MarCom Professional

In recent weeks, I’ve discussed why you need to adjust your copywriting’s personality to appeal to different audiences. It just comes with the territory.

Well, the rise of one-to-one marketing means the ability to mould your language and style to match your target market could soon be in greater demand.

What is one-to-one marketing?

With marketing budgets being dragged towards the guillotine, marketers are scrambling to deliver campaigns that provide a better return on investment.

The cost of mass, untargeted campaigns is becoming harder to justify, and annoying prospects with irrelevant messages is to be avoided when customer retention is so high on the agenda. More...

Different people like to be spoken to in different ways. Some want to know the facts, whilst others are more interested in hearing a story.

So copywriting needs to be pitched to match the attitude and style of your target audience, and resonate with their personality type, if you want it to provoke the right response.

In my last post, I discussed why you need to give your copywriting personality if you want it to build an affinity with your brand and a desire for your products.

To discover which personality to adopt, my tip was to immerse yourself in your target market’s culture: visit their websites and read their magazines to understand how to write in a language that’s fine tuned to their wavelength. More...

If copywriting is salesmanship in print then all you’ve got to do is weave a benefit laden pitch that will persuade anybody to buy, right? Well, whilst that’s generally true, what you’ve also got to consider is that different people respond to your words in different ways.

The trick is to write in a style that appeals to your target group, rather than to as wide an audience as possible. You have to give your copywriting a personality that resonates with their attitudes and aspirations. And you need to reflect the personality of your client at the same time.

Why is personality important?

The internet can seem a robotic, impersonal place, so web copy generally needs to be more chatty and friendly than its offline version. More...

[Photo courtesy Hamed Saber]

Since moving to my new domain in March I’ve been stripped of my glorious Google page one rankings for my key terms (copywriter, copywriting etc), and left groveling with a begging bowl in the dank, dark depths of its search listings. Whilst a brief fall from grace was expected, I’d hoped it would only be a few months before Google learned to love me again.

However, when I noticed that my Yahoo page one ranking had been reinstated I started to panic.

Well, it would appear that Google has banished me to their ’sandbox’. This is a mystical (some would say mythical) place where new websites are held until they’ve matured enough to be allowed to hang around with the older sites on Google’s top listings. More...

A great blog if you’re a believer in the benefits of valuable content for converting browsers into buyers (which I am), Junta 42 has released a new eBook on content marketing and why you should implement it as part of your marketing strategy.

The eBook’s 11 pages long, and provides some inspiring case studies and excellent advice on getting your campaign rolling.

Here are a few points I scribbled down:

• 2007 Forrester research showed that 90% of purchasing decisions begin online
• Content marketing is the art of understanding what your customer needs to know and then delivering it in a relevant and compelling way
• If you deliver relevant content you’ll become a trusted resource
• The internet means prospects are no longer reliant on the traditional media to meet their information needs
• With access to information at their fingertips, buyers are now more proactive in finding content to help them make smarter buying decisions
• The r

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[Image courtesy MarkDM]

Brochure websites need to be consigned to a museum as relics of the internet’s evolutionary history. There I’ve said it. Websites, and the thinking behind them, has evolved a lot over the last few years. If you just want to recreate your company brochure into pixel form then, please, go ahead. But the longer you can keep prospects on your website the more time you’ve got to build a relationship.

People surf the web for information. Not sales messages. So your website needs to be interesting and ’sticky’ if you want to engage your visitors’ interest and keep them glued to your pages. More...

Whether you call it business blogging, content marketing or engagement, giving away free content is a great way of building trust and credibility with info hungry web surfers. Google seems to like it too.

It has taken a while for awareness to spread (I’ve still got a drawer full of business blogging leaflets from a Milton Keynes exhibition two years ago), but this year I’m finding more people are getting clued up on the benefits of weekly articles for boosting their online profiles.

The latest place to find words written by me is the bda (Buckingham Design Associates) website. My current contributions are: More...

[photo courtesy of monamigreetings]

Even if you compose the most concise copywriting to ever grace a page, the most persuasive words aren’t always written by you. There’s an ingredient you can add to your copy that can help you sell more in less time. It’s an underused tactic. But one that can rapidly satisfy a prospect’s logical and emotional demands at the same time.

People are skeptical of being sold to, but they do listen to each other. So to persuade them to buy your product you need to provide them with  evidence of someone it has benefited. You need to provide the social proof that your product is as wonderful as you claim. More...

[image courtesy of ansik]

Whether it’s in customer reviews, blogs or forums, people are talking about products and influencing buying decisions. Blaring out sales messages merely antagonises skeptical prospects, who place their trust in the objective advice of their peers.

Research is showing that the ROI of traditional marketing methods is falling, whilst customer interaction is increasing. This would suggest that an adjustment to the bean counter is needed to how marketing dollars are spent.

Perhaps it’s time to stop thinking about just ‘joining the conversation’ in marketing to an online world, but also to be useful in how you communicate. More...

People might be ignoring overtly salesy marketing, but they still listen to each other. One of the most persuasive voices for selling your products can be your customers themselves. Whether you’re selling eBooks, renting skips or promoting your expertise, reviews and testimonials can enhance your credibility and build trust with hesitant buyers.

Reviews ’social proof’ your products

Web savvy consumers now search for reviews as well as the products themselves. As Dean Rieck coined on Copyblogger, people look for the ’social proof’ of a product or service. More...