My favorite Subhead
I’ve been working on a sales letter today. Here’s a subhead I’m particularly happy with:
“You Can Have Customers Coming After Your Products and Services Like Zombies After Braaaaaiiiinnnnnnnsssss. . . . ”
Sometimes I like my job.
Response to HWW #21
Michael Max is a heck of an acupuncturist, a world traveller, a fellow bald-headed troubadour and an all around nice guy. He also writes good responses to things. Here’s what he had to say about the most recent HWW newsletter:
And completely agree that much of learning is really about unlearning something that might have at one time been a perfect solution, but now has evolved into into a problem. Or simply stagnated past it's pull date and needs to be done away with. Either way, once something becomes "infrastructure" it's hard to do away with. Sometimes you just need perseverance and blasting caps.
I really dig Michael’s comment about “infrastructure” getting in the way.
c
One of the worst “Sales Letters” ever
I was bouncing around some copywriting boards this morning and found posted what might just be the worst sales letter ever. (The guy who posted it on the board got it in the mail and was so appalled he felt the need to share.) Here it is:
Dear Sir / Madam
Welcome to the new XXXX marketing campaign. We have officially adopted Einstein and other wise men to provide us with great business ideas.
The XXXX team have had great success this year with a previous campaign. We ran the “Da Vinci” Marketing Code campaign and were inundated with enquiries and orders for our service.
The reason for our new theme is the result of our recent success! The XXX team were running low on TIME hence our new theme. So we have recruited a bigger team!
We can provide an outstanding service that will provide you and your team with more time to create new business opportunities.
So if you need anything from “PRINT TO POST” we are the expert team to give YOU the TIME to grow new business!!
XXXX would love to provide you with TIME, so if we can help please take the time to:-
(followed by website, email, telephone, fax info)
Ok, dear readers. Have some fun. What’s wrong with this thing? Is it the lack of any real and discernible benefit? Is it the completely passive prose? Is it the fact that all the letter does is talk about how great the XXXX team is? Is it . . .dear god, I could go on and on. I could spend a whole day just drilling through this thing and pulling it apart. It’s like copy crime salad.
Remember, folks, a good sales letter:
-Is benefit oriented.
-Is about the prospect, not about you.
-Doesn’t read like stereo instructions.
HWW #21 – Marketing is Educating (or maybe Re-Educating)
Hey folks,
Welcome to the all new, all different HardWorking Words Newsletter.
It’s leaner. It’s meaner. It’s . . .uh . . .just plain text in an
email and a lot less likely to get kiboshed by overambitious spam
blockers.
Got a friend who wants to subscribe? Have them send an email to
hwwords@aweber.com or point them towards
http://www.haddadink.com/newsletter.
In today’s big issue (number 21 for those of us who are counting),
I’ll dig around in the marketing toy trunk and talk about teaching
old customers new tricks.
=====================================
Why Marketing and Educating are the Same Thing
=====================================
My keyboard is like some weird sort of alien steering device.
People who pop by HWW central and try and type something usually
get this glazed and confused look on their faces. Very occasionally
they pass out. And that’s always hard to explain.
You see, a few years ago I was suffering from horrible and
debilitating tendonitis. Using my mouse was like being repeatedly
bit on the wrist by an overzealous ferret. And trying to type was a
plodding and painful affair that usually ended with me icing my
wrists and trying to peck out prose with my nose.
=====================================
So I decided to do something about it.
=====================================
First, I bought my weird alien steering device keyboard (made by
the fine folks at Kinesis, who make damned good products and do
damned bad marketing.) And second, I decided to learn how to type
in the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout.
Now, for those of you who aren’t nearly the geek I am, Dvorak is a
layout developed back in 1936 by a guy named August Dvorak. It’s a
lot more efficient and comfortable than QWERTY and makes your
fingers “travel” less as you type away. Less travel. Less work.
Less pain. Sounded good to me.
So I downloaded a typing tutor (it had a Viking. I called him the
typing Viking) and got to work learning how to write all over again.
