Customers buy on emotion
so for you to be successful
at selling,
you should understand
basic buying emotions/triggers.

Susan Gunelius outlines
10 of the most common emotional triggers.

They are;
Fear
Guilt
Trust
Value
Belonging
Competition
Instant Gratification
Leadership
Trend-setting
and Time

Some triggers are timeless like fear.
Fear and greed has been used
to sell products
since human history began.

Others are more recent like instant gratification
yet aren’t any less effective.

EVERY marketing message
should appeal to emotion.

Steve Strauss has a great post on branding

“Look, there are 27 million small businesses
in this country alone,
and that is not counting
the countless number
of websites and competitors
you will encounter overseas and online.
So why will a potential new customer
choose you over the competition?

One reason, a main reason,
is that your have
a clearly identified unique value proposition (UVP)
and that UVP is relayed in all that you do –
from your site to your signs,
from your store to your social media.”

Notice he said A,
not one billion,
A unique value proposition.

Because that’s the trick with being different.
Be different in one area,
and you’re innovative.
Be different in all areas,
and you’re strange.
Customers can’t relate to you.
There’s too steep a learning curve
to use your product.

Unless you have the time and financial resources
to push customers over that curve,
be different
but not TOO different.

One of the most talked about commercials
of the Winter Olympics,
especially with female viewers,
is P&G’s
‘To Their Moms, They’ll Always Be Kids’
commercial.

The commercial is emotional.
Almost every mom
has sat in the stands
or bleachers
or auditorium,
wishing desperately to keep her child safe
yet knowing the child has to do it
on his own.

It contains an unanswered question,
drawing the viewer’s interest.
Why is the child shaving?
Why are they dressed up
and acting like adults?

There are close ups on individual children,
giving each scene
a hero or heroine to relate to.

And it is about relationships,
not achievements.
The relationship of a mother and child
is pretty much universal.

P&G nailed their demographic perfectly.
A brilliant, brilliant commercial.

One of the methods
to ‘fool’ prospects into tuning into advertising
is to disguise it as content.

Magazine advertisers do this
with their advertising written as articles.

Now radio advertisers are doing the same
with their fake news reports.
The fake news report
is ‘interrupted’ with even bigger news
which is usually a sale.

We have been trained
to listen to ‘breaking news’
and we do
so this tactic DOES work.

However, use it with the knowledge
that it can backfire.
If there is… say…
a deadly earthquake as that day’s top story,
announcing your sale is more important
can be viewed as insensitive.

Your marketing WILL get noticed
but not always in a good way.

It is challenging to watch tv
or listen to the radio lately
without hearing
someone boast that
his/her company’s product
is made from ‘real’ ingredients.

Real means nothing.
Everything on this planet
is made from real ingredients.
Even fictional stories,
although consisting partially of imaginary ingredients,
have real components to them.

But it also costs nothing to say.
It implies all natural
with none of the legal implications.
(If the product was truly all natural,
that label would be used)
It sounds impressive.

‘Real’ IS a real option.

A article by Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz
explains that
the easier a font is to read,
the more likely a person is to make a decision.

Novemsky’s study in 2007 showed
that 41 percent of participants
delayed making a choice of cordless phone
when the font was difficult to read
vs
17 per cent of participants
when the font was easy to read.

In another study,
when participants were presented instructions
in Arial, an easy-to-read print font,
they estimated that
the exercise would take 8.2 minutes to complete.
When the instructions were presented
in a difficult-to-read print font,
the estimate was 15.1 minutes,
nearly twice as long.

Do you want your prospect to take action?
Present your proposal or sales letter
in an easy-to-read font.

Leave the fancy fonts
to businesses not needing the sales.

One of my buddies
was developing a toy
for a five year old boy.

Knowing that
the average 5 year old American boy
is 3 Foot 7 Inches tall,
he would visit toy stores
and then crouch to that height.
The view from that height
was vastly different
from the view from his own.

I often hear
that playing pretend
is a necessary part of
every child’s learning experience.

What you don’t hear
and is equally true
is that playing pretend
is a necessary part of
every successful entrepreneur’s learning experience.

Putting yourself in your target market’s shoes
is often easier
if you pretend to walk in those shoes.

Tim Berry has a list
of 10 tips
for starting a business quickly.

His #1 marketing message?
“The most important concept
in marketing is focusing
on a well-defined target market.”

I agree.
The world is big.
Trying to compete everywhere
with start up resources
will result in your business
making no impact.

Focus, dominate, expand.
That was how
many of the global businesses today
were founded.

Susan Gunelius
at Entrepreneur.com
has her list of
top 10 marketing trends for 2010.

Many of her top 10 trends
center around relationships.
There are tactics for forging them
(social media/online video & mobile marketing),
and
there are guidelines for keeping them
(transparency and trust/less interruption, more value).

Relationships aren’t anything new
in business.
Those in sales
know that people buy
based on relationships.

What is new
is WHEN this relationship is forged.
It is now being built
long before the prospect
even expresses interest in the product.

I like to think of it as
a relationship from birth.

One of the ‘rules’
in marketing
is that people move away from pain
and toward pleasure
so you market your product
as reducing pain
or increasing pleasure.

The Taser booth
at the Consumer Electronics Show
was a clear example
that all rules can be broken.

People (they were all males) lined up
to serve as the guinea pigs
during the Taser demonstration
(it was one of the most popular demonstrations
at the show).
The volunteers were tasered with enough force
that they fell to their knees.

‘Course you could argue
that the pain of not knowing
what being tasered was like
surpassed
the pleasure of not having
X volts of electricity
shot through your body.

One former guinea pig in the audience
told me
“You have to try it
at least once in your life.”

I passed on the opportunity
but many, many people didn’t.