| © Dale
Armin Miller
You can shout your
message from the roof tops if you have to. Or write it
on a picket sign. Or mumble it while nailed to a cross.
And it will produce results *if* your message is
compelling enough.
If not, it won't matter
much that it occupies all the advertising spaces in all
the newspapers, television stations, and websites in the
world.
But don't worry: you
--yes, even you-- can deliver compelling messages. So
read on.
Now don't confuse
"message" with "product" or
"service." If you want to get downright
unethical about it, there are a lot of people with high
incomes who offer no product or service at all. You
don't have to look far for them on the Internet. But
they do deliver compelling messages. We call these
people con artists ... or politicians.
Here's an example of
why the distinction between message and product is
important. I'll pick on myself for a moment.
Many people are paying
money to gain access to The Success Arsenal![tm] Chances
are they think they are paying for what is actually *in*
Arsenal!. Yet I can easily disprove that: They pay
*before* they ever see anything in Arsenal!
You may object that
they *know* what is in Arsenal! before they join. But I
ask you to consider that they only "know" what
I wrote!
So I assert something
rather different: that my message engendered in them a
reasonable belief that their lives would be
more-favorably enhanced if they gave me money than if
they did not.
That's an important
sentence. No -- more than that, it's crucial to
marketing.
But it's a mouthful. So
let me strip it down a bit.
Your Marketing pH
Factor
Consider any successful
message. A message is being persuasive if it's
"engendering in you a reasonable belief that your
life will be more-favorably enhanced if you
______________ than if you do not."
It seems to me that
what's between the quotation marks is the essence of
persuasion -- it's heart.
(In the common picture
of them, hypnotic and subliminal methods are not ways of
persuading. Rather, those are ways of commanding.)
There's a blank in the
persuasion's-heart quotation. (I'll just abbreviate it
"pH.") When the blank pH is filled with
"vote for me," it becomes this:
"Engendering in you a reasonable belief that your
life will be more-favorably enhanced if you vote for me
than if you do not." We call this situation a
successful political campaign.
If the pH blank is
"go on a date with me," we call it a
successful pick-up line. (If it worked, please contact
me.) If the blank is "believe what I say," we
call it a successful religion or philosophy. If the
blank is "gimme candy," we often call it
begging. If the blank is "give me money," we
call it a successful marketing campaign or solicitation.
Of course, it's
successful solicitation that interests you. So we'll
consider the Marketing pH: "engendering in you a
reasonable belief that your life will be more-favorably
enhanced if you give me money than if you do not."
But I want you to see
that it's only a subtle variation of a technique you
already mastered before you could even talk. Sometimes
your very life depended on your artful manipulation
--oops, I mean persuasion-- of your parents and other
adults.
(I know you *feel* you
rarely got your way. Consult with your parents about
this; if you are now a parent yourself, the truth may
begin to dawn on you.)
For example, you're two
months old. It's 3 o'clock in the morning. You're making
this gawd-awful noise at the top of your lungs. You
engender in your parents a reasonable belief that their
lives will be more-favorably enhanced if they feed you
than if they do not. So you got milk. You brat.
I promise that you are
a master at it. Or dead (in which case I will be very
interested in learning where you are reading this).
If you're like most of
us, you have two problems translating that mastery into
"marketing" mastery.
One problem is in even
recognizing that marketing is just like getting Mom to
give you milk, getting to stay up past your bedtime,
getting candy before supper, getting Dad to let you use
the car, and so on.
Marketing is only a
game we made up so we could get paid for the same stuff
we used to get yelled at about. Just like movie stars,
politicians, and comedians.
The second problem has
to do with translating that mastery into words.
I mentioned "a
technique you already mastered before you could even
talk." Well, talking is a game parents made up
because they don't want any more years with you like the
first one. Teaching you to talk returned to your parents
some measure of control in their lives. Being the
persuasion genius that you are, you turned it against
them. Still, you never quite recovered.
So the coaching I am
about to offer is not so much telling you something you
don't already know. Rather it is to get you to apply it
to something that you --if you're like most web
marketers-- do not apply it to.
A message is probably
any sensory impression you cause anyone to have.
However, because you are interested in the Internet,
because I am using words, and because my favorite TV
show is about to start, we will only consider verbal
messages. Words. As in classified ads, webpages, email,
banners, and phrases in links.
Even if it's only a
yawn, all messages engender some sort of reaction. So
any attempt will automatically fulfill the first couple
words of the Marketing pH, "engendering in you a
reasonable belief that your life will be more-favorably
enhanced if you give me money than if you do not."
