Today’s episode is all about how to shake things up and break the monotony of a repetitive sales message to get people’s attention, keep them hooked, and get them to buy.
In this episode, you’ll discover:
- Why you shouldn’t stop marketing just because someone says no once.
- How to start a conversation in different ways with your customer so that each time you reach out they want to know a little bit more about you.
- 5 different angles you can use quickly to get some variety in your copy (perfect for email subject lines / headlines)
I’m also going to show you how I work with my own clients to help them find new angles to repeat yet progress their marketing message so that people stay interested in what they are saying.
I’ll be showing you how familiarity and predictability can be exactly what people want, especially if the alternative is a nightmare blind date. To all the single ladies listening, I’d like to remind you that all of the characters and events in this show, (even those based on real people) – are entirely fictional and all voices are impersonated purely for your entertainment.
After this show I’m hoping that you’ll be able to spot possible areas for improvement in your own marketing message. I hope that this will help you to break down what your customers want more easily so that you can repeat your message in way that moves your marketing forward.
As always, please feel free to leave any questions or comments below and click the link for more information about my Write With Influence course.
Show Transcript:
Amy:
Welcome to the latest edition of the ‘Write With Influence’ podcast where you can expect 10-15 minutes or so of sales messaging techniques so that you can become a powerhouse of persuasive writing with the ability to get people’s attention, keep them hooked, and get them to buy. But remember to always use this power for good – if you’re trying to sell a crappy product or encourage someone to buy something they don’t need, well, shame on you. Of course, I know you’re not because it’s been said that the Write With Influence listeners are the best of the best, the creme de la creme, the cat’s pyjamas. You’re just great!
I’m writing and recording this episode during some very wet and windy weather here in England. I think it’s storm ‘Dennis’, this particular one. I don’t know when or why they started naming storms. I do remember being very confused when I saw headlines about ‘Desmond uprooting trees’ or ‘Edna flipping over wheelie bins’ and ‘Frida bringing misery to commuters’ because I thought we were seeing a spate of pensioners just going on the rampage. You know, just fed up with the monotony of watching ‘Cash in the attic’ in the afternoon, day after day and instead just going out to look for some fun and excitement. I was a bit disappointed when I discovered otherwise because they sounded like they’d be great people to party with.
And that brings me on to today’s episode, shaking things up and breaking the monotony of a repetitive sales message. How do you repeat your sales message without sounding spammy? Well, first of all, repetition isn’t a bad thing. When you send out a marketing blast, say you’re emailing your list with an offer – some people may accept, some people won’t buy, but the people who don’t buy then doesn’t mean they will never buy. There are many different reasons people decide not to buy something and it doesn’t always mean they don’t want it. For example, it might not be the right time for them, they might be too busy to take your course or they don’t have an upcoming occasion that warrants them booking in for a makeover at your salon. They may not have the money for the purchase at the time, it may be a decision that they’re going to make just after payday and they may not see what they need to in your marketing in order to have the confidence to buy.
Ultimately, what you need to understand is that, just because someone says no to your offer, it doesn’t mean they’re saying no to your product. They’re just saying no to your marketing at that particular time. I mean, think about it, let’s say your friend invites you out for dinner on Friday and you say no. Now, hopefully that doesn’t mean your friend thinks this person doesn’t like to eat dinner with me, so I will never ask them out again. That’s crazy, but it’s easy to forget this in our marketing because we don’t get that immediate response from our customers. If you’re talking to a friend, they may say, it’s not a great time/ I can’t really afford it/ I’m a little bit run down this week etc and we’d understand and that would be fine, but we would probably ask them again in future. With our customers, when we send something out and they don’t engage, we don’t always get the feedback about why someone isn’t engaging. We know that they said no, but we don’t necessarily know why.
