How To Avoid Being a Marketing Flop

Copyright 2006 Jo Han Mok

Most companies are just not customer focused in their advertising and marketing.

It’s almost always about themselves, how long they have been in the business, how many branches they have, how many awards they have won, how organized they are… They actually think that all these would make people into customers. The truth cannot be further from this.

People really don’t care about hearing about you. You must make them see how you can benefit them. Remember WIIFM – What’s in it for me?

You really need to sneak your way into your customers’ head and speak to their needs, their wants, their wishes, their dreams, their fears, their desires.

You must then offer them benefits, and show them how your products and services can help solve their problems, achieve results they only dreamt about, take away pain that they might have been feeling in a particular area.

Another problem in most advertising is that people are selling the wrong things when they should be selling benefits.

Most people simply talk about features of their products and services, eg. Comes in an elegant box, Has 100 moving parts, Handmade by craftsmen. All these features do very little to sell.

You really have to show your customers how all these features is going to benefit them.

Whenever possible, you should also sell them the benefits they are going get from your products and services, and push them hard repeatedly in your copy and marketing.

How much time they would save?

How is it going to make their life easier?

How much money they can save in the long run?

Most people are not very adventurous when it comes to promoting their products and services.

They are usually constrained to a set type of sales copy or ad that they feel is appropriate for their industry and end up just like everyone else in that industry.

The question then becomes why would a customer even notice you among your competition. You should really aim to interrupt and demand attention from your customers.

Being different, brutally honest and in your face will make you stand out from the crowd. Avoid advertising based on facts and logic but rather promote and advertise based on emotion, your customers’ emotion.

Being enthusiastic in your copy sometimes to the point of over the top strengthen your chances of your customers registering your messages emotionally. People attach emotions to the thoughts they have, so you need to grab them by their emotion.

You need to get people to focus emotionally in order to get them to pay attention to what they have read.

People buy based on emotion, then justify it based on logic. We buy something we want, then justify and rationalize our decision with explanations in our mind.

When writing your sales copy for your products and services, you should reach out to people, appeal to their emotions, make them want what you have to offer and justify it with the rest of your copy.

Most importantly, have the guts to make a call to action at the end, which is the close. Remember the advertising formula AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

It is also of great importance that when you get to the call to action and the close, you take your customer by the hand and tell them exactly what you want them to do so they do not have any doubts on what they have to do. “Fill Up This Form And Mail It To This Address With Payment Of $97,” Call Bill At 123456789,” “Click The To Checkout Button Now,” “Send $97 To This Paypal Address Now.”

You have to walk them through as if they are a child, telling them exactly step by step what they need to do. At this point, if they are ready to buy, they will be waiting for your direction, and it’s really your responsibility to do it well.

Failing to do so will result in losing sales that you would otherwise have gotten.