*And within about five minutes I had an aneurism and collapsed into
a frothing-at-the-mouth mess on my office floor.*
Because, you see, I wasn’t just trying to learn something new, I
was trying to *unlearn* something old. I’d spent more than 20
years tick-ticking away on QWERTY boards, and as I tried to follow
along to the typing Viking’s instructions, I could literally feel
the gears in my head grinding up against each other, sparks and
smoke coming off, pathways in my brain resisting every stroke.
Sitting there with my keyboard staring up at me, I think I got a tiny,
tiny taste of what it’s like for stroke victims who have to
learn how to talk again.
==============================================================
SO, WHY AM I SPENDING SO MUCH TIME TELLING YOU ABOUT MY TYPING
HABITS?
==============================================================
Oh, come on, dear readers. You’re a smart bunch. I bet you’ve
already figured out. When you get right down to it, good marketing
is educating. You need to *teach* prospective customers why it
is that your product or service is the one that’s going to bring
the biggest benefit to their lives.
And what’s the biggest obstacle to teaching your customers
something new? You got it. All that old stuff–all those old ways
of doing things, old ways of thinking about things and
misconceptions–that are already clogging up their heads.
This is why cool technologies like RSS, podcasting. . . uh. . cars
. . . take a while to catch hold. To the technorati and the geek
set the big benefits are obvious. But everybody else already has it
set in their head how they get news and listen to the radio and get
across town.
If you’ve got a product that challenges the way people
have done things before, you’ve got do all the hard work of teaching
your customers what’s so great about it and hold their sweaty hands
as they go through the gear grinding phase of taking all that cobwebby old
stuff out of their brains and replacing it with your shiny, new and
hopefully better way of doing things.
The upside? Once you’ve done the edu-ma-cating, you’ve probably got
a customer for a good long time (I’ll never go back to QWERTY.) The
bad news? Teaching your customers takes time, effort, multiple
hits, long copy and a willingness to stick your mud and believe in
what you’ve got to offer through all the objections, naysays and
curmudgeonly grunts.
Fun, huh?
If you want to talk about this more, shoot me a line at chris@haddadink.com
======================================
See you next month, folks. In the meantime pop on by the Hard
Working Words Blog at http://www.haddadink.com/blog or listen to my
dulcet tones at the Biznik Podcast at
http://www.biznik.com/podcasts. And keep an eye out for my new
blog, podcastmarketingtricks.com, launching sometime next week.
=======================================
About This Newsletter and Your Subscription
=======================================
©2006 Haddad Ink. Copywriting Services. All Rights Reserved.
If you like this article
=======================
Feel fre*e to share it with your own list, post it on
your site, post it on your blog, or add it to your
autoresponder. As long as you leave it intact and
don’t alter it in anyway. All links must remain
in the article.
And give me a shout out by asking folks to subscribe by emailing
hwwords@aweber.com
Please notify me when my article is used online and off line.
===================================================
HWW 21 coming soon! Are you going to miss it?
Hey folks,
I’m hard at work this Saturday morning pumping out HWW 21. Now, I changed list managers recently and as part of the deal all you fine subscribers have to confirm your subscription to the hottest little marketing newsletter in the world. If you didn’t get the confirmation email, or were just too lazy to reply to it, send a blank message to hwwords@aweber.com and the robots will take care of everything.
BOOM BOOM!!
Down in California I met this whacky Canadian named Brian Hogg. Brian does a show called DotBoom which is, I’m unafraid to say, absolutely freaking hilarious.
If you work in advertising, marketing or design (or have just spent time dealing with office politics and idiocy) check it out. It’s Canadian! And has puppets!!
Who are you writing for?
This one’s for all you copywriters in the audience. Come over to the corner with me for a second. don’t worry, no one else can hear.
Alright kids, I know. I know your plight. I know you wake up nights sweating, wondering how you can best serve your clients when your clients aren’t much interested in best serving themselves.
I know you worry about the age old question “Who are you writing for?”
Because here’s the problem. If you’ve spent any time as a wordslinger, you know that while you SHOULD only be thinking about what your target market is going to like and respond to, you ACTUALLY spend all your time thinking about what your CLIENT is going to like and respond to.
Because most clients–especially clients who don’t have any marketing experience–make the absolutely deadly mistake of thinking that what they like and what their target likes are the same thing.