So, you shouldn’t stop marketing just because someone says no once. Repetition is good, it keeps you visible and front of mind when your customer is ready to buy, but, repetition of exactly the same thing – that’s not what you want to do. There’s a guy, I don’t know how I got on his email list, but he’s from a content marketing company and every few weeks I get an email from him that says, ‘Need quality blog posts written?’ as the subject line and I’ve had exactly the same subject line from him for the past (at least) four/five emails and the body of the email is about 98% the same as the previous email – very little changes, maybe an update as to when their ‘offer’ is about to run out. It’s a little bit like, and I don’t know if this is a universal example, but when I was growing up, there was a very large furniture company that did sofas, dining room tables etc and on their TV adverts, their sale was always ending that Sunday and then the next week, the sale again would be extended but ending that Sunday and it became this little comedic quirk in their advertising. So, going back to this email sequence that I’m getting every few weeks, it’s exactly, exactly the same email pretty much, what do you think happens? I mean, I keep them just as a researcher, as an example of marketing that you probably shouldn’t aspire to, but there’s a good chance that if I am a potential customer, if I just keep getting the same exact message, I’m going to start to ignore it. It becomes invisible because if you just see the same things again and again and again, you become so familiar, it’s very easy to ignore. Remember, persuasive writing is about having a conversation with someone and building a relationship so that that person trusts you. Marketing should read and feel like a real life conversation, not like a robot that just spits out the same answer again and again and again. Now, some things you do want to see again and again completely unchanged . . . I could watch ‘Stepbrothers’ over a hundred times a never grow tired of it,
“No power tools!”
Repeating the exact same message again and again isn’t going to progress your marketing results. You know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So, you don’t just want to blindly repeat the same message. There has to be some kind of progress and the progress you want is that your customer gets a fuller, more rounded image of what it is that you do and trusting that you can do it. Think about it this way, you know when you have a crush on someone and you want to find out a little bit more about them each time you see them, it’s still the same person, but you want to find out what music they like, what they like to do to relax, the movies they enjoy watching, their inside leg measurements, any relevant medical history and sleeping position! Each new piece of information is like a little hook, it’s a connection point that makes you feel closer to someone, and if that crush then turns to love, real love, you continue to make more of those little connections together over (hopefully) many, many years. You know, those shared moments that only mean something to you both. In fact, I read that when you break up with someone, it’s the absence of the person who understands those little moments that can often be the most painful part.
Showing a slightly different angle in your marketing message is a way of helping customers really get to know you and that builds trust. And if you think about it, if you’re only saying the same thing again and again, you’re giving someone a very small snapshot about what it is that you have to offer, and yet you’re asking people to invest in you based on that tiny piece of information.
Let’s bring it back to relationships again, I have a secret love for trashy women’s magazines. There’s a handful of these UK publications and I don’t read them regularly, but they tend to have headlines like, well, let me just consult the ones I have here:
“Ladies’ man Lez strikes again – would you take this rat back?”
And,
“Rat faked being a millionaire to bed all three of us.”
And finally,
“I rummaged in his pants and found him cheating.”
Now I know that infidelity can happen for many complex reasons, but in these magazines, there does tend to be a common theme of jumping into a relationship before really knowing someone and *spoiler alert* it doesn’t usually end well.
[New Scene]
Journalist:
“Hi Lisa, lovely to meet you, I’m a reporter with the UK’s ‘Women’s Weekly, Let’s Talk About It’ and I’m just going to take notes about your story and write it up and it should be out in a couple of weeks’ time.”
Lisa:
“And you pay a 250 quid, right?”
Journalist:
“That’s right. So, in your own time, just start from the beginning.”
Lisa:
“So, I was in Yates’s, with my mates and we’d just downed a load of tequila shots . . .”
Journalist:
{Writing}
“Clinking glasses in the wine bar with friends, I was ready to let my hair down and have some fun . . .”
Lisa:
“I went to the bar for a Guinness and a bag of pork scratchings coz I was starving and, well, that’s like a meal innit! I was pretty P***** by this point . . .”
Journalist:
{Writing}
“I went to the bar to order some appetisers, feeling confident as I made my way through the crowd . . .”
Lisa:
“and I’m trying to elbow my way to the front, right, coz it’s rammed! It’s not a problem because it’s mostly these little skinny lasses and couple of elbows and a glare from me, well, not gonna mess are they? But then I come up against this big lad in the queue, a bit like Shrek, but with a massive smile. He sees me trying to get to the front of everyone and that makes him laugh, right, and he says, “Go on then love, get in front, and I’ll get behind you” and him and all his mates laugh real loud.”
Journalist:
{Writing}
“A tall man with smiling eyes saw me waiting patiently and chivalrously let me go ahead of him.”
Lisa:
“So, we start chatting because we’re there for ages coz the bar staff are dead slow and he tells me I can buy him a Guinness to pay him back for letting me in front. I said, “F*** off, do you know how much they are in this place?”. He looked a bit shocked, but said he’d have half a mild instead and I thought, well, that’d probably be all right.”