So only two
considerations remain. 1) Life enhancement and 2)
reasonable belief. It's not too much of an exaggeration
of my web experience to claim that 1 is widely
misunderstood and 2 is totally ignored altogether.
1) Life Enhancement
It's easier to start
with what life enhancement is not. It's probably not
whatever you're selling. I'll get back to that in a
moment. First, this may bother you even more: It's not
money, either. People are not really after money. Not
even you!
"What? Are you
nuts?!"
Yes *and* I can even
prove you don't really want money: Somewhere near you
there's a store or a bank or some place where there's a
pile of it. Maybe where you work. Go get it. (You watch
TV, so you know how.) I'll wait.
"Well, I don't
want it *that* way. I don't want to go to jail. I don't
want to go into hiding. I don't want ___ ."
That's the end of my
proof.
But I also want to ask
if it is safe to say that you would like money in a way
that is ... more life enhancing?
It's life enhancement
you're after, and either you do or do not see money as a
means to life enhancement. They are not the same thing.
I am not, of course,
saying that money doesn't have an appeal. I am saying
that if you're relying on that appeal you are missing
the boat ... and attracting sharks.
Maybe you're not
relying on the appeal of money. Your product has its own
appeal. Like hamburgers do.
We Americans (sorry,
Canada) love our burgers. And that's why the McDonald's
song goes --come on, sing along-- "You deserve a
burger today." Of course, that's not how it goes,
which is why they're still in business. You can buy a
hamburger at McDonald's, but they don't *sell* them
(except during price wars). They sell life enhancement:
"You deserve a break today."
And that's exactly what
the 8-year-old marketing genius inside you said to your
mother. Or something just like it. (I know because the
kids who never got beyond "I wanna hamburger"
died off.)
How would you get your
parents to buy whatever you are now selling? *That's*
what your message should be. And don't forget the
enthusiasm --the excitement!-- you put into whatever the
answer is. That's what will bring you results.
By the way, if you are
not sincerely excited about your product or service,
you'll probably never get good results trying to sell
it. Besides, if you're not excited by your product or
service --not the message, but the actual product or
service-- why are you trying to sell it in the first
place? No matter how much money you're making, you'll
never feel like your dreams are coming true if you're
not excited by what you're doing. Find something that
excites you. Life is too short.
2) Reasonable Belief
I imagine people
scratching their heads wondering why customers aren't
jumping through the computer monitor to take advantage
of "Make $12,000,000 in 10 minutes." Chances
are *your* claim is less outrageous. Maybe it's,
"Get your life enhanced now!" Maybe it's only,
"The best cricket uniforms in Nottinghamshire."
Whatever your claim is,
that's all it is to us readers and viewers: A claim. And
we readers usually realize that you can claim anything
you can think up.
This is more important
than words about life enhancement. It doesn't matter
what you say or show if your audience doesn't believe
it.
You won't get far
wondering, "Well, why shouldn't they believe
it?" I suggest you will be much better off
wondering, "Why *should* they believe it?"
Wonder about that before you write a single word, before
you dream about page layout. Everything else is
secondary. In fact, if they don't believe you,
everything else is irrelevant.
After you learned that
"I'll hold my breath until I turn blue" does
not work, what did you do to get your parents to believe
you? And, later on, friends, schoolmates, dates, etc.
Use *that* in your message.
The first million
webpages projected so much of their authors'
personalities and interests that it was hard to figure
out why you would be interested in looking at them. In
fact, usually there *was* no reason to look. But those
sites exuded personality. And we never questioned an
author's claim about having three cats and a Volvo.
Now the pendulum has
swung so far in the opposite direction that websites
--and ads and the rest-- are often cold, lifeless,
unbelievable.
Put *you* into your
message. You are, after all, the one constructing it.
Tell the truth. Try "I'm sitting here at my
computer in my boxer shorts."
A few paragraphs ago, I
wrote, "If the pH blank is 'go on a date with me,'
we call it a successful pick-up line. (If it worked,
please contact me.)" Why did I write the comment
between the parentheses?
I hoped you might
smile. And deep down I really do hope some woman in my
vicinity contacts me. But mostly I want to make sure you
don't think this is computer generated. So you know I'm
a person. So you can relate to me better. So maybe you
will believe me.
"Of course it's
not computer generated," you may exclaim.
But move your head back
an inch or two; re-focus your eyes. What (unless you
have WebTV) are you actually looking at?
-------------------------------------
This is from the Creating Value section of The
Internet Marketing Success Arsenal![sm] The
author is busy there stockpiling Internet- marketing
resources, tactics, and tools for small and home
businesses. You don't need a security clearance just to
visit -- but no smoking within 500 feet. http://successarsenal.com/wow/reprt3482a/index.html
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