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handprop
10-27-2009, 01:04 AM
Dave, here is the response I promised you

Politics is a 24 hour job. I received a call a couple of hours ago from a Senator that was invited to a Q&A on a nationally syndicated network in the morning and he was freaking out because he kept drawing a blank about what message he was trying to push.

My job was to help him stay on task, not always an easy with politicians! And what I did to help him is the same thing I recommend for people trying to develop copy for any printed media or advertisement. After all, a conversation is no different than a billboard right?

The conversation lasted two hours and the first half hour was me listening to him ramble on and talk in circles. After the thirty minutes were up I had him go through an exercise that I have used since I first began my quest into marketing and is proven successful.

What I did was ask him to list five items that he felt occupied the minds of voters regardless of what party they belong to. Like most people he had a hard time with the list because he was having an information overload from a very rough day. I knew where this was going and also knew I had to settle him down and just stay with the basics. The list was as follows.

1. Voters think the government can’t be trusted
2. Voters are scared of the future of America
3. Voters think the government does nothing but waste money
4. Voters see the economy getting worse
5. Voters are sick of parties fighting and not solving problems


Now comes the fun part! I asked him to come up with some potential questions that might be asked but I had a series of rules that had to be followed. The rules are simple, I ask the question and he responds with the answer but the answer can only come out of the list of 5 factors voters are concerned about. This may appear simple but try it and you will find it’s very challenging.

The first couple rounds was a mess and we both laughed but after some practice I was able to force him to stay on task and the answers came out like pure poetry.

You might be a little confused so I’ll explain why this is a very good exercise. But instead of explaining my exercise with the Senator I’ll apply it to Daves website for his plumbing company, that way he can walk away with something he can use to increase how effective his site can be.

Dave…..You responded in the other thread buy explaining how your website already has the typical bullet points like honesty, dependability, etc. Try the above exercise and list 5 items that are always on the consumers mind when they think of calling a plumber. You already have listed a couple items like honesty, dependability, etc. so it should be rather easy.

One point I want to make before we continue is be careful because what you feel the 5 items are could be different than the 5 items your customers feel are important. (This is why surveys can be important if designed correctly)

Anyhow, develop the list and write it down on paper. Then go on your website and look at every detail of the content, this includes photos, links, headlines, etc.

Now imagine you have to re-develop all the content but this time every stitch of it revolves around the list of 5. You can see how hard this exercise can be.

The only point I’m making is we all know how important it is to connect on a personal level with our customers but yet somehow people fail at developing content that revolves around the customer. When a customer clicks on a link to your website what comes up? Do you have a headline that pulls them in? Does the content of the headline revolve around the list of 5? Or how about the body of the front page, you expect people to read it but do they? If a customer just sees the same old garbage as every other site that’s a real problem. But what if you developed content that revolved around the list of five? If done correctly the customer will WANT to keep reading.

The list of five doesn’t just apply to a website either. What about a yellow page advertisement? The goal is to always strike an emotional cord with the potential customer and if it’s designed without the list of five it will be a sub-standard marketing vehicle.

But what about the offer I talked about earlier? Once we have the list of 5 we can now craft a great offer right? It’s easy because the list keeps us on track and we can take this information and create an offer that’s very targeted to the customers thinking process. The offer is beyond the scope of this thread but put some thought into what I wrote and you will find your business will be forced to stay on track. If you can get a handle on this all types of advertising becomes a walk in the park.

Hope this helps
Mike

vangogh
10-27-2009, 01:40 AM
Interesting post and exercise Mike. Let me try to dig into it a little to see I'm understanding the point of the exercise.

The idea with the list is to get into the mind of your customers/clients. If you expect them to buy from you then you need to be addressing their concerns and not yours. The list is an attempt to get into the minds of your customers to understand what it is that will make them buy. What do they want. What do they need. What are the things they're concerned with when choosing whether or not to hire or buy from you.

By making sure every little detail on your site is addressing those questions you stay focused on a message aimed at and convincing the potential customer that they should get out that credit card or give you call or whatever action you want them to take.

In the Senator's case no matter what the question the answer needed to stick with something on the list because regardless of the question that's what the voter really cares about. The Senator's needed to stay focused on the questions that mattered regardless of the question that was actually asked.

Same thing for our businesses. Answer the questions that matter to your potential customers.

