Here’s a powerful tool for you to add to your marketing playbook.

Created in PDF format for you to download and incorporate into your marketing materials. Special thanks to Natalie for bringing this one to the table.  You’ll need Adobe Acrobat to view the PDF. 

: MarketingMediation.com Glossary of Marketing Words that Sell

Whatever you do, DO NOT miss out on the Visual Thesaurus. Whenever you sit down to write, be it an article, website copy, or something of the like, this is one of the single, most powerful tools you can possibly utilize. Take a look: Visual Thesaurus.

 Good Luck!

When it comes to your marketing materials, your choice of words can make or break you. Sales copy is some of the hardest content to write, add the fact that you’re often writing about yourself and it’s twice as difficult.

The next time you sit down to rework your website content or draft a sales letter weigh in on our Sales Copy Videos or download a copy of our:

Glossary of Words That Sell.

Glossary of Marketing Terms

By Natalie J. Armstrong,
www.MarketingMediation.com

A PICTURE IS WORTH.. MORE THAN YOU THINK
People love to look at photographs. They are a magnet. No matter where they appear on a page they attract the reader’s eye. Research shows that the best-read parts of the newspaper are the small print captions under the pictures.  That’s worth repeating.

Captions under photographs are the best-read words.

Pictures rivet a reader’s attention while they read the copy underneath. You can put a lot of information in a four- or five-line caption. Don’t make the mistake of making captions too long or you will lose the powerful effect.

Using photographs in your brochures and on your website as well as your cv / resume allow your potential clients to “get to know you without you having to be present. Just think how uncomfortable you are when you are waiting for someone who is a stranger to you versus someone you’ve previously met or seen. A photograph does the same thing.
It allows people to make a visual connection to you without a physical introduction.

If you would like to see a great example, take a look at Mark Loeterman of MLmediation.com. This is perfect.

A note on portraits it isn’t necessary to sit in front of a blue or gray backdrop to make an impression. In fact, think about having your portrait taken in a library, park, (tidy) office setting etc. Think also about how the photograph will fit into the over-all color scheme of your media as well as the personality of your collateral pieces.

Natalie J. Armstrong is the Founder and Managing Director of Golden Media, a marketing and consulting firm dedicated to promoting the resolution industry. She is the author of The Essential Guide to Marketing Your ADR Practice and speaks internationally on business development and the successful marketing strategies of the conflict resolution industry. More ADR Practice Development articles and information about Ms. Armstrong and Golden Media can be found at www.MarketingMediation.com.

By Natalie J. Armstrong,
www.MarketingMediation.com

You might take a moment to reflect on the messages that have been sent to you throughout the year. How to sell; how to advertise; where to advertise; the list goes on.

Advertising will be one of your biggest expenses so you may want to remember one word in advertising, if you recall nothing else you have read.

Believability will be a key factor to your sales and of course, to resulting profits.

There are extensive articles, squibs, and how-tos on writing ads. For the most part, they are all geared to several themes, none of which has changed over the years. The Internet has offered us some great potential and changes. What it hasn’t changed, however, is people. It is very important for you to remember that the 1980’s was the Age of Skepticism in advertising. The ads, the brochures, the guarantees and the warranties everything was being challenged by the public. And many found that industry upon industry was deceiving them. You can bet that by the 1990’s, not much has changed and in the attitudes of the American consumer. They hate to be lied to . . .

Marketing and advertising is the art of trying to figure out customer perception. While this may be an art that takes time, if you lie to them during or after your evaluation process, they will never forgive you. The Madison Avenue advertising firm of Oglivy did a study in 1989 and found that 75% of those polled do not believe advertising! That is not good odds and if we give you 4 strikes in this game of salesmanship, that means you have 3 against you as you start out writing that ad, that brochure or the sales letter. If you are to succeed in the coming years, you are going to have to sway public opinion your way to with a totally believable campaign all year long. Remember this is a relationship game. You’re not going to makes anyone a believer in you with a single ad or two. You’re not going to do it with a single colored brochure either. And surely, you’re not going to do it in a one shot email ad to some unknown party.