Journalist:
{Writing}
“I bought him a drink to say thank you and he was surprised. I don’t think he was used to a lady paying her way, but I’m a modern woman.”
Lisa:
“Anyway, we get chatting and, he’s all right, and after a few more pints he looked, well, doable, so I said he could come back to mind if he got me a kebab!”
Journalist:
“The conversation flowed as smoothly as the wine and at the end of an enchanted evening he walked me home and stayed the night.”
Lisa:
“And that was pretty much it! He was always just there after that, which was fun but then after a few weeks, right, well, he was just always there drinking my Guinness and playing video games in the day and then he’d disappear at night. He told me he was freelance, right, so worked ‘unusual hours’ and often had to ‘entertain clients’. I thought it’s got to be something to do with the internet coz all his clients were like, real young, like them vloggers, you know, dead attractive and stuff, and I used to have to give him money for it. He said it’d be all right coz I could probably expense it on my tax or something which I think means like the government will give you back . . .”
Journalist:
{Writing}
“Late nights away and exotic dinners without me, something didn’t add up.”
Lisa:
“Anyway, one day I came home and he was s******* some lass on my couch! Turns out he wasn’t a freelancer, he was a brickie who’d been thrown off site cause he kept p****** outside and he owes me 800 quid now!”
Journalist:
{Writing}
“I could never have imagined the truth . . .”
[End]
Repetition in marketing is about showing up again and again, but with a slightly new and different take on your message so you can build those hooks that make people like, know and trust you.
So how do you do it?
Well, by trying different angles on the theme of the problem that you solve. The number of different angles is really only limited by your imagination, but let me walk you through a quick example. Let’s say you have a parenting guide aimed at parents of teenagers, so it’s helping parents have a better relationship with their children. Instead of being like the guy from the content marketing site saying, ‘Do you want a parenting guide?’every single time, we could split this up into different angles very easily. Off the top of my head, I can think of about five simple themes we could use, for example:
- High level objectives
- Symptoms of the problem
- Changes they want to see
- Risks of leaving things the way that they are
- Tackling a work-around that they’re using that isn’t working
What I mean by a ‘work-around’ is, when they’re using other resources or solutions that isn’t what you have and they’re not getting the results that they want. These five examples are all key areas in my copywriting snapshot and this is a document that I build for all client products that I’m ever going to market. It’s in-depth and breaks down what the customer wants, what their life looks like now, how the product improves their life etc, so that when I sit down to write, I have all this rich information to hand.
So first, let’s walk through some sample subject lines that we could create around these different themes. So first, high level objectives, very simply means, what does the customer want? If we were sending out an email, we could have a subject line such as;
‘Do you want a better relationship with your teen?’
Next, if we wanted to think about some ways that we could touch upon the symptoms of the problem, i.e. how the problem is showing up in their life, we might have a subject line of;
‘Is your teen sulky or moody?’
Next, we might want to look at the changes that they want to see, (remember, we looked at this in episode 11 which will help you come up with more ideas for this when we looked at butterfly moments) for our subject line here, we might have something like;
‘What’s possible when your teenager opens up to you?’
Next, risks, (we looked at this in episode 12 if you want to get some more ideas about that);
‘Is it too late to get your teenager to trust you?’
And if we wanted to touch upon a work-around that isn’t working, it might be something like;
‘Why most parenting classes don’t work!’
These are very simple, I’m not saying go out and use these subject lines, but it gives you a springboard to think about ideas for how to shake up your sales message so that you can repeat your marketing without ever sounding spammy. So those five examples that I just gave you were:
- High level objectives – what is it that they want?
- Symptoms of the problem – how is that showing up in their life?
- The change that they want to see – the transformation that they want to achieve.
- The risk – of leaving things the way that they are.
- Work-arounds – what have they tried that isn’t working for them?
That’s all for today’s quick message. Don’t forget to let me know your comments, thoughts, or questions, and if you have a copy problem that you would like me to fix on the show, please do get in touch.
Until next time, keep believing and remember, variety’s the spice of life . . .is it?
[New Scene]
Sandra:
“Jonathan?”
Jonathan:
“Sandra, hi.”
Sandra:
“Have you been here long?”
Jonathan:
“Oh no, just long enough to soak up the atmosphere and get myself on the right astral plane so I can be the best me to connect to the best you.”
Sandra:
“OK, good that you weren’t waiting long.”
Jonathan:
“The dating agency said that you just got to have a long relationship. . . tell me about it, cheater? Eater? Beater?”