Blessed
10-27-2009, 03:25 AM
The other thing I like about limiting yourself to 5 things your customer cares about the most is that it forces you to keep your message succinct. It's easier to craft a really great offer because you are so much more focused on what that offer should be instead of on the 101 things you might have been thinking about before you engaged in this exercise.

handprop
10-27-2009, 08:40 AM
Yes, you are both on track! Try it for yourself and have fun with it. Like I said in the post it's very difficult but very effective if the 5 items are the right five items. When putting it into action it also exposes the fluff of the copy as well.

Pick a product ouside of what you do and try and figure the list out. Then find a website, advertisement or sales letter and practice. Try it with your favorite company or a company you knowis the best at what they do like Fox news, or Jelly Belly. Test yourself, none of us are born with marketing talent, marketing is a learned behavior that requires practice and testing.

When your done checking out great companies then take a look at a couple you know are having a hard time and test the marketing list of 5. I practice marketing 24/7 and still make mistakes.

I challenge you to come up with your own list and carry it in your pocket for a week, bring it with you in the bathroom or when your filling the car with gas. Spend time thinking really hard about the list and what you have developed, the stronger the list the stronger the results.

If your having a hard time with the list of 5 then work backwards!:eek: I do it all the time. Most of us work in a selected industry so find the best companies in that industry and gather all the marketing material and work backwards to figure out what they used for the list of five.......

Try it! Your customers will thank you!

Mike

KristineS
10-27-2009, 12:44 PM
This is an interesting exercise. You also make a very good point about being careful since your top 5 might be different than the customer's top five. We have CSRs that handle customer calls for us here and they also contact customers to let them know about specials and such. One of the things we discovered is that what we think would be a motivating special is not necessarily what our customers think would be a motivating special. You have to know your customers and talk to them to ensure that your five items are relevant.

cbscreative
10-27-2009, 02:22 PM
This is great, I just gave this thread a 5 star rating.

handprop
10-27-2009, 03:19 PM
Thanks, I hope it helps somebody.

I wish I coud say I created the list but I didn't, my customers did!:eek:

Mike

huggytree
10-29-2009, 08:10 PM
handprop, your posts are too long....I cant concentrate long enough to read them...ADHD?

1. plumbers charge too much
2. contractors show up late and waste my time(on time/ reliable)
3. will he ask to use my bathroom?
4. Contractors will try to cheat me or lie about the situation(trust/honesty)
5. contractors dont listen to my needs..too pushy

I find internet shoppers to be very similar to phone book shoppers...price is king...i rarely have an email response lead to a job...1-2 a year

thats the best i can come up with...that bathroom thing was actually taken out of a trade magazine as the customers worst fear of a contractor...I never #2 in a customers home because of it.

Patrysha
10-29-2009, 08:22 PM
I disagree about internet shoppers, yeah you have to develop a relationship with them, but all that takes is words that you write once and then direct people to as they have needs that arise. That is the beauty of the 'net.

You can be there throughout the sale process without really being there until they are ready to commit to a job.

I mean if you want to attract homeowners then you have to appeal to what they are looking for and your statements above would fit...

But if you are going for the contractors then they quite frankly don't give a rat's behind about any one of those things except getting you at the rate you promised in the time frame you agreed to.

You'd need different writings altogether to appeal to them. Completely different markets with completely different needs.

Another beauty of online marketing, is you don't have to do any of the writing yourself. Hiring out is not that much when you consider the return you could get on a website. If you're going to have one at all, why not have one that can actually earn it's keep?

handprop
10-30-2009, 09:01 AM
Geez I wish I had time this morning to answer this but I am booked solid until late tonight. I can give you the short version now and the long version late tonight.:) That should put you to sleep in no time flat.

Patrysha is correct!

I will add something though:

You need to be in total control of your business and that means marketing as well. I bet if I asked you what sales are for the month of March 2008 you could tell me because you have it documented. Marketing needs to be treated the same way. The assumptions you make about customers are only about your customers. The reason is, the marketing framework you have created this. Change the framework and you will change the customer.

That's the beauty of marketing and why rolling the dice when it comes to creating it yields poor customers and poor results. The goal is to create the customers you desire and that can only be achieved by the total marketing package. Sometimes is hard to read and may seem long winded but make no mistake, the marketing package is complex. That doesn't mean it's hard to accomplish but remember, marketing needs all the components working together to be complete. You can't do one aspect of the package and expect stellar results.

