Presentation, presentation, presentation
It’s politics season.
Labour are just coming to the end of their conference, and Chief!Ed gave what was by all accounts a barnstormer of a speech.
I’m not going to get into my politics here. I’ve got them, and one day I might talk about them. But not now.
Now I want to talk about this paragraph, taken not from the speech but from James Landale’s analysis of it:
But that said, Mr Miliband did go some way to tackling one of the questions that have been hanging above his head: could voters imagine him as prime minister? Today he gave an outstanding speech, without notes or text, a performance that was assured and confident, engaging and near-faultlessly delivered.
I’m not sure what I would look for in a prime minister. Ability to negotiate is probably useful – that’s pretty much what politics is. Some grasp of economics would be pretty handy right now.
Ability to remember long speeches and then… well, speech, is probably not very high up the list. But that seems to be what everyone’s looking for.
Why’s this?
Mostly because what everyone’s looking for is someone who looks the part. If they can’t imagine him as prime minister, they don’t vote for him. Whether or not he can actually do the job is irrelevant – we don’t get to find that out until after he’s in office, and it’s not like we can take him back to the shop for a refund.
What matters, then, is the presentation. The marketing. Right now, Labour are in opposition, so they’re out to sell. That means they need a product that can be sold. But it doesn’t have to do everything – or anything – they said it would on the box… it just has to look like it can.
And exactly the same is true if you’re selling something, online or off. The product does not make sales. The marketing makes sales. The only thing the product affects is the refund rate. (Of course, since your customers can get a refund, that doesn’t mean you get to disregard it completely. Just sayin’)
Proving your bargain is a bargain
Woah, this has been a while.
Though I do have an excuse. In fact, I have 2. Work, and Cornwall, where I just spent a week and a half. Cornwall is possibly the most beautiful place on Earth, and I don’t say that just because I grew up there.
Well, maybe because I grew up there. My memories are full of Calvin-and-Hobbes summers, and that definitely colours my perception.
Cornwall itself was brilliant – I chased many birds and almost killed myself trying to bike up the hills. But as you probably won’t want to hear about all the oystercatchers, turnstones and peregrine falcons I saw, let me talk about perception a bit instead.
We all think we go through life assessing details and coming to our own conclusions. And in a way, we do, but the way we assess and the details we come to are clouded by what we’ve experienced and been told in the past.
That’s why perceived value works. If you see a nice jacket on sale for £400, then one day you walk past the shop and it’s discounted to £200, you’re going to be FAR more tempted to buy it than if you’d first found it at the £200 price.
It’s just the same jacket, but in the first set-up you’ve already got the value anchored at £400, so £200 seems like a bargain.
And how do you make this work for you?
Well, pretty much exactly like I’ve described above.
If you want people to REALLY be tempted by your discounts, show them that they are real discounts. Show them where the item is on sale at full price, as well as offering the discount. Set up a whole new website and link out if you have to.
People love a bargain, so prove you’re giving them one.
Dare to be different
Here’s a neat little marketing idea…
Most restaurants, with your bill, give you a couple of mints and, if they’ve got any idea about trying to drum up repeat business, a business card.
The business card gets points for effort, but certainly for me they don’t work that well. I’ll take them home and then forget about them, and the restaurant with them.
So if you really want to make an impact, you need to make a bit more effort.
Take Wahaca.
Wahaca are a small chain of Mexican restaurants in London, and with their bill you don’t get a business card.
Instead, you get a small matchbook with 5 chilli seeds inside. On the outside face are contact details for both their restaurants, on the inside are instructions for growing the chillis and a recipe for guacamole.
Grow the chillis, and every time you look at them you’re going to be remembering Wahaca. Even if you don’t, it’s different enough that there’s more chance of you remembering the one restaurant that gave you chilli seeds than the hundred that gave you a business card.
Yes, it costs more, but I’m willing to bet it’s worth it. Space in your customers’ memory is a commodity that’s very hard to buy.
It should be noted that they don’t get everything right… their website is a hideous flash confection that some web developer somewhere probably thought was a good idea.
They should probably get whoever came up with the matchbook idea to take a look.
3 things no copy can do without
It doesn’t matter whether you’re telling a story to sell, persuade, or entertain – there’s 3 things you always need:
A beginning that grabs
A middle that keeps
An ending that lingers
I was reminded of this by a post on the Nieman Storyboard – it’s talking about storytelling in journalism, but the principles of writing something that sticks in the reader’s head well after they’ve finished are pretty universal.
Be compelling from the start. Never waste time. And when you close, do it with passion.
Why no-one works
Procrastination.
I’m REALLY good at it.
I can put things off for days, weeks or years. You name it, I won’t have done it.
Strangely, this doesn’t apply to professional things. I’ve yet to miss a sales letter deadline. Copy is cranked out to a pretty rigid schedule: I work on it in the mornings, when my writing brain is best, and leave the afternoon for smaller tasks.