Only when you are believable will you become credible. And only when you have reached the plateau of both will you continue to succeed in business regardless of how big you are or what you are selling. The same rules apply to GM as they do the small book dealer. To a customer, a lie is a lie. Lying in business will be like the line cowboy who fires his single bullet into the hoard of Indians. As he foolishly sparks the fire of self-destruction, there is nothing left to do but sit back and lament and wonder why did I ever do that?

Natalie J. Armstrong is the Founder and Managing Director of Golden Media, a marketing and consulting firm dedicated to promoting the resolution industry. She is the author of The Essential Guide to Marketing Your ADR Practice and speaks internationally on business development and the successful marketing strategies of the conflict resolution industry. More ADR Practice Development articles and information about Ms. Armstrong and Golden Media can be found at www.MarketingMediation.com.

By Natalie J. Armstrong,
www.MarketingMediation.com

We all know that well-written copy is one of the most highly effective methods of getting people’s attention and attracting them to your product or service… but the importance of the shortest copy is often overlooked.

A lot of people don’t even realize that things like their navigation menus, links, or even their newsletter subscription offers ARE copy and require careful consideration. Ironically, this kind of copy is ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE TOOLS YOU HAVE. Think about your…

• Banners
• Classified ads
• Newsletter subscription offers
• Navigation menus
• Links (”click here,” “buy now”)

This sort of copy is typically asking people to take some sort of action that is vital to your business: VISIT your web site, REQUEST details, SUBSCRIBE to your newsletter, CLICK through, BUY the product… which is why it requires so much more attention than it tends to receive. Of course it’s more difficult to get your message across when you have limited space, but short copy is THE GLUE THAT HOLDS YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGN TOGETHER.

And if every button on your menu, every ad, every link isn’t as compelling and effective as it can be, you’re not going to get the results you’re hoping for, be it more sales, more subscriptions, more referrals, etc… So I’m going to show you FOUR HARD AND FAST RULES of copywriting that must be followed in even the shortest of copy to guarantee you always make the most profitable use of the little space you have.

HARD AND FAST RULE #1:
YOU MUST EMPHASIZE BENEFITS, NOT FEATURES I know, I know, you’ve heard this one before. But I so often see copy — short and long — that neglects to even MENTION how the features of a product or service will benefit customers that I’m guessing a good number of you aren’t sure what this really means.

So let me clarify for you…

A FEATURE is one of the components or functions of your product or service. For example, if your toothbrushes come packaged with glow-in-the-dark toothpaste, that’s a feature — not a benefit. - A BENEFIT is something your product or service will do
for your buyer to somehow offer a solution to a problem. So if your toothbrushes that come with glow-in-the-dark toothpaste make stubborn kids thrilled to brush their teeth before they go to bed, then you’ve got yourself a benefit! Are you following me? An online real estate agent advertising “real-time mortgage calculations” is advertising a feature of her site; however, if she writes, “Avoid wasting time haggling at the bank with my real-time mortgage calculator,” then she’s advertising a benefit.

Emphasizing benefits is the NUMBER-ONE MOST OVERLOOKED RULE of copywriting, and this lack of emphasis is one of the top reasons advertising falls flat. Short copy is no exception — and you don’t need a lot of room to do it right. Let’s take a look at a short classified ad.

If you posted an ad that read:

Real estate on the Internet.
Plenty of listings.
Shop at your convenience.

…you probably wouldn’t get the greatest response. The ad is brief and to the point, but it lacks clarity. First of all, what kind of property is being advertised? Are the listings for commercial buildings or family homes? What part of the world does the ad refer to?

How many listings is “plenty”? How do we get to see these listings? And, most important, how does this service benefit me? There is a vague reference to the benefit of “convenience” in this ad — but it’s not really explained. Let’s dress it up a bit:

Take a PERSONAL TOUR of 375+ of Seattle’s HOTTEST, MOST AFFORDABLE Single-Family Homes Skip the hassles of house hunting when you search our HUGE online database of single-family homes:

• 375+ homes with pictures, video tours, and detailed descriptions!
• Search by price, location, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, and more!
• Get FREE local school reports, neighborhood information, and mortgage calculations!
• To begin searching our online database of Seattle’s hottest, most affordable family homes — without leaving your computer — visit: SeattleFamilyHomes.com

This version expands on the benefit of convenience and details the different ways this convenience offers SOLUTIONS to the house-hunter’s problems. So the benefits we’re clarifying for the reader are:

• House hunting is a hassle and now you can avoid it.
• Physically going to see 375 homes would be practically impossible but you can easily do it online.
• You can search the database by very specific criteria to effortlessly find exactly what you want.
• Plus you’ll get free reports that detail all the information you’ll want to know about a new home and neighborhood that you wouldn’t get even if you went there in person.

Also note that this ad targets a specific niche: single- family home buyers in the Seattle area. Targeting your advertising is the only way to get your benefits in front of your best potential customers, as we’ll discover in the next section…

HARD AND FAST RULE #2:
YOU MUST WRITE TO A TARGETED AUDIENCE
The fact is, your product or service is just not going to appeal to everyone. And if you try to market it to everyone, you’ll wind up with far fewer sales than if you choose a select group to direct your copy to. So once you’ve defined your target market, you need to turn your attention toward making sure your copy addresses them directly.

For example, let’s look at pay-per-click advertising. Let’s say you bid 17 cents per click in Overture.com for the key phrase “single-family homes.” Because you pay every time someone clicks through this link, whether they purchase from you or not, you want to make sure that your ad carefully
TARGETS YOUR BEST POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS.

Given that you’re targeting single-family home buyers in the Seattle area, you’d want to make sure your ad includes this vital piece of information. That way, you can be sure you won’t waste money on people searching for single-family homes in San Diego!

And if you bid 41 cents per click for the key phrase “Seattle homes,” you’d want to make sure to write an ad that clearly states that your site features single-family homes… so you don’t waste your advertising dollars on condo-seekers or recreational property buyers.

By writing a separate ad for each of your keywords that carefully targets your market, you’ll ensure that you ATTRACT THE MOST BUYERS FOR THE LEAST COST. Of course, if you’re writing copy for banner ads, your approach will need to be a bit different. Whether you’re:

1. Purchasing blocks of impressions (i.e. you pay a set dollar amount for your banner to be displayed 1,000… 10,000… etc… times on other web sites), OR
2. Participating in a banner exchange (i.e. you’re trading banner impressions with a network of other site owners) …you’ve paid for your advertising up front, so you’ll want to do everything you can to attract viewers’ attention and persuade them to click through to your site. And this means you’ll want your ad copy to be a bit more general, to ensure it attracts the HIGHEST NUMBER of click-throughs.

The title of the above classified ad would make a great banner:
Take a Personal Tour of 375+ of Seattle’s HOTTEST, MOST AFFORDABLE Single-Family Homes! Click here now…” …You’re targeting your best potential customers! But you might also try testing banners with more general copy that read something like this:

Search HUGE online database of 375+ Seattle Dream Homes and skip the house-hunting headaches! Click here now…” The first ad is going to ATTRACT THE MOST QUALIFIED AUDIENCE — those people who are looking for a single-family home in Seattle for a reasonable price.

The second version, however, will attract a slightly broader audience. Still in Seattle and still looking for homes, this group is not necessarily looking for a single-family dwelling, and they’re not necessarily worried about price. They’re just checking out homes in the Seattle area and they’re attracted by the size and convenience of the online database. While the first ad may GENERATE A HIGHER VISITOR-TO-SALE CONVERSION RATE (the percentage of people clicking through who then sign up for the service) because it is more specific, the second ad will probably solicit more click-throughs in total, because it has a more general appeal. You’d have to test to see which version would pull the most sign-ups altogether.

HARD AND FAST RULE #3:
YOU MUST INCLUDE A CALL TO ACTION

Okay, easy enough. BUY NOW! There’s a call to action. But hold on a minute. If it were that simple, everyone marketing online would be rich, and every online shopper would have to move into a bigger home to accommodate all that happily purchased stuff. There are two very important things that you must include in your call to action:

1. You must determine exactly what action you want people to take, and
2. You must provide a reason why people should take that action.

Isn’t BUY NOW exactly the action you want? Not necessarily.Think about what exactly it is that you are trying to do. Are you trying to generate leads? Do you want people to sign
up for your free newsletter? Are you trying to attract a specific audience and hoping to convert as many of those people as possible into sales?

It is important to understand that ALL copy, if possible, should contain a call to action that clearly identifies what action is desired. I can’t emphasize this enough. Think about the buttons on your site menu. Each one is a call to action! And they are all very important! If they’re not as direct as possible, telling visitors specifically what to do, they will be useless.

For example, if you have a button that is labeled “sales,” you are doing nothing but confusing your visitors, leaving them guessing whether you are referring to product sales
(i.e., online ordering), products that are on sale (i.e., specials or discounts), or maybe the opportunity to sell your product (i.e., merchandising opportunities).

But your visitors won’t guess for long — why would they bother? They’ll just leave your site.

If you change the button copy from “sales” to “order online,” you are now asking viewers to take an action — to order your product. This clarifies the purpose of the button and tells the viewer what to do to get your product into their hands.

Another example: instead of writing “E-mail,” you could ask your viewers to “Contact Us” — again, you’re asking your visitors to take a specific action!

Of course, you will not always be able to include a call to action in every button; you won’t always have the space. Your best bet in this case is to be AS CLEAR AS POSSIBLE.

For example, it would be difficult to include a call to action in a button of your navigation menu that leads to your newsletter back issues. There would not be room to say
“click here now to read our newsletter back issues.”

In this case, you’d just want to make sure that your copy is clear. Label the button “Newsletter Back Issues” instead of “More” or “Old Stuff.”

Now let’s think about your links. Supposing “buy now” is the action you want… You have to give people a REASON WHY they should buy. Huge, garishly colored words on a screen won’t do the trick; added benefits will.

And in your links, you have a little more room to move. The call to action should remain the central focus of the link, but pack in as many benefits as possible around it.

Something like…

CLICK HERE NOW to claim your ‘Golfer’s Guide to the Green’ and instantly receive the downloadable video that features up-close-and-personal interviews with Pro Golfers who reveal their hottest golfing secrets, guaranteed to improve your game in 2 weeks or you don’t pay!”

…will win out every time over “Buy now.”

HARD AND FAST RULE #4:
YOU MUST PAY ATTENTION TO LAYOUT

Making the most of your layout is especially important when you’re writing short copy. The right blend of emphasis andinformation is the best way to attract viewers. Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of bolding, italics, underlining, color, and white space.

But don’t overdo it either!

For example, an offer to subscribe to your newsletter must be BRIEF, COMPELLING, AND EFFECTIVE. It will not be the main feature of your web page or anyone else’s, so it must be attractive enough to grab the attention of a distracted reader. But it also needs to remain readable and informative, without a gross misuse of formatting tricks.

If your ad has too much going on in it, it will look unattractive, unappealing, and unprofessional — and the clutter will detract from the meaning of your message.

On the other hand, too little emphasis leaves you in danger of never catching anyone’s eye. If your ad is totally boring, no one will ever even see it — and if they somehow do, they probably won’t look at it long enough to find out what it’s about.

Of course, some of the formatting techniques discussed here are available only to people formatting their ads in HTML. Obviously, you have more options in HTML and can do pretty much whatever you like. But in text format, you don’t have the choice of adding color, bold, italics, etc.

You DO, however, have the ability to use characters, spacing, capitalization, and indentation for effect.

