If you want to be an effective marketer and an influential force in the lives of your ideal customers, it will be well worth your time to understand what I’m about to tell you.
And incredibly costly if you don’t.
Let’s start with a few facts:
1) Your readers can get information on your topic from a million sources. Maybe more.
Chances are, they’re already overwhelmed by the amount of information they already have (and are continually bombarded with).
Simply being “unique” isn’t enough anymore.
Neither is being “better.” (Most potential buyers can’t tell whose info is better anyway.)
2) You readers can get entertainment from a million sources.
And let’s face it. Netflix and ESPN are hard to beat.
For these reasons, “infotainment” based marketing is on shaky footing.
It is useful to be informative and entertaining. In fact, I believe entertainment, in one form or another, is non-negotiable for entrepreneurs and marketers today.
But, again, it’s not enough.
The most powerful marketing I see are the messages that connect your would-be buyers with MEANING.
Last summer I wrote a promotion that transformed my client’s entire business.
The heart of the promotion was a long-form video sales letter that sold a low-priced front-end product. Up until that point, the client struggled a little to get front-end buyers, and those buyers generally took a long time to convert to one of the back-end products.
The sales video, along with the emails and ads that drove traffic to it, connected the viewer to meaning in two ways:
- he would stop being a victim of the big Wall Street firms (we showed him 6 barely-legal ways they were already emptying his pocket), and
- he’d become the hero his family needs to make it successfully through difficult times.
Note the emotional impetus isn’t what he’s going to get. It’s who he’s going to become.
A victor instead of a victim. A giant-slayer. A provider and protector his family respects and admires.
My video destroyed the previous version in terms of front-end sales. The number of buyers who took the upsell skyrocketed, too (without changing the upsell copy at all).
Suddenly, my client could buy traffic and be profitable in days… where it used to take months to break even.
The company’s revenue tripled in 12 months.
You don’t have to be a professional copywriter to use this principle to become an ever-more influential figure in the lives of your audience.
Regularly help your should-be buyers see themselves becoming the heroic version of themselves they dream of being… because they work with you.
No matter what you sell, there are deeper meanings at the foundation. That’s where the strongest, most enduring emotions are rooted.
Connect your customers to those deeper meanings, and even Netflix will have a hard time competing with you.