You can write beautiful marketing material that really shows you know your ideal client’s pain but it can still fail to have the desired effect (i.e. make them place an order) if you make a few errors. The good news is they are easy to rectify. I’m going to share with you the three errors I see businesses make the most often.
1) The first one is the most classic mistake and the easiest to remedy. Too many businesses forget to add a “call to action” to their marketing material. This is the point when you say to the reader to get in contact with you, to place an order, to use the contact form or whatever the action is that you want them to take. I was reviewing some newsletters for one of my clients last week and there wasn’t a single call to action on any of them. Failing to add a call to action will result in failing to capitalise on the marketing effort you are making so please don’t overlook this. It’s not being pushy to add one!
2) Think about the order you are writing your marketing material in. Remember when I talked about describing the value you deliver with your product/service. The challenge here is to describe that value, to basically capture the reader’s imagination, early enough in the marketing material that they will want to keep reading and to take action. I was reading the marketing material of a different client last week and they fall into the trap of putting the fab benefits that their service delivers towards the bottom of the content. The answer is to flip it around so a nice value focused statement goes first so the reader gets to see your service/product could solve their pain and then keeps reading. I find that when people write their material it seems quite natural to write about the features then the benefits. It’s a bit like having a comfort blanket when you are writing your marketing. It’s fine to write it that way as long as before you publish it you flip it round. I do it a lot as I write in a way that the words naturally flow out of me but then scrutinise them, flip them around and make it as compelling as I can.
3) Don’t write War & Peace. The aim here is to write enough but not so much that your target reader gets bored. Always be mindful of the action you want them to take from reading your material and then take them on that journey. You need to give them enough that they are keen to obtain more info by following your call to action. Usually I write a long piece then edit it down and flip things round so it becomes more fine-tuned and more likely to entice the desired outcome.
You should review your marketing material on a very regular basis to make sure it is working for you as well as it could be. I am continually reviewing and adapting mine and I see this as the natural evolution of any business.
Your challenge for this week is to review your main pieces of marketing, which for most of you will be your website, and make sure you are covering the 3 points I’ve mentioned above. Just think about those orders that you might be missing out on by not making those changes.