🍊Content Quick Start: Marketing without the ick

Good news: Your marketing shouldn't make you feel icky

Marketing gets a bad rap — even among marketers.

Advertising is rated one of the five least trusted professions in America (its trust level is just 2 points higher than members of Congress).

People assume marketers are lying to them or saying anything to get the sale. The bad actors who actually work that way ruin it for the rest of us.

Even some of us in the profession have drunk the untrustworthy Kool-Aid. Small marketing teams often react almost viscerally against the idea of selling in content or making promises in copy.

These are good, empathetic people who don’t want to trick anyone. Asking for the sale makes them feel icky.

Sometimes, desperate to have some positive metrics to report to the boss, they do it anyway, abandoning their usual low-key brand voice for a heavy-handed sales pitch.

It makes them feel gross, it sounds awkward, and they’re secretly relieved when it doesn’t generate results.

Marketing shouldn’t feel icky.

First, let’s accept that two things can be true at the same time.

1. You usually don’t get things you don’t ask for.

2. Asking for a sale doesn’t have to feel gross.

If your engagement and conversions are low, take a look at your calls to action.

• Does every piece of content have one?

• Are they clear?

• Are they specific?

You spent a long time and a lot of thought developing that piece of content or copy, and it’s probably obvious to you what the reader or viewer should do once they’ve finished with it.

They, on the other hand, are spending just minutes with it, if that. They’re not thinking that hard about it or about you or about what you want them to do.

You have to ask. And you have to be clear and specific. Don’t imply a possible course of action and leave it to them to figure it out.

So how do you clearly, specifically ask for a conversion without feeling the ick? It’s all in your approach.

When someone has just consumed a piece of your content, they are primed to take action.

It’s like how theme park rides always exit through the gift shop. Disney knows that the best time to ask you to spend $30 on a Space Mountain T-shirt is when you’re still giddy from the ride, willing to open your wallet to extend that good feeling and even take it home.

Ineffective CTAs are often dropped in the wrong place, without priming the audience first. Meanwhile, that primed and excited audience is left to wander off because you didn’t want to come on too strong.

Which brings us to the second part of your CTA: the message.

If asking for an action makes you feel icky, you’re probably viewing it as a transaction. You’re putting yourself in that camp of untrustworthy pros who will say anything to get a sale.

But what if you’re not?

What if you’re not a smarmy salesperson, but a helpful friend?

Your target audience has a problem or an aspiration. You have a way to help them.

What kind of a friend would you be to keep that information to yourself?

As soon as you stop thinking of CTAs as a mechanism to “make” people give you money and start thinking of them as a way to help people get what they want, the ick disappears.

No one wants to be sold to. Everyone wants to buy something that gets them closer to what they want.

🍊Apply It

Look at your marketing goals. What needs to happen to get you there?

Now look at your audience. How can you help them?

Design your message to deliver that help. Offer small wins. Once they’re primed, give the audience a clear, specific action they can take to get what they want.

Your marketing goals and your audience’s goals are linked. The CTA is the bridge that offers them what they want so you can get what you want.

No ick required.

Are your calls to action being ignored? Let’s figure out why. I’m offering a limited number of free copy audits. If you’re interested, email dana@herracommunications.com with the subject line “Free Audit.”