Overall, less is more on a landing page. You objective is to get the visitor to take an action, so capturing their attention, being direct, and guiding them to the action is what it’s all about. You have about three to five seconds to do this. Here are my answers to the test questions.
Read MoreWatch this to find out if you make one of these five mistakes in your customer testimonial videos.
Read MoreSales people like to talk. The good ones listen. Marketers, on the other hand, tend to be verbal but more focused on reading and writing. They wind up working on the copy for websites, PR releases, direct mail, email, literature and whitepapers. The problem is… no one reads any more. So much of this activity is wasted. Too bad. What are you going to do about it?
Read MoreThere is a long cultural history in the US of women taking on the role of “helpmate.” George Lakoff calls the situation women face the “Women’s Lot” narrative. For a long time women could only be nurses, not doctors. However, they could help doctors. They can help in HR but not become CEO. They can help their families or their spouse. So what characteristics does a helpmate have, whether they are male or female? They work hard to serve others, often getting little credit for them selves. Any marketing narrative and message to this prospect constituency must contain these key elements.
Read MoreRegardless of your gender, if you’re a B2B marketer and not considering it, you are missing a key element in messaging. While 90% of marketers may acknowledge that gender is important, I find only 10 percent of 1:1 marketing campaigns or databases have any data on gender. Here’s a simple deep dive technique to add gender to your database.
Read MoreRecent research (O’Keefe & Jensen, 2008) indicates that the negative frame will only take you so far in influencing behavior through messaging. Their research finds that there is a slight positive effect at persuasion for messages that were positively framed. It may be simply that we prefer thinking about the beautiful lady and not the leopard, pleasant thoughts compared to dark thoughts. However, I believe framing in a positive way helps activate the dopamine circuitry in the brain that is associated with positive emotions, happiness and satisfaction.
Read MoreWhat’s a two year-old’s favorite word? It’s “NO!” of course. And why do they use this word? Just to piss us off? How engaging! But that’s exactly why they learn and use the word… to be “engaging”. In a discussion of the way the brain works and metaphorical thinking, this is the single most powerful metaphor we learn to use. Here’s a quick way to improve your odds of engaging.
Read MoreI once had a competitor say to a prospect that if they bought from us, we would nickel and dime them to death. Of course this is a lousy way to sell, and I would never advocate disparaging your competition like this. But having been presented with this “negative frame” and hearing it repeatedly in the marketplace, I had to do something.
Read MoreWhile it is fun, it is not necessary to make up metaphorical language about beavers. Rather the point is that we think metaphorically. A metaphor exists in the brain as a connection of synapses and neurons. It can be expressed by language. Knowing this, we can create messaging based on language that fits naturally into the narratives we already have in place in our heads and that are activated by metaphorical thinking. The most influential metaphorical language construction is the “frame.”
Read MoreWhen we are children and are held by our parents, we feel warmth (temperature) and learn to associate warmth with affection. What happens in these two cases is that our brains do something called neural recruiting. Two neurons each holding different concepts begin to be connected. The more often that two things are associated together, the more the neurons that hold each of these two things begin to connect or wire together.
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