Category: Sales & Marketing

Same old same old just doesn’t sell anymore. To make your marketing stand out, you need to get creative. Below are five tips designed to get your creative juices flowing. Some are brainteasers or are what Michael Michalko in “Thinkertoys” calls Linear Thinkertoys. Others fall under intuition or Intuitive Thinkertoys.

Some tips may appeal to you more than others. My suggestion is to try them all. Even the ones you’re not drawn to may still open some doors that wouldn’t have opened any other way.

These tips will work whether you sell a product, a service or both.

1. Find the “second right answer.” Roger von Oech talks about this in A Whack on the Side of the Head. Don’t be content with the first good idea you come up with. Take the time to think of a second, or third or 50th idea. Quantity counts – the more ideas you have to choose from, the more likely you’ll discover an excellent or even a brilliant one. Remember, Thomas Edison discovered thousands of ways a light bulb didn’t work.

2. Change the question. If you change the question, you’re probably going to get a different answer. You say you want to sell more products? What if you changed the question to how can you make more money? Well, there are other ways to make more money than to sell more products – maybe you lower the cost of making the product or you raise the price of the product. Now you suddenly have new avenues to explore rather than just going down the same tired path.

3. Ask your product or service how it wants to be sold. Now we move into more intuitive techniques. Start by getting yourself into a relaxed state. Take a few deep breaths or practice some relaxation techniques. Imagine your product or service in front of you. Now ask it questions. Who do you want to be sold to? How do you want to be sold? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Who do you think you can help? Why do you want to help them? You can also do this technique as a journal exercise. Write down the question and answer. See what bubbles up onto the paper.

4. Paint a public relations campaign. What would a press release look like if you painted it? Or sculpted it? How about a dance number? A collage? Take any part of your marketing that troubles you and turn it into a piece of art. By combining two dissimilar acts, you may discover your answer. Or you may not come up with anything at all, but just the act of “playing” and “creating” could jolt something loose. Hours or days later your idea may suddenly end up in your lap.

5. Walk away from it. If nothing is working, then stop. You can literally walk away by taking a walk, or just quit thinking about it. This is especially important if you find yourself getting frustrated or discouraged. Give your subconscious time to mull things over. The idea may just suddenly appear to you. Or, after a few days, try another exercise or two. That may be the catalyst you need.

The most important tip of all? Make sure you have a blast. Being creative should be fun. Keep it light and fun, don’t struggle too hard with it, and see how many ideas you’re rewarded with.

Want to know the secret to creating MEMORABLE promotional copy? Sales copy that actually stays with your customers long after they’ve finished reading it?

Then master the art of using words to create pictures in your customers’ heads.

If you can describe your products or services in such a way that it forms images in your customers’ heads, well, then you’ve just created something that will last long after the marketing is over.

Why else do novels stay with us for so long? Those “pictures” we see draw us into the world of the novel, and those pictures stay with us long after we’ve closed the book. If you can create that kind of staying power with your marketing materials, think about how much ahead of your competition you’ll be.

So, how do you get started? Below are three tips. (Note how all three tips have the word “specific” in common. Be specific whenever you can. We don’t think in generalities, we think in details. The more specific you are, the stronger the pictures.)

1. Use specific nouns. Quick — what springs to mind when I say the word “bird”? Now erase that image. What pops into your head when I say “cardinal”?

When I said bird, you could have pictured any number of bird species or maybe even some sort of generic bird (something brown with wings and feathers). When I said cardinal, I bet you saw a bright red bird with that distinctive triangle head.

See the difference? Cardinal is specific and it brings a specific picture to mind. Bird is generic, and it brings a generic picture to mind.

Whenever possible, use the most specific noun you can. (However, if the most specific noun is something most people wouldn’t know, say some rare exotic insect only found in the Amazon jungle, then make sure you describe it as well.)

2. Use specific verbs. Verbs breathe life into your copy. They’re the difference between words lying flat and comatose on the page or jumping up and dancing a jig.

Verbs bring movement to your copy. They tell your readers if someone is walking, jogging, sauntering, skipping or crawling. Or maybe that someone is exhausted and has decided to lie down for a bit.

