Your Marketing Sucks
- By: Linda Buquet [privmsg - website] On 1st Sep 2005
"Getting Your Ego Out Of The Way... One of the most painful things to admit is that your marketing sucks! Yet, 99 out of 100 marketing pieces could be better..." Here's how in 9 easy steps.
Troy White from the Word Wealth Channel at Duct Tape Marketing writes: "Just recently, I had to slap my ego upside the head and tell him to take a hike." Troy then goes on to give some practical advice and 9 tips about how to get your ego out of the way AND ALSO to help avoid the procrastination and paralyzation most of us face when we look at marketing stuff we've written in the past and just don't want to deal with re-doing it.
Here, in my opinion are 2 of the most important points for SEM's, merchants and affiliates to keep in mind when trying to boost click-through and conversion rates.
(2) Re-read all your marketing materials from your customers eyes (the key to this is to get out of your own head and put yourself in your buyers shoes). ***** Imagine your perfect customer asking you this: "If I knew what you know, would I truly want to buy what you are selling? Why?"
(7) Count the mention of the words "I" versus "you" - you should have 5-10 times more "you" than "I" in your copy. Your customers don't really care about you (the "I" in your copy) - all they care about is what you can do for them.
Read the rest, then come back to discuss your marketing bloopers and blunders, as well as what you plan to do now to get that ego out of the way.
Cool
I thought it was going to be a review of the book by the same name (which is a good read BTW).
Nah my marketing's good!
Just started a new project with the consumer in mind. Secured
*********.com
*********.net
*********.org
for under $24
All good brandable names with good keyword association. Off to celebrate.
I vs. We
Totally true, many people forget the old sales acronym *WIIFM*, as it applies to converting visitors to sales.
There's a good tool out there for checking your customer focus
available here
But how do you forget what you already know? How (really) do you look at your business, with all it's jargon and history and intrinsic knowledge, and look at it again like it's brand new?
Thanks for that link Shoda
I ran some publicity through it and got what I think is a resonable rating of
Your Customer Focus Rate: 67.15%
it's debatableat what point e.g. 100% your copy would lack any personalisation...
great link Shoda - here's another
Thanks Shoda. I love Grok and the guys at FutureNow but had not seen that tool before. On that same page is a link to a good article on Clickz by Bryan Eisenberg called: "It's the Customer, Stupid" that has a ton of good info on the topic and really drives the point home.
"I" think "I" tend to "I" too much. In fact today "I" was writing PR for a new featured client and then totally went back in and re-wrote the whole thing after reading the articles in this thread.