In Case You Missed It:  The Most Important Word in Marketing

On Friday, July 20th CWS’s own Heather Holmes and Tom Novak spoke as part of the Rochester Area Chamber of Commerce’s “Marketing Today” series. Heather spoke about Crafting Your Message: Emotional Marketing and Effective Word Choices while Tom spoke on Measuring Your Results with Analytics. In case you missed it, here were the take-aways.

Part I: Crafting You Message

Emotional Marketing

Emotional Marketing builds your customer’s ego. It feeds their self esteem, making them feel smarter, sexier, and more successful. In essence, it makes them feel better about themselves. If you can go beyond simply describing your product and its benefits, if the way you market your product makes your customer feel better about themselves, then you have achieved the goal of emotionally connecting to your customer using emotional marketing. Success, Anger, Body Pleasure, Human Connection, Daring, Chaos and Fear are the most powerful emotional drivers.

Check out this example of a commercial that uses emotional marketing. It conveys that you are smart and therefore a Success if you use their product.

Graeme Newell is a great resource to learn more about emotional marketing and building customer loyalty.

Words Matter

Word choices are powerful. Your word choices are so important that they:

• Reveal your bias, prejudices or preferences.
• Help you connect or disconnect.
• Give the correct impression about you or give the wrong impression.
• Crush.
• Calm.

Changing your message ever so slightly can have a profound effect as this video demonstrates.

If you’re not an expert on word choices, don’t fret. Use these 3 principles and your results will improve immediately:

1. “What-We-Do” vs “What’s-In-It-For-You”

Too many times a company will craft their marketing messages in a “What-WE-do” style, when they should be speaking in a “What’s-in-it for-YOU” voice.

2. The Most Important Word

If you remember nothing else, remember that YOU is the most important word to use when marketing.

3. The 2nd Most Important Word

The 2nd most important word is a bit trickier. It’s a scientific trigger in the human brain and that word is BECAUSE. Using the word BECAUSE can increase action by up to 50%. Studies show it doesn’t even matter a great deal what you say after using BECAUSE.

Example: Here is a floral shop’s message reworked with YOU and BECAUSE.

Old way: We guarantee our flowers are the freshest.

New way: YOU deserve the freshest flowers, BECAUSE fresh is the best!

I find Copyblogger to be an excellent resource with helpful hints on crafting messages and word choices.

Stay tuned for our upcoming blog post from part II of the Marketing Today series. Tom Novak demonstrated an interesting case study; SkyVu Drive-In, A Northern Minnesota business success story. Tom reveals how they marketed by measuring results using Facebook and Google analytics.