Your prospects don’t care about you

That’s little harsh perhaps, but it’s essentially true. Despite all you’ve done making a shiny product or service, they don’t care.

For now at least.

All is not lost, however.

They just got a new wallet and it’s small. There’s work to do.

The right words, in the right order, change things.

• If Martin Luther King had said, “I have a plan” and not “I have a dream”, it wouldn’t have had the same effect.
• If Neil Armstrong had stopped at “one small step”, no-one would have remembered.
• Or if René Descartes had just said “I think….” without adding “therefore, I am”, he’d have left his readers wondering what was coming next.

The words you write in your marketing are no less critical. They have an impact on their readers; either sending customers flocking towards you or running away.

Want some hot tips on how to make your words better?

Ask yourself these questions.

Do my words address a problem?

Let’s imagine you’ve invented a new can opener. You’re rightly very proud of it. You go out telling everyone who you think might listen that it opens cans like no kitchen implement ever has. But you get no sales.

People are selfish. They won’t buy it just because you tell them.

No, they’ll buy your product if it solves their problem.

They’ll buy it if they have a problem opening cans (yes, cans without ring pulls do still exist).

There’s a famous story about the birth of the iPod. It wasn’t the first MP3 player on the block by a long shot. There were plenty around before, but they all talked about compression rates and techie feature stuff. The world said, “meh”.

Steve Jobs came along and just said, “1,000 songs in your pocket” and the world loved it. The world had to have one.

Do you see the difference? If you just give technical features, no-one cares. If you tell people what problem your product solves, they’ll love you.

The first thing you’ll need to do is ask yourself whether your product is a good fit for me? Do I need it or do you just want to sell it to me?

Please make an effort to understand what I’m thinking right now and what my problems are. I need you to wow me! You need to tap into my emotions.

Now, I understand that it may get a bit messy looking into a mind like mine, but that’s the kind of thing you have to do in the sales business. It’s all about emotion and feelings. You know that people don’t buy what they need, don’t you? They buy what they want, all the time. Even food in a supermarket.

Then, once you’ve got my attention, you must ask me to buy.

Not with a lame, “click here” to buy my stuff. This is the bit where you’re asking me to commit to you (not long-term necessarily, but possibly), I’m not the kind of person that just takes things for a spin or buys stuff “just for fun, so I want to know what’s going to happen when I do buy”.

A proper call to action says, “if you have this problem, do this, and this will happen”. So if you have problems opening your cans of beans, you can buy this opener and your can opening life will be problem free forever. Although, I’ve no doubt you could make it better than that.