing before, or thought that YouTube was just another site where you can put up videos for fun. YouTube is the most authoritative video site with the most number of videos and highest traffic, and one of the most expensive websites to ever get sold (bought for gazillions by Google some years back).
There are a lot of really talented musicians, songwriters and artists who try to find ways to get their music across to their audience. In the old days, getting your music heard meant trying to play as many gigs and venues to as many people possible… then maybe give away a few cassettes here and there.
Radio and other broadcast media is also helpful, but it is not easy getting your music played over the radio, even more difficult is getting an interview or getting asked to do a few songs live on air. Having been on radio for about a decade, and a marketing and program director for some, I know how radio stations decide on which music to play, which acts to feature.
This is why today, with the internet fast and reliable (at least faster than when it was first commercially available little over 10 years ago at turtle speed), musicians have found that inexpensive yet equally effective medium of spreading music… YouTube!
So if you are a musician reading this, and want more people to view your videos on YouTube, this is how to do it.
Let’s say you just came from a gig, a good gig, a good crowd. You brought the house down and they loved your songs. Where do you think they are going to start heading?
Chances are they are going to go online, head over to Google and start typing your band name or your own name and find out where you are playing next and if they could hear your songs, or watch your other performances. Others go straight to YouTube and type your name.
So here’s a question… when you type your own name on Google or on YouTube, are you anywhere among the top results? At the bottom of the page? Or are you listed at all?
If not, well here are a few tips to help ensure that your YouTube video gets found on searches done on YouTube and even on Google.
Tip 1 – It’s All About Keywords
Keywords are words or phrases that people use when searching for information online, they do that on Google and on YouTube. If you know what keyword people are likely to search for, and in your case, your band name or your name, you need to make sure that your name is found:
- in the title of the YouTube video
- in the description of the YouTube video
- used as tags
Tip 2 – Tell The Viewer What To Do Next
Viewers who watch your video will not stay until the very end of the video if they did not like what they saw. So if they do, then that is a really good sign, they are open to what you will tell them. At the end of the video, encourage them to do any or all of these things:
- rate your video
- leave a comment
- spread the video to their friends
- publish it on their own blogs so their own blog visitors can watch it
- bookmark it on social bookmarking sites
- or click a link to your main site
Tip 3 – Leave a Link So They Know Where To Go
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At the very beginning of the video description, put a link to your website, fansite, MySpace site, Twitter account or Facebook account. That way you will be growing your network, increasing your audience, a potentially large captured market who you can directly message if you have announcements, show schedules or new music to test.
I hope those tips are helpful. Remember one very important thing, YouTube has very high traffic and funneling that traffic to your own sites is key to building a bigger audience, getting more people to hear and appreciate your music… and getting your video popular, and getting your brand, or name found at the top of results when people search for them is driven by the number of views of your video, the number of comments and rates, the number of embeds your video has on other websites and finally the number of links pointing to your video.
Image Source:http://www.rockislandmarketing.com
3 Questions to Ask Before Marketing Online
Marketing your product, service or business on the internet can have several advantages. However before you sit down and start planning out your online marketing campaign, ask yourself these 3 questions.
Are your customers online? Knocked Up trailer
To put this simply, it really would not make sense to put money on an advertising medium that does not generate revenue because your audience is not on that same medium.
This fundamental principle in advertising applies to all media. If you want to sell a product then you need to advertise on radio and TV stations that the audience you are after listens to and watches; focus your below the line efforts on events that your market has an interest in and will likely be in attendance, and so on.
So if you want to push your product over the internet, ask yourself if your target audience is online.
Finding out if your target demographic is on the internet can be done through surveys or traditional market research, or through online research.
Will your audience perform a conversion online?
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A conversion is a specific and predetermined action that you want the recipient of your ad to take. As an advertiser, your goals are probably to make a sale or get a customer.
If you are a pizza place advertising on radio with a radio ad telling the listener to call a number to get a fresh pizza at a discounted price delivered to their doorstep in 30 minutes, then it is obvious the conversion goal here is the call-in and sale.
However your business may not be the type that does transactions over the internet, conversely your product customers may not be the type who buy online.
So you have to then clearly know what your goals for marketing online are.
Each marketing campaign comes with specific goals and online marketing is no different. You should know first what it is you want to achieve through your online advertisements. Do you want to make purchasing or transactions possible over the internet, or are you simply using the internet to gather leads or get inquiries about your product.
Advertising over the internet offers several advantages over media. Aside from the fact that it can potentially be a lot cheaper and more efficient, online advertising is accountable, with data readily available and with the ability to track audience behavior and reaction to advertising, that helps in fine tuning aspects of your campaign.
In the end, all you need to do is determine if your effort online can get you a customer, regardless if instant with a sale done right on your website, or protracted and through a process that starts with getting a lead, to relationship building and then the sale.
Is it worth the expense?
Again, online marketing can cost you much less than traditional media placements, but marketing costs can vary depending on the online marketing strategy or strategies that your consultant lays out for you… and there are several methods; PPC, SEO, email marketing, banner advertising, etc.
It boils down to basic figures; knowing how much you spend, knowing how much profit you make, and knowing the cost per acquisition of every customer and finding ways to get more customers for the same cost of acquisition or lower.
This in turn also goes back to the first question, about your audience being on the internet, and how huge that market could be. As it may turn out, it may not be viable for you if the online audience for your product is too small, and that small volume may not be enough to justify your online spending.
Online advertising is a great way to promote a business, whether you have a product to sell or a service you provide; the internet erases all geographical limits and gives you a worldwide audience, and for those that sell online you can have a store that sells and earns you money while you sleep. That being said, the internet is just another medium to evaluate and use if necessary to reach out to what is actually most relevant to your business, your customers.
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