I always control what type of customer I have....period! What I can do tonight if I have time, is give you some workable solutions you can use to maximize yield on marketing effort.

I would give some thought to what Patrysha said also. Many times business owners hire out the critical elements of marketing!

Mike

greenoak
11-01-2009, 08:12 PM
what a good excercize......... it hits what we try to do all the time...keep them in mind more than how neat we are........our main marketing idea right now is ... save money with style...im using it a lot, in talk and ads..... also i like ....a fun place to shop....
i think its so good to think about them more than us..altho it doesnt come naturally.....
if i had to list 5 things on the minds of my main target.....HOME OWNERS UNDER 40.....IT WOULD BE...
money and value, saving money
style, on trend, adventure,
green, recycling,
fun of shopping, refuge, cheap thrills
quality and uniqueness
ann

handprop
11-02-2009, 12:42 AM
I find myself once again out of time. Politics is a 24 hour job and I’m writing strategy 14-16 hours a day and wish I could have more time to help some of you folks out. Over the years I feel as if I have read every marketing book available and the one thing I have learned is they all fell short of providing any answers. One reason for this is most authors have never really had to create a marketing SYSTEM for a major corporation and all most books do is just scratch the surface of the whole marketing puzzle.

The list of five is something I learned from a senior marketing executive from a 700 million dollar a year company. Actually I learned many things from him.

The most important lesson I learned is being very observant of what works and what doesn’t. Over the course of time I developed a system of marketing that works for every company and every situation. The problem is I never had time to write it down and it’s just all in my head. If I had more time I would write it all down and give it away. Some of the stories I could tell are really amazing.

It’s 12:00 at night and I just read Ann’s post and thought I would make a quick comment. The list of five is very important and works as an aid to keep us on task but let’s take a minute and explore that a little deeper.

When looking at the list of five we can learn a little more about marketing than meets the eye. As I explained earlier it keeps us on track, but more importantly it allows us to maximize our marketing effort, otherwise known as return on marketing effort (ROME). Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it’s not in any books and that’s because I came up with that on my own. All it means is marketing takes a certain amount of energy or effort if you will, and if we can maximize our input we can then maximize our output.

Example of ROME:
Let’s pretend for a moment we have a blank sheet of paper and that’s our only marketing vehicle. Basically, we have an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper that contains 93.5 square inches of space that we can work our marketing magic. ROME is nothing more than a method of guaranteeing we maximize the largest percentage of the 93.5 square inches as possible. Most of us can imagine a headline, offer, introduction, body, conclusion, call to action, etc. but does it end here? No way, and that is where most companies and marketing groups fail.

Marketing never ends and must always be measured for effectiveness. If you write an offer does that mean you’re done? No, the new question is how strong is the offer? Think of ROME as continuous improvement of the marketing effort. Use the list to create a marketing vehicle but don’t forget to keep using it for the same marketing vehicle over and over. When I develop a marketing vehicle it’s just a guess but the list can help get me close. My goal is always to maximize effectiveness on the fourth or fifth round and the list of five is always used.

If we develop the 93.5 square inch marketing vehicle into what we feel is about perfect then use it for a couple weeks and measure the results…..you are measuring results right? Once we have measured our result, that’s when the list of five becomes even more important. Remember the goal of marketing is to increase the effectiveness of the vehicle not just design it and walk away making blind assumptions. Instead grab the list of five and look for wasted square inches. On a typical advertisement how much of the copy is not working for you to create a customer? It’s never 100% but how much is it?

Wasted square inches are on every advertisement so it’s easy to discover. I was visiting a front page of a website the other day and I almost burst into laughter. What I found was a big photo that doesn’t represent anything having to do with creating a customer. It was about 3 x 4 inches, that’s a whole 12 square inches…….wasted. Photos are not bad but the wrong photo is. If we have 93.5 square inches available and we just wasted 12 square inches that’s 13% of the total space not working for you. So how did I know it wasn’t working? Well, I just looked at the site and knew right away what the list of five was and when I looked at the photo nothing about it qualified for the list of five. If your going to put a photo up be sure to qualify it!

The reason this happens is because people don’t know what to put on copy so they become creative and artistic. That’s called filler, and filler does nothing for the customer. Learn to use the list of five and learn to continually evaluate using the list. Over the course of time the results are amazing. Putting garbage on advertisements for filler is amateur, use your list of five to keep you from doing that!

Mike