“You are the product. You feeling something. That’s what sells. Not them. Not sex. They can’t do what we do and they hate us for it.”

To sell, you must evoke emotion. Make your customers feel. Stoke their desire to buy.

But, how can you get a customer to feel anything when you cannot see them? You have no idea if you’re trying to reach a 75-year-old woman in Alabama or a salsa-dancing single in New York City. You’re waving your hands like a five-year-old child trying to capture everyone’s attention. First, stop that. Never yell at your audience or write desperate copy. Pretend exclamation points and all-caps are extinct. Second, stop thinking you’re going to reach the entire world wide web with your message. Not only is it impossible, this notion prevents you from writing a targeted message.

Narrow your audience

Narrow your audience down to a small select group (about three or four), create marketing personas, and then get inspired by greeting cards. What message will your persona listen to? What words will make them feel? Greeting cards sell feelings. Walk down that aisle of colorful cards. Spend sometime in the Happy Birthday section. You’ll laugh. Move onto the wedding cards and you’ll weep, giggle, or get hungry for cake. Every message was created to stir your emotions. Greeting cards are copywriting and the product is the emotion itself. You wouldn’t send a chimpanzee eating a birthday cake card to your Grandma (unless your Grandma is my Grandma). Just like you shouldn’t write humorous copy when you’re trying to reach a 55-year-old man who’s about to retire. You don’t know if Bob, the future retiree shares your love of fart jokes. You do know he’s a nostalgic empty nester who’s soon to set out a new adventure. That’s why all those Father’s Day cards have sailboats on them.

Can you tell the difference between the advertisement copy and greeting card?

“Don’t you just love the 12-seconds when all the laundry is done?”

“For those nights you want everything to be just right…“

The first line is from a greeting card and the second is from an advertisement for stereos in the 70’s. Both have a similar target: the middle-aged-bored-out-of-her-mind mom. Both make you long for a break, a little romance, or relaxation. Send the wrong message and your customers will feel nothing and move on. A good example of what happens when you send the wrong message to the wrong person, comes from my Uncle Jim, who once gave his wife a Far Side birthday card, complete with an egregious joke about cows and utters. She expected a flowery card full of tear-inducing sentiment. He gave her the humorous card he would want. Ultimate *FAIL*.

The post Write Compelling Messages – Think Greeting Cards appeared first on Portent.

It’s no secret that pouring it on too thick will make consumers suspicious and distrusting of your advertising. It’s no secret that advertisers continue to do it anyway. But there is a quiet uprising occurring, an anti-movement springing up in the form of sites like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Yahoo Answers. Such user-based sites aren’t new, but due to the bombardment of glitzy, insincere ads, flash banners and billboards, they are taking on a momentum of their own.

Consider their influence. I’d argue that TripAdvisor reviews supersede “star” ratings when booking a hotel. If enough people on Buzzsugar love a movie I’ll by a ticket, even without seeing a trailer. Why? Because I value the opinion of people who don’t have anything to gain by selling me on something more than I value of the opinion of people who do: even if the opinion is the same.

So does this mean that advertising is obsolete?

Is the average Joe the new mad man?

Or is there another solution?

The short answer is yes.

Read on to hear my solution, what I call “the truest best.”

Old school Internet marketing still has its place. But we need to shift our focus from slathering our ads in hyperbole and get back to something simple: what I call “the truest best.” The theory is simple: by stripping away all the puns and play-on words, and focusing completely on the end user’s experience, only then are we able to come up with the truest ad strategy for our client. And whatever’s truest (whatever benefit appeals most to the end user) is the best. No matter how unhip, no matter how anticlimactic, no matter how “inconsistent with market research.”

Examples of Truest Best:

• Dove Deodorant: Stays on skin, not on clothes.
  It’s not sexy or flashy. But it matches the right benefit with the right person and so I will buy Dove first.
• AT&T: More bars in more places.
  Even with all the iPhone hype, better reception beats access to YouTube videos for many people.
• Apple: Everything is easier on a Mac.
  True, and very appealing.

In our over-saturated advertising marketing, consumers are both drowning and desperately dehydrated in their search for an effective product-buying strategy. To meet their needs, Internet marketers need to make discovering these types of truest best benefits our holy grail. We need to focus our energies on resources on finding out definitively what it is, and selling it accurately. There are several ways we can achieve this:

How to Get the “Truest” in Truest Best:

1. Offer an incentive for customer feedback (clarify the feedback can be good or bad so it doesn’t come across as a bribe)
2. Make it bite size: Rather than burying people in surveys and focus groups, include one question in your monthly e-newsletter, or post a rotating poll on your site.
3. Video testimonials: I have often thought these were the wave of the future. If you can get a real, live reputable person (not a celebrity, but your target market) to do a video testimonial, it’s worth about a thousand flash banners.
4. Pay customers to blog about your product. Make it a publicly known fact that you are paying them, and again, allow them to say whatever they want. This sounds risky, but it isn’t. The good stuff they say will be more convincing than any tagline, and the bad things will provide invaluable feedback for you.
5. Fix stuff based on their feedback. It’s not enough to diligently harvest feedback. You have to act on it, publicly, and acknowledge that the changes are a result of customer feedback. This might sound counterintuitive. I imagine it’s like when the first person came up with the idea of publishing corrections in the newspaper. “You want us to acknowledge our mistakes…in print…and apologize for them?” It must have sounded insane. Today of course, newspapers as an institution have a strong reputation as just and unbiased, largely because of their corrections sections. And Internet marketing campaigns can benefit from the same sort of revolutionary accountability.

This is only half the equation. Now that you’ve found the truest factor, you need to help it become its best. You have to make it look good, sound good, make it easy to find and simple to interact with. Wait…that sounds like…you guessed it, Internet marketing. Phew, you still have a job after all. The bottom line, Internet marketing is still necessary, and so are end-users . By working together, you create advertising that connects the right people with the right benefit, so everyone wins.

86 the Internet Marketing Assembly Line

“That sounds wonderful!” you are thinking. So why doesn’t it happen? It doesn’t happen because Internet marketers have so many checkpoints on the way to producing a campaign, and most of those don’t ever involve interacting with an end user. Once an Internet marketer has gotten themselves past their boss, their client, and their client’s boss, they are ready to call it a day.

If you are a Creative Director or Account Manager, the best thing you can do is have your team interact directly with the end user. Take them on a field trip, schedule interviews, read their trade publications and eat their cereal (ok, you don’t have to eat their cereal.) But you see the point….Don’t ruin their souls in tiresome bureaucracy and back-and-forth with the client. That is your job, not theirs, and it will not inspire them to do their best. You help them create the Truest Best by interacting with the end user, and then you defend that campaign on their behalf.

Turning honest-to-god opinions into Internet marketing gold

The moral is obvious: People are over glitzy spokespersons and overt, over-the-top marketing material. They want to hear the off-the-cuff, honest-to-god opinions of people who have nothing to gain by telling it like it is about a roach motel or a pot roast that tastes like roadkill. And if you can find the benefit that turns those honest-to-god opinions into good opinions, you’ve got the blueprints for a brilliant Internet marketing campaign.

The post The Holy Grail of Internet Marketing: The Truest Best appeared first on Portent.