If someone has a piece of your written marketing in front of them right now, will they feel inspired to take action? Will your marketing message compel them to call you, email you or visit you?
Written marketing
I am in the process of writing an article for my next marketing newsletter. It’s all about how to make your written marketing more powerful. Copy writing is one of the most overlooked areas of marketing within small and medium sized businesses. They will often invest thousands in a great website, an advertisement, a mailshot or a brochure – only to blow it all by writing their own, uninspiring copy.
A professionally written marketing letter, advertisement or website can out perform one written by a keen amateur by thousands of percent. I’m not talking marginal differences here. For example, this blog generates more enquiries in one day, than many sites with more traffic will get in a whole month.
Fortunately, it’s really easy to measure how effective your existing written marketing is; simply by measuring your results.
Unfortunately, a lack of results is not usually enough to motivate a business owner to have their copy written professionally.
I spoke to a web designer recently, who designed a £17,000 website for a client. Unbelievably, the client was happy to spend all that money on a new website, but refused to pay for a professional copy writer! Three months later, his client has had four email enquiries via the site and not a single phone call. This, despite the fact they have very effective search engine optimisation (SEO) and get a lot of targeted visits each day. When my friend asked the site’s owner why she didn’t have her new site copy written by a professional, she told him; “the cost would probably be too high.”
Clearly, she can afford the cost of losing tens of thousands of pounds worth of new business though!
When I speak with business owners, who are getting poor results from their marketing, they always blame outside factors. They will blame the economy (even when times are great), the marketplace, the time of year etc.
It never crosses their mind that the reason they are going nowhere, is because their marketing is ineffective!
By the way, these are the same people, whose mailshot letters you throw in the paper bin and whose advertisements and websites you ignore. They honestly believe that YOU are the reason they are failing; not thinking for one moment that their pedestrian copy writing and amateur marketing might be to blame.
Inspirational marketing
We have to remember that our prospective clients are not idiots. Today’s consumer is better informed than ever before. They see ‘average’ marketing all day long; it just washes over them.
To motivate someone to become a client or customer, we need to capture their attention and then inspire them.
The small business owners I work with enjoy far more sales, attract better clients and grow amazing businesses.
If you want the same, here’s exactly how it happens.