Now, when I say verbs, what I’m NOT talking about are “to be” verbs — am, is, are, was, were, etc. Those verbs don’t paint a picture. Not like hug, skate, sail, run, fall, spin, flip, etc. See the difference?

While “to be” verbs are necessary, the idea is to use them as little as possible. In fact, I have a fiction-writing friend who has a “was/were” rule. Only three “wases/weres” per page.

Yep, you heard me right. Per page.

Yes, it can be done. I didn’t think I could do it either in my novels. And let me tell you, when you start pruning those “wases/weres” out of your prose, it’s amazing how strong your writing becomes.

3. Describe specific situations. Compare:

“Our bookkeeping service is the best in the area. We can take care of all your bookkeeping needs, from invoices to paying bills to reconciling your bank statements.”

To this:

“Do your invoices go out late because you can’t stand the idea of sitting down to do them? Does your cash flow suffer droughts each month because no checks arrive in the mail (because your invoices went out late)? How much hair have you pulled out over the years because of accounting mistakes? Never fear, those days are over when you hire us to do your bookkeeping.”

The first example is generic (take care of bookkeeping needs). The second example shows you HOW the business does it. (In fiction we call it “show, don’t tell.” Good advice, even for copywriters.) You can actually “feel” those business problems — late invoices, cash flow droughts, loss of hair. It’s the difference between something cold and impersonal that really has nothing to do with you and something that wakes you up with a spark of recognition (“Hey, that’s me. I need that.”)

Writing Exercises — See what others are doing

Pick a piece of copy. Something with meat — at least 300 words or so. No, it doesn’t have to be something you wrote either. In fact, this exercise might be easier if it isn’t yours.

Now analyze it. Look at the nouns. Are they specific? Or are they a bit too generic? What about the verbs? Could they be stronger? And does it describe a specific situation, something that you can actually feel and touch?

Try this with a variety of writings — novels, nonfiction books, newspaper articles, Web sites, sales letters, etc. Look at both “good” and “bad” examples. (Although good and bad are somewhat subjective, follow your gut.) See what trends you discover.

By analyzing what others are doing, you’re better able to see the strengths and weaknesses in your own writing.

Article Contributed by Jo

It is important that if your business plans a telemarketing campaign, your expectations are met and are measurable. If you decide to use the services of a call centre, you do not want to be throwing money away and not distinguishing whether your telemarketing campaigns are working or not. Telemarketing budgets are becoming slimmer and slimmer and this means that you need to do everything you can to ensure that the money that you do spend on telemarketing goes on the right things, and does not get wasted.

The way which you can ensure that your telemarketing campaign is successful is to set out clear objectives. This means that you need to set out clear cut measures so that you can indicate the success of the campaign in a formulaic fashion.

There are various ways you can do this. A professional call centre will help you to create measurable objectives if you outsource. If you are doing it yourself, you can go for simple objectives or more complex measures, whichever is most appealing to you and whatever is most methodical. Your telemarketing campaign might be complex, and therefore might require a more flexible and complex approach.

The first thing you should do is put a report together which figures out what exactly you are measuring in your campaign. You might be conducting the campaign for several reasons, you might need to generate more leads, you might need more data, or you might want to promote a product or service. You need to determine whether it is an outbound or inbound campaign.

You then need to think about your KPIs. This stands for your “key performance indicators.” Once you have decided what you are doing in your campaign, you can set very specific key performance indicators for your strategy. Your key performance indicators will be the backbone to your strategy, and can be anything like revenue, new leads generated, new data gathered, or the number of calls that have been made. These are far easier to keep track of and therefore you can track your campaign success more easily. You can also use this data to compare how this differs from previous telemarketing efforts you have made, and it helps you to define your return on investment.

After you have gathered the data that you need, you are able to assess your performance. Make sure that you use this data effectively; do not allow it to collect dust on the shelves. This data could be crucial and allows your business to adapt to changing industry or client requirements. You can take both the positives and negatives out of your data and use them to define a course of action. You might need to repeat the campaign in the future, to compare them with these results and see whether your redefined assessments were more effective.

About the Author

Jo writes for alldayPA.com – a call answering service that can help you launch your own tailor made business telemarketing campaign.