Article Marketing: A Musical Analogy
Hitting The Right Note
If you’re heavily into Heavy Metal, how much will you enjoy a violin recital? If Scottish dance music is your bag, how appealing would you find an evening at the opera?
So, you love opera… but how would you feel if you paid a small fortune to hear your opera idol live and s/he started belting out folk songs instead?
Music has many different styles eg classical, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, ‘heavy metal’ and folk. Then you have a wide variety of musical instruments – piano, guitar, violin, flute, drums and pipes. There are choirs and soloists, groups and bands, duets and harmonies. You can come up with more, I’m sure. Each of these has a different ‘market’. And that’s where there’s a very significant similarity between music and marketing…
Keeping The Customer Satisfied
Famous musicians, bands, groups and singers have made their mark – and their market – by appealing to audiences who like their style and then giving them more of what they want.
And that’s what you have to do. Decide on your market and your marketing message – and then focus on delivering your message to your market. The more useful they find the information you give them, the more they will turn to you for advice and support.
When you have something for sale, they are more likely to buy from you. If you recommend a product, they will see it as a ‘must have’. Of course, this won’t happen overnight. You have to build a reputation first.
The Attractor Factor
Article Marketing is an excellent way to do this. Valid, valuable content is a sure-fire way to attract a human audience. A bonus is that search engines like this too. You can add an article resource box where you can promote your business. Use inbound links to entice people to your website (or blog).
All these techniques help to raise your profile. They’re great for anyone who wants to find out more about you. And they’ll give you credibility as an ‘expert’ in your field. The more exposure you have – providing you give useful and original information – the higher your website will rank with the search engines.
Variations on a Theme (of Pagnini…)
But it’s about more than just website ranking. You can use all that material in a variety of different formats eg newsletter, blog post, website content or an e-book. You could even break it up and use it in an autoresponder series. The only real limit is your own creativity.
In the Spotlight
Writing articles is a great way to show your individuality, to put a different perspective on whatever you write about. No-one thinks exactly the same way you do. And your view might just be the one that gives your readers the insight they need. The way to stand out from the crowd is to be original – and the best technique to adopt is to be your own inimitable self.
Women: The Superior Marketing Sex?
This is an important article adapted by Marian Dyer, BME Copy Editor, from an article by Mark Ritson.
Most senior marketers seem to be men. And yet, a fascinating article published on the Women’s Marketing Forum, claims many female marketers outperform their male counterparts.
Male brains, on average, have 5% more brain cells and are around 10% larger than women’s. Another case where size doesn’t matter… The workings of the female brain more than compensate. Plus they’re better designed for marketing; probably because they’re also built for empathy.
What’s The Difference?
Actually, everyone’s brain is female initially. Around 8 weeks, a surge in foetal testosterone destroys cells in boys’ communication centres and increases cell production in the sex and aggression centres. The female foetus simply continues to develop.
Boys and girls really are different. A study from Cambridge University claims that the amount of testosterone boys receive in the womb prevents them from understanding and connecting with others. Women genetically have more effective communication skills and a higher level of emotional understanding.
This emotional understanding gives women a biological advantage in marketing. Male marketers think the market will want what HE thinks it wants ie a ‘perceived need’. Female marketers get ‘inside the head’ of their customer and plan their marketing around a real need.
What’s the connection?
Both sides of the human brain are connected by the ‘corpus callosum’. With 200m of nerve fibres, it’s a kind of super-highway joining the two sides. The right side is holistic and intuitive (qualitative); the left deals with logic and analysis (quantitative).
Qualitative research measures responses to options offered; eg a choice between apples or pears might show a preference for pears. But what if grapes were included? The majority might choose grapes. The quantitative approach, eg asking how many oranges a person eats and how often, gives no indication whether oranges were favourites or the only option. Marketers need both kinds of research to understand their market.
It’s best to start with qualitative research and refine the findings in quantitative exercises. Most marketers rely on one or the other – which is probably why lots of marketing falls short.
Understanding The Differences
Women, reportedly, have a larger corpus callosum than men and are more ‘integrated’ in their thinking. As well as understanding what’s important to the consumer, they can more easily figure out the significance of the variables. Men’s inclination to rely on one approach means they miss half their potential market.
It’s important to understand that, because different brands have distinct qualities, techniques that work for one brand may fail with another. Branding is another area where women are likely to be more successful. The difference in their processing powers means women consider the intricacies and specific details while men prefer the global and general approach.
Men and women look at problems differently too. Women tend to be intuitive thinkers while men prefer rule-based processes. When building a brand, you need a clear statement; what the brand stands for and what the customer can expect from it. Most brand ideas are too complex. To be effective, they need to be simple. Like Nike’s “just do it”.
Focus or Flexibility?
Women are ideally suited to marketing. Their intuition and flexibility helps them adapt to changing circumstances and subtle nuances. Men concentrate more on focus and aggression; they’ll follow a path that doesn’t lead anywhere rather than admit they’ve got it wrong.
Women are genetically programmed to keep lots of balls in the air; they can cook, clean and keep an eye on the kids simultaneously. Their in-built sixth sense warns them when things are not quite ‘right’. While men’s hunter-gatherer traits help them focus on single issues, in marketing this can lead to disaster. A tendency to concentrate on perceived threats means they often fail to see the big picture.
Extra neurons and dendrites give female brains greater processing power; they can more easily ‘link thoughts’. Male brains are better designed to exclude diversions so they can concentrate on the task in hand. Men also excel at spatial reasoning – probably why they’re more adept at parking than most women. But how helpful is that in marketing?
The Conclusion – Isn’t It Obvious?
Every market has an element of competition. To be successful, you must identify your competitors and create ways to keep yourself ahead. Intuition and flexibility are likely to be more useful here than focus and aggression.
While it’s fair to say that not all men are better at marketing than all women, women who are good at marketing are likely to be more successful than men who are good at it…
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Direct Response Marketing: 5 Statistical Reasons Why
Nearly every business I come across believes online marketing is ‘THE WAY’ to increase sales; that all they have to do is ‘crack the code’ and money will instantly pour in. They forget that digital marketing is just one piece of media, just one of many ways to compel a customer to do business with you.
People who fall prey to the pressures of internet marketing and social media have forgotten – or have never known - the power of ‘old’ media ie direct response mailings delivered via an old fashioned post-box. Even if you aren’t struggling with Pay per Click, SEO and FaceBook, here are 5 statistics* that should convince you to reconsider the sales power behind a powerful piece of direct response copy.
The Power Of The ‘You’ Word In Copy
When communicating with visitors to your web-site, remember these two rules.
The 1% Rule - this is the tiny percentage of people who, on average, take some form of ‘action’ when visiting your web site. By ‘action’, I mean visitors who subscribe to your newsletter, contact you about your service or directly place an order. This means that you may be losing 99 out of every hundred visitors to your site.
The 8 Second Rule - research shows that on average, 50% of visitors to a typical web-site make a decision about whether to stay on that site within 8 seconds.
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