Which is sort of like thinking everyone else likes pistachio and swedish fish ice cream just because you do.
It’s driven many a writer to commit ritual sepuku, slaving away on hard-working copy that pushes all the right buttons and uses all the best selling tricks only to have a client come back and say “Well, can we use optimize a few more times here? And I really don’t like the way you use “You” all over the place.”
So what do you do? How do you make sure you give your clients copy that’s actually going to work while still letting them feel like they’ve got a real hand in the copywriting process?
You get sneaky. You write the “First Draft of Over the Top Awesomeness.”
Now, this is a trick that should only be used in extreme circumstances. But if you’ve got a client you suspect is going to red-line your copy to death, and who thinks he’s the target market even when he obviously isn’t, you’ve got to write a first draft so far out there that he’s guaranteed to hate it. And I mean hate. You’ve got to get witty. You’ve got to get clever. You’ve got to steal whole passages from Finnegan’s Wake.
And then you send it off to the client.
And you wait.
And after all the comments come back, you go and write the copy you wanted to write in the first place. And this time? This time I’ll bet the client will be just thrilled, the target market will be all sorts of amped up and you’ll be able to sleep at night knowing you did your marketing best.
Happy Friday. Currently I’m slaving away on HWW #21, putting together a few proposals and setting up a brand new blog I’ll be sure to key you in on later.
Why Rush Limbaugh is So Damned Successful
Scott Bourne ruled the room last night, doling out tasty podcasting morsels to a roomful of hungry Bizniks. I’ve seen Scott speak a few times now, and I have to say he was in rare form. If you want to see real passion, just ask Scott about Podcasting and stand back.
But my favorite part of the night was when Scott was talking about how to become successful as a podcaster. He said:
“The reason Rush Limbaugh is successful is because he takes a position and owns it. It’s a show. He used to do a left wing show, but it didn’t work, so now he does this. You want to be successful? Stand there, carry the flay and don’t wince. Hold your mud.”
Google Buys YouTube – - World Explodes!
So unless you’ve been living under a rock (and a rock without internet access at that) you’ve undoubtedly heard that the wunderkinds at Google have decided to buy up internet sensation YouTube for 1.57 Billion in stock.
And you gotta wonder, why are those geniuses in California shelling out so much scratch for a site that hasn’t–and legally almost can’t–make money?
Well, one of my new Haddadisms is “Money can’t buy you success, only opportunity.”
And what Google is buying here is the opportunity to lead the charge as the internet becomes more and more of a video medium.
A while back I harped on about how happy I was that the 30 second commercial spot is dying a quick death. And I’m still happy about that. In fact I’m dancing right now in my chair (as I watch a downloaded copy of Battlestar Galactica commercial free).
But video is powerful.
And video that’s controlled by the user–video that a consumer can turn on and off as she wants and skip through for the content she really wants, whenever and wherever she wants is going to be one of the most powerful sales tools to come along in decades.
Google knows this. Google undoubtedly has a plan that’s going to be as powerful and revolutionary to the way direct marketers (and if you’re doing business in 2006, you should be a direct marketer) work as good old Adsense.
And personally I can’t wait to see what it is.
Later skaters.
When Bad News is Good News
For years and years now I’ve been quietly (or not so quietly) suffering from horrible, debilitating back pain. I’ve tried everything from Chiropractors to jungle voodoo to heavy prescription pain killers with no great effect.
And then on Friday, some guy walked up to me after yoga and said “I think your legs are two different lengths.”
So I went home and measured. And wouldn’t you know it. There’s something like 3/4 of an inch difference between my right and left legs. I’m lopsided. And being lopsided? Well, that could well be the cause of all the pain I’ve been going through for the last 10 years or so.
So, is it a “good thing” that I’m deformed? Nahh. But I’m sure glad to find out now instead of plowing ahead with my life and doing more damage.
Which maybe just maybe has some sort of seed of a lesson about marketing.
Better to find out what pieces you have are hurting you early on. Better to get the bad news as quick as possible. And better to make those corrections that left you make big heaving piles of cash.
I’m off to the doc. Keep on keeping on.
