It’s no secret that emotions are front and centre in marketing. Research shows that it’s emotions that drive our buying behaviour, not rationality, so they’re important to understand. Psychology Today breaks it down: “Advertising research reveals that emotional response to an ad has far greater influence on a consumer’s reported intent to buy a…
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(Mildly NSFW – you’ve been warned!) Much earlier in my career, when I was writing copy for my first corporate website, I suggested a top-level menu label called “Why I need it.” It titled a section that talked about the risks we face when planning for retirement, and how a financial product could help…
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My challenge for this article: write at an eighth-grade level. Why would I want to do that? Well, to make this easy to read – and understand. It’s the difference between me telling you: Your content is useless if your readers can’t read or understand your message. (grade 7.6 reading level) and The effectiveness…
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If there’s anything we can learn about clickbait, it’s how to capture someone’s attention with just a line of text. But what makes an article a clickbait article? And why are you so compelled to click on one, even though you know you’re just feeding the beast? Good thing you’re here. I’m going to…
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So you need to improve your marketing email engagement. Or your online sales. Or your brand recognition. What’s the first thing you do? If you answered something like changing your email format, creating a video campaign or starting a blog, you’ve fallen into what I call the Tactic Trap. It’s so exciting to list…
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TL;DR: as long as it needs to be. It’s not a new question – and a quick Google search will put you in touch with all kinds of advice. Lots of advice. Pages and pages and pages of advice. Conflicting advice. Woah… okay, too much advice. Let me break it down for you, then,…
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We all have our little writing quirks. Some of us are Serial Capitalizers. Others have a tendency to creationalize new words. Maybe ur more of a txter (k thx). Or write in fragments. What happens when our individual quirks creep onto company websites, blogs or social media? People notice. It can leave your customers…
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