Month: October 2019

“No, YOU have a consistency problem”

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copywriting consistency habits

Habits are hard to break. Harder than freezer meat.

That’s one of the reasons marketing can be hard work.

The difficulty of a marketer’s job is rooted in the dark nature of habitual behavior.

The habitual behavior of your should-be buyers, to be specific.

Let me explain what I mean.

You’ve probably read Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence — or you’ve at least heard of it. So you’re probably familiar with the principles of commitment and consistency.

People like to be seen as consistent. They want to feel consistent.

Marketers try to leverage that fact by seeking “micro-commitments” and “progressive series of agreement.”

There’s value in those concepts.

But listen…

These are attempts to produce consistency. The truth is, your prospects are already consistent.

Freezer meat consistent.

Therein lies the problem — and the opportunity.

Your potential customers are consistently, habitually doing the same things over and over again.

Buying the same things over and over again.

If they’re buying from you, hallelujah! If they’re buying from the other guy… ouch.

More than that, they’re avoiding doing the same things over and over again — and consistently rejecting the same kinds of offers.

So, let me ask you a couple questions:

1.
Do you think it’s smarter to get someone to micro-commit their way to consistently buy from you…

Or should you target people who are already consistently buying the types of products you sell?

2.
Should you spend all your time chasing new customers and weeding out the ones who stubbornly refuse to commit to what’s clearly the best option for them?

Or does it make sense to focus on (or develop) hyper-responsive buyers who already have habits that make you say “Hallelujah”?

Think about it.

Then do something about it.

Sell Me Their Eyeballs

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Your competition is more brutal than you may have realized.

Mostly because your biggest competitors probably aren’t who you think they are…   

I’ll share a tiny example, then a giant one.

Some years back, the Illinois Small Business Development Center used to bring me in to teach marketing during its entrepreneurial training programs.

Part of the job was to help the trainees understand what they’d face out there in the real world — and give them tools to win.

I remember one young guy named Omar. He was brimming with energy and ambition. He wanted to open a smoothie shop with healthy food alternatives for high schoolers.

Good stuff.

He was the first trainee to go over his assignment aloud during class.

While talking about his business plan, he listed his main competitors as Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts and McDonalds.

Now, it’s hard to be the person who bursts the bubble of anyone so full of excitement… but that was the job.

I told him — in front of the entire class (they needed to hear this too)…

…that he was wrong.

Starbucks may have been his most visible competition.

But Omar’s smoothies would have to compete with every other rival fighting for the attention and dollars of his target audience.

And Lord knows teenagers have their eyes divided between a lot of sugar-coated options.

His healthy, pricey smoothies would have to earn their way onto the priority list.

Not just against other beverages the teens were already in the habit of buying…

But against ALL snacks… fashion items… gasoline for their cars, etc.

That competition is fierce — and I wanted Omar and the others to understand the scale of the battle they were engaged in.

That’s the small example.

The giant example gets the point much faster.

It’s this quote from Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix.

entertaining copywriting

At Netflix, we are competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, etc.”

Sleep is hard to beat.

But it’s even harder when you don’t know that’s what you’re fighting against.

Do the research. Find out what you’re really competing with.

Adjust your game plan… and play to win.

And before you go, here are 7 tips for writing eyeball-wrangling headlines and subject lines: