Bottom line: there is a clear formula that can help you improve responses rates to your marketing programs.
My formula is:
Naked + Swahili + Enemy + Last-one-left = a Response. Now if you understand that, skip what’s below and if not, bear with me.
CEOs and Boards always ask CMOs some version of ‘what is your definition of marketing?’ as a way to deduce skill set and vision alignment. My answer is broad (to organize the dialog) to reflect the big M multi-dimensional aspects of marketing but when most people think about good marketing, they envision good advertising.
Advertising or creative and copy is the least forgiving discipline as it needs to do several things simultaneously and very quickly. Enter the well-know AIDA acronym–Attention, Interest, Decision, Action.
If you can grab someone’s attention, generate relevance or interest, create clear positioning for the choice between alternative ‘solutions’ and then drive the person to start buying process in a matter of seconds, you’re a natural marketer.
If you’re not a natural, I suggest following a process with a few proven rules, that for me have delivered abnormally high response rates and brand affinity.
Here are rules-of-thumb that I use:
1. Identify the emotional objection. Example: selling technology to scientists requires that you know that scientists are professional skeptics that are incredibly specific in thinking about their needs and conclusions. They are also naturally curious and often witty. If we can appeal to their skepticism, curiosity and wit, while providing enough details, we can appeal to them
2. Boil the emotional appeal down to a theme. Example: ‘Skeptics Wanted’
3. Have a point. Example: ‘high-throughput chemistry and electronic lab notebooks make your science better’.
4. Target your audience by industry, role, and function. Then boil that down to ‘insider terms’ that are specific to them. This is speaking Swahili. Example: Excipient compatibility, forced degradation, catalysis and hydrogenations. Trust me drug development scientists will respond because few technology companies speak to them in these terms and they know its specific to them.
5. Pick and vilify the enemy of their goal. Example: ‘useless experiments’.
6. Pick and vilify the enemy in terms of alternatives. Example ‘singletons in paper’. To a scientist this is short for single experiments documented and found in traditional lab notebooks.
7. Create a visual metaphor. This is what I mean by ‘naked’ part of the formula. It should demand attention, be self-explanatory and be a metaphor for either the emotional connection or the enemy. Example: grainy Polaroid of UFO. We sent this to scientists with the URL ‘the proof is out there/Randy Clark’ typed on the white strip of the Polaroid. On the back of the Polaroid was a sticker that said ‘Skeptics Wanted: Excipient compatibility, forced degradation, catalysis, hydrogenations’
8. Pick the right vehicle that reinforces emotional connection. Example: hand written envelope. This appealed to their curiosity (as did the Polaroid and copy) and broke through their junk mail filter of throwing all marketing promotions directly in the garbage.
9. Write ‘skip the middle’ content that creates ‘copy conflict’ with customer validation and plenty of numbers. Example: Productive Science: Bigco went from 4 multi-variate tribology studies for isotactic polymers to 12 studies in 6 weeks. Cut out the blah blah.
10. Quick, easy, compelling call to action. Example: when scientists went to the URL/microsite, they got the pitch and then could click to get the whitepaper (the others were already oversubscribed out of stock, but click here to get one when next available)
OK so would you believe 40% response rates? Yeah we had a good list but that’s another post.