Sandra:
“What? No, we’ve just been together a long time and . . .”
Jonathan:
“Too comfortable? Boring yeh?”
Sandra:
“Maybe . . .”
Jonathan:
“That’s why I’m here – looking to shake things up in your love department! I’m a life guru you see . . .”
Sandra:
“A what?”
Jonathan:
“A guru. Guru is soooo 2017 you know, I’m not going to tell you to eat raw food and to meditate, I’m going to tell you to be raw and explorate.”
Sandra:
“I’m not sure what that means . . . shall we order? I think I’m going to start with the buffalo mozzarella.”
Jonathan:
“Interesting. Why Sandra? Tell me the method behind that decision.”
Sandra:
“I like cheese.”
Jonathan:
“That’s so why you are where you are. You’re doing what you know you like.”
Sandra:
“That seems to make sense.”
Jonathan:
“It’s boring! What’s the thing you are least likely to order?”
Sandra:
“Erm, probably the flaming hot jalapeno infused mushroom stuff with foie gras.”
Jonathan:
“That is what you should get.”
Sandra:
“But I won’t like it.”
Jonathan:
“That’s not the point, Sandra. You’ve got to shake it up, push the boundaries. . .”
Waitress:
“Madame, Monsieur, are you ready to order?”
Jonathan:
“Two of the flaming hot jalapeno infused mushrooms with foie gras and Sandra, tell me, what do you like to drink?”
Sandra:
“Just a glass of house red would be great.”
Jonathan:
“No, she’ll have a Quatro and peppermint liqueur.”
Sandra:
“That sounds rank! I don’t like either of those things.”
Jonathan:
“That’s everything for now. Thank you, merci! Look Sandra, I’ve taken a lot of psychedelic substances in my time and do you know why they improve your life?”
Sandra:
“No,”
Jonathan:
“Because they make you unlearn everything you’ve learned.”
Sandra:
“That seems a bit daft.”
Jonathan:
“You start from scratch. You might look at a table and think, yeah, that’s a table, I know what a table looks like, but what if we don’t just push the boundaries but erase them? Why couldn’t that table also be a television or a neck tie?”
Sandra:
“Because it’s a table.”
Jonathan:
“No, Sandra, look, you need to forget everything you think you like and start trying the things you don’t like. It’s all about variety these days.”
Sandra:
“But why would I spend 37 years getting to know how much I love cheese, only to turn my back on cheese?”
Jonathan:
“Because there might be something better than cheese.”
Sandra:
“There isn’t. There really isn’t . . .”
Jonathan:
“But you’re putting boundaries on yourself Sandra . . .eliminate them!”
Sandra:
“No, boundaries are good, they let you know where the road ends so you can stay alive and as for unlearning everything I’ve learned, why do I want to get rid of the common sense I’ve built over the years? Why? Why would I want to look at something on fire and suddenly get curious about it, wondering if it could be a neck tie? That’s nuts!”
Jonathan:
“Oh Sandra, I’m going to turn your world upside down tonight. I’m going to take you to places you think you’d hate, I’m going to give you food you think will make you sick and it’s okay because we’re going to go on this journey together. I’m going to be with you every step of the way, babe. Except for now because I need to p***, I’ll go to the little boy’s room or maybe I’ll go to the woman’s room and shake things up!”
Sandra:
“Oh God, this is going to be a long night.”
Steve:
“Sandra?”
Sandra:
“Steve?”
Steve:
“What are you doing here?”
Sandra:
“I . . .”
Steve:
“Oh, are you on a date?”
Sandra:
“Yeah, kinda!”
Steve:
“Oh, I’m, I’m sorry, I’ll leave you to it.”
Sandra:
“Are you here on a date too?”
Steve:
“No, I dropped in to pick up some take-away, their mozzarella starter is amazing, so I got three! I shouldn’t, but . . . I’m just heading back now, it’s Friday so, few bears, yeh, I’m going to watch a bit of ‘Bob’s burgers’ and ‘Modern Family’ and then flip through some country songs on YouTube. I know, I know, I’m so predictable, terrible, isn’t it? Even after we . . . I guess I’m just a sucker for a routine!”
Sandra:
“Please can I come with you?”
Steve:
“What about . .”
Sandra:
“Why would I spend years getting to know what I like or what I love to turn my back on it for a Quantro and peppermint liqueur?”
Steve:
“What?”
Sandra:
“Exactly.”
[End]
Leave a Reply