A Picture Beats a Thousands Words

This following list is a great thing to keep in mind when you are trying to catch the attention of customers - particularly over your competition.

Most of these are based on testing or research by Gallup

1. When appropriate, cartoons attract most attention. They can work well on postal items like envelopes.
2. Photos convince most people. It is sensible to use them if looks or credibility matters.
3. Charts and statistics often attract interest - e.g. weight-loss figures or interest rates.
4. People look at people. 
5. Responses for can double when people can see who is talking to them in adverts.
6. Men look at attractive women; so do women. But women look at babies even more.
7. Illustrations or pictures that relate directly to the message work on average 32% better.
8. Captured TV frames from commercials are extremely effective.
9. If you don't illustrate the product or the idea, your advert can be 27% less effective than average. 
10. Generic stereotypes - smiling business people, chatting 'friends', loving couples and ecstatic eaters can kill your adverts -  they don't demonstrate and develop an uniqueness.
11. If the picture has something odd about it, people remember the message - ask a newspaper photographer!
12. One big picture usually attracts better than several small ones.
13. Pictures should demonstrate what you are saying - Before and after pictures are particularly effective.
14. Cut out pictures with 'free form' shape attract the eye better than squared-up ones.
15. Don't have pictures just for the sake of it; they cost money and can divert attention needlessly.
16. Research suggests that you should never use pictures that have nothing to with the product or service but seem a clever idea... There is a balance between number 11 and number 16!

Top Ten Tips on Writing Copy from a Master

Drayton Bird

I love getting emails from Drayton Bird. Always worth a read - some more than others, but hey ... he is a prolific emailer.

David Ogilvy (an advertising god is case you are too young!) said Drayton Bird "knows more about direct marketing than anyone in the world." - that's a hell of an accolade from someone who should know!

Today Drayton sent this excerpt from a book called 'The Unpublished David Ogilvy' that was originally privately printed over 25 years ago.

"The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches. Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. 

Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning - and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don't write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

Wise words. You can be as clever as you like, but the idea about writing things to be read is just that - they should be written to be ... read. Do yourself and your readers a favour - follow Ogilvy's 10 tips on writing.

To find more Drayton Bird Droppings see - http://drayton-bird-droppings.blogspot.com/

Is it Sales and/or Marketing??

Someone has ignited a fuse.... MY fuse ... I have been following Twitter and the tweets from @MarketingWeekEd and with that many of the comments about Sales and Marketing as separate entities. Some I just couldn't. I was on the verge of tipping myself over the edge.

I know they are only commenting ... and everyone only sees things from their own point of view .... but what a bucket of generalism!

• On one side there is: Remembering Ritson's view Know When to Shut the Door on a Customer.

• One the other side there is apparently 'controversially' the CIM suggesting sales & marketing merge  Marketing needs to Merge with Sales to Safeguard its Future 

PURLEEZ!! First and foremost it depends on what the business is trying to achieve... It is then up to Marketing to make that happen or at very least influence results enough to make it easier for the rest of the business to make that happen....

... And given that there are a lot of businesses out there, that are more focused on working to get and keep paying customers, most marketing people couldn't function if they didn't understand sales... and when I say 'sales' I mean .... to be a quality that makes people want to buy, have, to do or not do something.

Its all very well sitting there in a Marketing tower, talking.

Marketing - like Sales, should, and in the main is, measured on results. And Marketing should be lead by what the business for which/whom it is fulfilling its role actually wants - ie The Marketing function understands their own clients needs and works to get them what they want.... It's not rocket science and it astounds me every time when people try to make it complicated!!!

Paranoid Marketing

I was with a client recently who (quite rightly) was "just checking" what they should be doing online - and by that they of course meant their website and other 'social stuff' as they put it.

It has to be said that there is certainly an interdependency between SEO (search engine optimisation - ie where you or your business comes in the results from a search on Google, for example) and social media for better business promotion. Social media (eg Facebook, blogs, Twitter, Linked In etc) go hand-in-hand with SEO.

I whole heartedly recommend using social media and online tools and promote yourself and your business, AND YOU SHOULD REMEMBER: as much as you might feel that your Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, and Twitter, are yours, you don't own them. The online businesses do, so use them to support and promote but please make sure that you aren't making these sites the centre of your success.

Here are a few tips from Penny C. Sansevieri (@bookgal) to help you :

• Website: You should always, always, always have a website. I know some authors who use Facebook as their websites. Big mistake. I know other authors who get a website that doesn't belong to them, meaning they are part of a community of free sites they don't own. If the community decides to stop doing websites and goes away, guess what happens? So does your content.
• Smart Social Media: One of the things I really recommend is that you centre all of your content around your website. That's partially why I suggest linking your blog and your website to Facebook and Twitter. The content starts on your site and gets funneled from there, rather than in reverse.
• Other ways to promote: Consider other ways to promote your stuff that isn't tied to your online accounts directly. Interviews on (other) blogs, white papers, webinar events. Yes, you are still putting stuff out there on other sites, I'm not saying not to. I'm saying that you need to make sure that whatever content you put out there is reflected on your site as well.
• Duplicate content: There's a problem with posting huge amounts of duplicate content online, but unless you are pushing hundreds of pieces out a month, I doubt you have anything to worry about. However, the flip side is that you want to make sure you have copies of all the content you put out there. If you're uploading a video on YouTube, don't delete it off of your computer because you think it's "safe" on this site. It may very well be, but if you lose your page or YouTube gets bought (again) and morphs into something else, you're in trouble.
• Website... more: When I talked about having a website, I'm not just talking about having a one or two-pager. I mean have a robust site packed with content. Make sure that you have a blog, and you might consider adding a resource section, etc. All information about your books should be on the site (don't rely on Amazon to house this for you) and be sure that any ordering information is on your site as well. Wait! You might ask, is Amazon in danger of going away? Not likely. But as they've shown in the past by pulling down books and buy buttons without warning: they are Amazon and can do whatever they want.
• Traffic: So, the nitty-gritty of promotion is what? Sales, right? Sure, and exposure too (though I think you should target exposure first, then sales, but that's another article). If you're sending all of your traffic to social media sites, guess what? Your website traffic is probably pretty low or non-existent. If you send traffic to social media sites guess who benefits? Well, certainly you do in the way of exposure, but long-term this isn't a good plan. Let me explain why. If you aren't promoting your site as the center of the universe, and instead pushing people to social media sites, then your website isn't getting those super valuable incoming links from blogs, websites, etc. that you are promoting yourself to. As a result, your site will sink in Google rankings. That means if you lost one or more of your social media sites, you could certainly pick up the pieces and start sending people to your site, but that will be a long, hard haul. Better to focus on that now and gather that traffic, along with the buzz you create in social media, so you aren't caught with a zero starting point if anything happens.

You might think that the moral of this story is a slightly paranoid "trust no one" mantra but it's not. It's about protecting your stuff and being a smart and savvy author. While there are no guarantees in anything, you need to be smart about all of these wonderful, free, not-owned-by-you social media sites. You might do a fantastic job of driving traffic, fans, and likes to various pages. But the reality is that you should focus on what you own, your website. I love my social media sites and yes, it's a widely known fact that I'm addicted to Twitter. Yet they aren't the center of my online universe, my website is. Yours should be, too.

Great advice from Penny!

If you have any comments, or want to contact me - email me via thirza@lippymarketing.co.uk and visit our website at www.lippymarketing.co.uk