So if we’re formatting an ad for a newsletter subscription in text, we need to try to draw the reader’s attention but not distract them once they’re there. With the right blend of emphasis and information, visual appeal and readability, it might look like this:

“FREE Subscription to ‘Potato Farmer’s’ Newsletter”

Subscribe today and on the first Tuesday of each month you’ll receive tips and strategies from INDUSTRY LEADERS who’ll reveal…

• Secrets for selling your crops for the
  HIGHEST PROFITS!
• Tricks for cutting down the time you
  spend in the field!
• Cost-effective strategies for TRIPLING
  YOUR CROP YIELD!
• Plus much, much more!

Each issue contains tons of easy-to-implement techniques, guaranteed to REDUCE YOUR EXPENSES while dramatically INCREASING YOUR ANNUAL INCOME!

Visit http://www.Potato-Farmer.com to subscribe! Because we don’t have the option of using bold, color, or underlining in the title, I’ve put the capitalized “FREE” at the very beginning to attract attention. I’ve also enclosed the headline in quotation marks for emphasis, and put the newsletter title in single quotes (which should always be used inside double quotes).

The main FEATURES of the newsletter — what you’ll learn from the experts — are emphasized by the use of bullet points and a nice amount of white space. And all the BENEFITS of the newsletter are capitalized so that they’re as eye-catching as possible. (Be careful with your use of caps, however — too many makes your ad unreadable.)

Last but not least is the call to action, and because it comes at the end of the ad, it is supported by all the benefits that came before it.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
Now that you know the secrets of fitting high-impact copy into small spaces, I’ll let you in on another little secret…there’s a lot more to learn! There are plenty of experts on copywriting. Find one, learn all that you can, embrace it the ideas…and when you need help, contact Golden Media. We’ll put your copy to the test and help you polish it to ensure you copy is selling for you.

However, now that you have some of the basics under your belt, you should be able to START MAKING DRAMATIC IMPROVEMENTS to your short copy… improvements that will attract a much bigger response and increased sales! If all your copy is written with the rules of benefits, audience, calls to action, and layout in mind, you simply can’t lose.

And remember: no amount of copy is so small that it can be overlooked… every link, button, banner, and classified ad is either making or breaking your marketing campaign as we speak!

Natalie J. Armstrong is the Founder and Managing Director of Golden Media, a marketing and consulting firm dedicated to promoting the resolution industry. She is the author of The Essential Guide to Marketing Your ADR Practice and speaks internationally on business development and the successful marketing strategies of the conflict resolution industry. More ADR Practice Development articles and information about Ms. Armstrong and Golden Media can be found at www.MarketingMediation.com.

By: Sean Carton

The good news for marketers is that online ad spending is expected to grow to U.S. $16.5 billion by 2005, mainly at the expense of direct marketing and newspaper budgets. And it makes sense that online ad sales are growing: More people are coming online, spending more time online when they get there, buying more stuff online (from traditional as well as online-only retailers), and have a lot more opportunities in the future to interact with more “experiential” branding via broadband, enhanced TV, and wireless.

Good news for us in the biz, right? So what’s the bad news? The bad news is that if you think the space is noisy now (as far as consumer-direct messages are concerned), your audience ain’t seen nothing yet.

The new Jupiter report predicts that the average web user can expect to see more than 950 messages per day, nearly double what he or she sees now. The good analysts at Jupiter counsel us that, in order to cut through the clutter, “more diverse ad models” will be necessary to cut through the noise. I say they haven’t gone far enough. I think we need to completely reconsider what “advertising” means if we’re going to be heard by our target markets in the increasingly noisy future.

If you think about it for a minute, the Internet has really thrown a wrench into the machinery we call “advertising.” On the one hand, we’ve got banner ads and email as ways of pushing out messages to consumers. Most media people I know, regardless of how Net-un-savvy they are, don’t have a hard time conceptualizing how these things work. Banners are just another form of buying space, and email seems to be yet another form of direct marketing.

But on the other hand, there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t fit into the traditional models. Take web sites for example. Are they ads? Well, yes…kinda. Do they provide business-critical functionality? Yes, in many cases. But then these web sites start throwing some wireless stuff into the mix, and the waters start to get really muddied.

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