Each step is important.
The opt-in.
The language on the opt-in page.
The email that follows the filling of the form.
The landing on the sales page.
The bonuses that get emailed to you within a few days.
The structure of the consumption, and how you don’t get it all at once.
And yes, the information itself, which is rich and structured in detail.
Ask any copywriter how many headlines they write for a single sales letter or ad, and they’ll come up with a fanciful number.
Something like 75 headlines.
Or 150 headlines.
Or worse, 200 headlines.
So pray, why would you need to write 200 headlines?
I’ll tell you why. You need to write 200 headlines, because you don’t have a clue who your audience really is. Ooh, did I say audience? I didn’t mean to say audience. Because when you start to think of your customer as an audience, you’ve already mucked up your headline writing.
Is this Steve Jobs, or Steve Jobs, or Steve Jobs?
Because the concept of target audience is a myth
And yet, every single day a discussion between copywriters and clients goes like this:
The writer (stupidly) asks, “Who’s your target audience?”
And the client (stupidly) says: “Mothers who juggle home with a growing business.”
And then (stupidly),they go about merrily writing headlines for ‘young mothers who juggle home with a growing business.’ And this exercise seems perfectly logical, until you start to slice and
dice that so-called audience.
Are we talking about Lisa?
Are we talking about Aditi?
Are we talking about Gulnar?
Are we talking about Katie?
Are we talking about Britney?
Because Britney (as in Britney Spears) is indeed juggling home with a growing (or shall we say, dwindling) business. And so is Lisa. And so is Aditi. Not to speak of Gulnar or Katie.
And when writing that headline they’d all be clumped together
Which of course, is a mistake. Because while they form a tidy demographic of young mothers juggling homes with a growing business, they’re not at all alike.
They don’t exactly have the same problems, and most certainly don’t have the same priorities. And yet, like dumbos, we’re off to write a headline that encompasses the lot. We’re writing for 200
mothers. Is it any wonder we have to write 200 headlines?
Ok, so how do we get to writing a single headline?
We dump the ‘target audience’ concept, that’s for sure. And we look at ‘target profile’ instead. So instead of Lisa, Aditi, and yada, yada, we look at one person. Like Katie.
So instead of looking at every single mother who’d wander into that category, we’d look at just one. And we’d see what’s important to her. What does she want from life? What does she want
from her business? And when we start to look at this one person, the fogginess goes away.
Because we’ve stopped looking at this ‘fictional audience’ of nameless, faceless people, and are now concentrating on one person.
A person we know.
A person we can talk to.
A person we can relate to.
And more importantly, a person who can shoot down our headline in a millisecond.
Because we could go to Katie and ask her:
Would Katie take a 20% cut in profits to spend 20% more time with the kids?
Would Katie not tolerate any cut in profit, and still want to spend 20% more with the kids?
Would Katie be quite happy to concentrate on her growing business and grow it by 20%, or even 50%, knowing it will be better for the kids later on.
Aha, now we aren’t tramping around 200 headlines are we?
Because Katie would tell us. She’d tell us what she really wants.
And then she’d go so far as to tell us what her specific problems are. And instead of sitting in our nice, fuzzy headline brain, we’d actually be talking to a real person, with real issues, that
a million Katies would respond to.
A million Katies?
Yup, uno million! Writing a headline just for Katie seems like marketing suicide, but actually it’s quite the opposite. Because a million mothers with the very same problem will look at your
headline and say, “That’s me! This is exactly the service I wanted.”
Weird, huh?
You write for one, but gain the attention of squillions of‘Katies’. Because while the problem may be universal, the terminology that Katie uses will hit the hot buttons of um, squillions of mothers just like her. And when they see that ‘specific product or service’, they’ll instantly realise the ‘specific product or service’ is just what they wanted.
But did you notice I said ‘specific product or service?’
Don’t make the silly mistake of building your entire business around one person. You can only build ONE specific service or product around that person. Why? Because let’s assume we took
Katie into consideration. Let’s assume she chose to spend 20% more time with her darlings, and was quite happy to take the 20% pay cut, as long as the business stayed steady.
Well, the Katie of the year 2007, isn’t the Katie of 2008. And neither is she going to be the Katie of 2009. And we see this with Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computers as well. If you gave Steve an
iPod in the year 2002, he’d want a completely different iPod in the year 2005, and quite a different one in 2007.
In effect, Steve Jobs isn’t Steve Jobs
Katie isn’t Katie.
And your customer is not the same customer, year after year, after year. So each product or service responds to a specific customer need at a specific moment in a customer’s life.
Which means you need to sit down with every one of your products. Every one of your services. And allocate specific ‘target profiles’. And these ‘target profiles’ should be real, live people. If you’re writing for Aditi, you should know Aditi. If you’re writing for Gulnar, Gulnar better be around. If you’re creating a product or service for Steve, you’d better be getting Steve’s input.
And then you won’t need 200 headlines
Or 75 headlines. Or whatever.
Because ‘Katie’ will tell you exactly what her problem
is, and how you can solve it.
And that my friend, is the only headline you’re ever going to
need.
Ok, so Apple is getting smarter by the minute. Instead of sitting around and watching Windows take over the world, the iPod is now combining the power of extremely well connected strategic alliances, and continuously emerging technology to create even more trouble for us in business.
Trouble, did I say?
