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Category Archives: marketing
Slaying the credibility trolls
Sonia over at Copyblogger has a great piece on “The #1 Conversion Killer in Your Copy (And How to Beat It).”
What makes people almost buy? What makes them get most of the way there, then drop out of your shopping cart at the last second? What makes them stare at your landing page, wanting what you have to offer, and yet, ultimately, close the page and move on to something else?
It turns out there’s a hideous troll hiding under the bridge. Every time you get close to making a sale, the troll springs out and scares your prospect away. Get rid of the troll and your copy will start converting better than it ever has before.
The ugly, smelly, dirty, bad-mannered troll is prospect fear. And it’s sitting there right now, stinking up your landing page and scaring good customers away.
She does a great job of explaining where the “conversion troll” comes from, and she’s 100% correct. If you’ve grown up in this society, you have probably have a degree of well-justified trepidation about trusting the claims of those trying to sell you something.
I’d go her one better, though, because I feel like the principles she’s articulating when she says that “[t]rustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency are your best weapons” apply to a lot more than the point of sale. Continue reading
Bad Business 201: answer the phone
A few months ago I was in job-hunt mode, and during that period I had chats with a number of companies around Denver (mostly PR and Marketing agencies). In August I accepted a new position on the client side, running a wide range of marketing and PR stuff for a locally based financial services firm.
One of my very top priorities (along with assisting the VP of Marketing with a full-blown rebranding and heading up a complete redevelopment of the corporate Web site) was leading the search for a PR agency. I’d talked to most of the shops in town while doing my job search, so I had a decent idea what was out there, and a couple of the places I had talked with struck me as strong possibilities for my new company. So I put them on my big list and then called them to see if they were interested. Continue reading
Bad Business 101
My company is in the process of a major Web redevelopment, and I’m the point guy on the project. Among other things, it was my job to identify, solicit and make the hiring call on the vendor. I’m happy with the company we wound up with, but as the letter below indicates, it was an odd and frustrating journey. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.
_____
Hi Jeff. I wanted to get back to you on your recent bid for our Web redevelopment project. We felt like XYZ Interactive represented an outstanding development resource, and in the end I was convinced that you were the most capable vendor we solicited. Additionally, you came in with the lowest bid.
However, we decided to award the business to another vendor. Continue reading
The smartest shopping cart that ever lived
MediaPost reports this morning on an interesting new survey from TNS, which says that “sixty percent of shoppers across the globe believe that they will be able to pay for purchases using just their fingerprint by 2015, rated top by 25% of shoppers.” Never mind the chill that should send down the spine of anyone who values their privacy – we’ll deal with that another day. For the moment let’s have a look at what people expect from The Future®.
Quarterlife crashes and burns: what does it mean?
Opening night for NBC’s new Millennial-targeted series, Quarterlife, was an unparalleled disaster.
The drama series which made headlines about its transition from internet to TV, “Quarterlife,” succeeded in being a flop in its NBC debut Tuesday night, having the worst ratings in at least 20 years, according to Nielsen Media Research.
The brazilian-dollar question now becomes: what happened? Continue reading
Social networking: the next generation
Have you ever noticed how social networks don’t do a very good job of representing how our personal networks actually function? Sure, places like Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn have their utility, but their flatness is a problem.
Think about your Facebook, for instance. If it’s like mine, you have friends there who run the gamut from “real life best friend” to “people I know” to “guy I couldn’t pick out of a lineup if my life depended on it.” You may have relatives, friends from school, co-workers and “assorted others.” And they’re all absolutely equal.
Our LinkedIn networks can be even less attuned to how our lives works. Continue reading
Upon reflection: was I too hard on The Blog Council?
Last week I joined a legion of business bloggers in poleaxing the shizizzle out of a self-satisfied new project called The Blog Council. Josh Catone of Read/WriteWeb stomped them. Dave Taylor, who’s probably forgotten more about blogging than the entire council put together knows, took them to school. Robert Scoble – another guy who knows a thing or two about blogging – explains why he’s skeptical. Jordan McCollum goes door-to-door on some of the group’s players. Mike Moran prays that it’s all just a big mistake. And so on.
Then Jake McKee comes along and explains that all us “experts” don’t get it. In fact, our failure to get it proves that the Blog Council is right in doing things behind closed doors. Continue reading
A great new how-not-to resource for business bloggers
When a new innovation comes along, corporations typically follow a predictable arc. First there’s the “Ignore It” phase. Then, once it becomes clear that it’s actually important, they dive into the “Getting It All Wrong” phase. The first step in Getting It All Wrong is “pretend that the new thing works like all the old things.”
Eventually they get past these early “ballistic podiatry*” activities and begin to figure things out, although there’s often a step, which falls late in Getting It All Wrong, called “Hire a Consultant Who Was Successful at Other Things But Barely Knows More Than You Do About The New One.” Sometimes these outside hitters have read a book, but mainly they rely on the tendency of executives to overgeneralize about prior successes.
Which brings us to The Blog Council, Continue reading
Verizon Wireless gets it right!
And now, for a happy story. I bitch so much about how people get it wrong that it’s always great when a company gets it right.
My mobile contract was up and I was looking to upgrade my service and my handset. I work with social media and mobile and the phone I’ve been carrying around is almost embarrassing to pull out around colleagues. It’s kind of like working for Volvo and driving up in a KIA. But more than image, I needed to be fast-forwarding my capabilities – I need to be able to show clients and prospectives what I’m talking about and I need to be able to function better away from the laptop. Continue reading
wordSmith | Writing / Content Marketing 