Personal things: sorting out my investments, sewing a button back on to a shirt, fixing a broken door handle… for some reason I am incapable of setting a schedule and sticking to it the way I do for copywriting.
I even get why.
Professional things have an external motivation. People are relying on me to deliver, so by Mary Hellfire I will deliver. If my bedroom door handle isn’t fixed, the only person put out is me.
I’m not the only one like this.
It can be particularly bad for entrepreneurs who are just starting out, and even those who are more well established. You KNOW you should get that web page marked up, finish off that product… but if the only person who cares right now is you, it’s very easy to put off.
One way around this is to do things publicly… if you’ve committed to a launch date with some affiliates, you’ll be far more motivated to get everything finished on time.
I’ve yet to find out how to set serious external motivation for personal tasks, but I’d love any suggestions.
In the meantime, here’s an article to read in lieu of actually doing work
What separates you from Warren Buffett
There’s a few people who, it is generally recognised, Know Their Shit.
Warren Buffett: when he talks about investing, you listen.
Gary Bencivenga: sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods through direct mail copy. Anyone trying to sell anything would pay money to listen to him snore.
St Steve of Jobs: whether you love or loathe Apple, there’s no denying that Steve Jobs was a genius in product design and marketing.
The rest of us need to swallow our egos and accept a couple of hard truths:
1. No-one has a damn clue who we are
2. Everyone who does have a damn clue doesn’t care
If you’re trying to make money by selling anything – but ESPECIALLY selling things online, where scammers are sadly rife – your customers have to trust you, and trust that you know what you’re talking about. That means you need to create some authority for yourself. Do you know what you’re talking about? Awesome. Prove it.
Authority is a key component of ANY sales message. When prospects come to your page, they don’t have any good reason to listen to you.
So give them some.
Writing a JV page – what everyone gets wrong
Been a bit quiet over the last week or so.
We’ve been making some changes to the launch plans and that means changes to the JV page, though they’re all for the better. It hangs together far more coherently and presents a far better argument for why you should promote us. I’ll put a link up as soon as it’s live.
This JV page isn’t like most JV pages out there.
They’re mostly glorified noticeboards. I’ve yet to work out precisely why they exist… existing affiliates don’t care because you’re just going to tell them about your launch yourself, and there’s nothing there to tell new ones why they should promote you.
You’ve got prizes, you say? Well that’s great. Good for you. But so have all the other 15,000 launches competing for attention. What makes you special?
So that’s what our JV page concentrates on.
Do we have prizes? Hell yes. $25,000 worth of them. But we’ve also got an amazing product, better commissions than anyone else, rockstar copywriting courtesy of yours truly, and a track record of delivering EPCs that make affiliates drool… so that’s what I’ve talked about.
It’s not about making you want to promote us… it’s about making you want to promote us instead of everyone else.
Thing is, I am convinced this is going to be the best promotion going, and a few flashy graphics aren’t going to convey that. What is going to convey that is a coherent argument backed up with solid proof.
Your JV page is still a sales page, kids. Start treating it like one.
“If I’m likely to care about it, someone I like more than you will tell me about it.”
Found some good advice on e-mail management:
It might seem strange, that someone who is an advocate of e-mail marketing is linking you to someone who advocates deleting anything that even looks like a marketing e-mail.
In his own words:
If I’m likely to care about it, someone I like more than you will tell me about it.
But that’s the challenge – be the person that the customer likes more. If you’re marketing by e-mail even semi-regularly, you should be trying to build a relationship. Make your e-mail one the customer wants to read, even if it does involve a pitch.
The way I see it, if the customer doesn’t want to read my e-mail, I should be writing better e-mails. The best place for e-mails you don’t want to read – even if they’re from me – is the trash folder.
15 things you should know about your customer
A while ago, I posted about how copy was all about taking your prospect on a journey, so it was important to understand where you want them to go.
There’s another side to that, of course. You’ve got to understand where they are now.
Whenever I’m talking students through creating a sales page, I’ll have them create a customer avatar, as detailed as it can be.
Essentially I’ll have them create an imaginary friend, someone in the target market for their letter. Now, when they come to put words on a page, they’ve got a single person in their head that they’re writing to.
I do it. If you’re writing a sales letter, so should you.
Here’s a few questions you can ask, though there are a load more:
What’s their name?
Where do they live?
How old are they?
Do they have a job?
What is it?
What do they do after work?
What do they want to do after work?
What do they do at the weekend?
Do they have any kids?
How many?
What kind of income do they have?
Is it enough?
What are their plans for the future?
What do they do on holiday?
Do they even have holidays?
Not all of this stuff will end up being directly relevant to the letter, but all of it will help you understand the customer more, and let you throw in the details that make them think ‘hey, this guy is really speaking to me!’
And that’s what makes the sale.
“It’s the question where you learn most about the student.”
Just a very quick post today to point out the world’s most awesome exam question:
I can see it breaking a lot of people, but being forced to think like this is definitely no bad thing, and something the education system could do with a lot more of.