If you had any doubts about where wi-fi and video was going, this new iPod kinda puts those doubts to rest. The iPod is now literally a salestool in the hands of businesses. With Safari (Apple’s browser) directly connected to You Tube, and with Starbucks rolling out free wi-fi access in several of its gazillion stores, we have a situation where your ‘ad’ can be seen everywhere.
And blogs and websites will be relevant.
But videos will be more relevant.
And if you don’t have video, and relevant video as a means of marketing, you won’t be creamed. But you’ll surely be disadvantaged. Of course, it’s not all about video. If you use video to do a pitch-fest, then no one will pay attention. But use video to educate and then push clients to your website or um…iPhone number and you’ll start to see a torrential river of clients headed your way.
Video has existed as a viable medium for well over 30 years. But now it’s sitting next to your coffee. Are you prepared? http://www.psychotactics.com
Which means all marketers should shake in their boots if they want to add something new and improved, right? Or all of us should stop adding features, no matter how badly they’re wanted.
Which is simply impossible, but here’s what’s possible
You can’t beat feature creep, because it’s the customer themselves that demand the features, but of course, once they have all the features, they don’t know what to do with all of them. So they return the product, and bail out of the service at the very worst. Or they don’t use the product/service at the very least (lack of consumption). So what’s a marketer to do?
Tell the customer what’s important
Tell me what’s important in that product/service I’ve bought. Focus on the stuff that gets me up and running. And then I’m more than happy to use your products’ core features. And explore the rest when I have the time.
Because if you think less words are more, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. More words sell (no matter how the words come–via PDF or video–or text).
So what do we need less of , if it isn’t ‘less words’?
We need less concepts.
That’s what we need less of.
Google worked better than Yahoo because the concept was simple.
iPod worked better than most mp3 players because any dope knew how to use a wheel.
Lego blocks have success, because they’re simple to work out.
But you’re not dumb
You understand that less is more. You understand that things need to be simple.
Then you make a presentation with 567 slides.
You write a sub-headline or headline that snakes on forever.
You write articles that don’t focus on one thing.
‘Less is more’ isn’t about ‘less words.’
It’s about concepts. You need less concepts.
Or actually, one concept at a time.
The other day I was on a call, and I literally gave the listeners all the steps in the Brain Audit. And the more I gave, the more they were keen to buy the product. This kinda took me by surprise. I’ve long been under the impression, that if you give away all the steps in your system, then there’s nothing else to give.
I found out otherwise.
I found out the age-old concept of the bikini to apply. That by giving away 90% of the concept, and keeping 10%, the attraction factor was just as strong, if not twice as strong (there are reasons for me saying ‘twice as strong). And yes, what the bikini didn’t reveal, was the part the audience most wanted (naturally), and was the part they were willing to pay for.
Yes and no. Any one who thinks that video can do it all, is probably barking up the wrong tree. But video does have powerful persuasion powers. And it has experiential powers. It can make you feel something that’s hard to describe with words. So what about this video causes an attraction factor? Why is this more than words?
Barking up the wrong tree can be amazingly interesting. And educational. Sure you may think that making a mistake is a waste of time, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. Because making mistakes is what enables us to attract clients.
Imagine a world where everything went absolutely right for you. Where you never ever made a mistake. Well, that would indeed be an interesting world. And most people would peg you as a resident of Jupiter. Because for one, your client would never be able to relate to you.
Understand this: Most of our clients are quite impressed, even intimidated by our abilities.
Yes, we think what we do is ‘nothing’, but to the client, those ‘nothing’ skills are quite valuable. So if you’re able to relate your mistakes, that makes you less formidable, and the client feels an intense connection to your failures (and consequent success). Plus you stop being considered a ‘Jupiterian’ and become an ‘Earthling’ instead
When I conduct the Website Masterclass, I show my clients all my mistakes
And how we fixed them. That enables the client to see what’s achievable, and creates a safety net for the client as well. Now, they not only feel comfortable with you, but also feel comfortable about their own progress.
Plus mistakes are profitable.
Very profitable.
I’ll explain more in my next post.
——————————————– http://www.psychotactics.com
Why Customers Back Away At The Very Last Minute? Find out at the link above.
Do you actually sell on blogs? It depends. Are you in the mood for asking stupid questions?
If you, for one second believe, that you’re going to get action from your customers by simply ‘expecting them to work out’ what you sell–well, you are indeed in the mood for stupidity. Because let’s look at a blog as impassively as you’d look at a newspaper. You read the newspaper. And it talks about a new product. Does that article cause you to buy the product?
Nope. You read the newspaper. And you’re off for the day, right? You read loads of stuff, just like that, and it makes not a whit of a difference. But then you see an ad. And the ad creates urgency or desirability to buy the product. Um, can you hear the knock on your brain?
Yes, customers are waiting to be led. Customers are ’sheeple’. And when I say customers, I say you, me and almost everyone else on this planet.
Logically, sheep should come home by sundown
But they don’t. The woof, woof, woof, has to happen. The sheepdog has to play his role, barking madly. Then the ’sheep’ file back to the farm from the paddock.
Customers are just the same. If you stupidly believe that they’re going to buy, then you’re out of your mind. They need to be led. And contrary to what you believe, leading customers–playing sheepdog is a good thing. Because if you don’t really direct customers, they do the sheep thing. They wander around. Hang around. Do nothing. Or something.
You’re doing your customers a disfavour
You’re doing yourself a disfavour.
Plus, there’s the stupidity thing
