Imagine a friend invites you over for dinner, and you’ve never been to their house before. They give you their address and tell you how to navigate their apartment complex. But when you show up at the address, there’s no apartment complex. It’s a house. Even with the address right [...]
As an advertiser, you want your audience to see your ads and think, “Hey, this is for me!” You want to speak to their aspirations and problems so clearly that they feel like you understand them and your product or service can really help them. You want them to see [...]
People generally open your email for one of two reasons: They recognize and trust you. Your subject line sounded interesting. The only way to build trust is to increase brand awareness and consistently create valuable experiences for your leads and customers. But there are lots of strategies for writing interesting [...]
It’s nice to imagine that if you present the right facts and statistics, the sheer weight of your logical arguments will convince people to buy your product or service. But that’s not really how most people make purchasing decisions. While facts, logic, and statistics are important, emotions play a critical [...]
When you’re trying to convince someone to click your ad, open your email, sign up for a demo, or read a blog post, it can be hard to settle on the right messaging. How do you boil down everything your company or product does into a handful of words? What’s [...]
Every industry has specialized vocabulary that describes its concepts, problems, products, services, tasks, and roles. Sometimes these are unique words that evolve from acronyms or concepts that other industries don’t deal with regularly. Other times, this specialized vocabulary might repurpose existing words in a new way. However it forms, this [...]
The average goldfish has a nine-second attention span. The average Internet user has an eight-second attention span. That’s what your marketing is up against every time someone hits your landing page or opens your email. Your readers are literally less attentive than a goldfish. That’s not a criticism of how [...]
Nobody would be surprised if a pastor kept a Bible dictionary open while reading a theological commentary. When you read highly academic texts, you need tools to help you understand complex terms that the author doesn’t take the time to explain. But marketing isn’t academic, and your audience shouldn’t have [...]
Imagine you’re at a friend’s house for lunch. After you spend a few minutes catching up, a stranger opens the front door, sits down at the table, and leans into the conversation. That’s what it feels like when your ads look out of place on someone’s website. To the reader, [...]
Every organization should be able to explain what they do in a single sentence. It’s tempting to think your company solves too many problems or has too many facets to be reduced to something so simple. But your audience needs you to make it simple. The more complicated your offer is, [...]