I wonder if you could imagine the benefits of increasing your reply rate on a marketing campaign by [say] 10%? Or, how much more impressed your Sales Director would be if you could generate ‘X’ extra leads from your website?
Milton Model linguistics are employed extensively in marketing and advertising; to disarm the rational mind and allow customers to begin to imagine why they ‘need’ a product. Remember these slogans:
- For Everything Else, There’s MasterCard
- Where Do You Want To Go Today?
- Probably the best lager in the world
As the uptake of NLP grows in the mainstream, and with the very experimental nature of the web, more and more companies are ‘playing with’ their content to become more appealing. With web statistics programs you get real feedback of what works in the online sales process.
And of course, some marketers go way over the top trying to nominalize, mind read and tag questions, don’t they? You may have seen the long ‘Sales Letter’ websites? I once read a book called Web Copy That Sells, which was a good intro, but it did exactly that - went a little overboard for my liking.
So, on the premise that most purchasing decisions are based on a buying strategy, usually at an unconscious level, you can begin to position your marketing message accordingly appealing to different customers by delivering messages that answer their individual positive outcomes.
For instance, I work creating websites (The Escape). I don’t sell the design or the actual programming behind these sites though… I sell increased profile and, for a marketing website, for example, actual sales leads. Suddenly my proposition is geared towards another market and needs a new message: People who want to attract actual business through their website and can imagine the possibility of that success.
The chances are it’s the same for your business, whether you are in training, HR, or retail. What and why people buy, is not necessarily what you think you are selling. This same principle also applies to internal marketing, ie. inter-departmental: what sales need from marketing, or what accounts need from training, etc.
With decreased customer attention span brought on by a mass of marketing interruption, the need for brand differentiation and a quality marketing proposition, crafted with relevant detail and possibility (using the Milton Model) may begin to encourage a more positive response.