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Tag Archives: Marketing

Because

October 20th, 2010

Over the last week I’ve been reading some fascinating books on persuasion and influence that were recommended to me by Jeffery Combs. They are by an author by the name of Robert B Cialdini in 2007 and 2008 respectively. He is a doctor of psychology and has a litany of credentials to match. He has written many books on the topic and is the most cited social psychologist in the world today on the subject.

There’s a lot to learn here. Much of his research has been clinical in nature but has revealed many innate and predictable patterns of behavior when it comes to marketing. Most bring you ‘ah-ha’ moments and cause you to ponder out ways to incorporate them into your marketing. These innate triggers in most cases, are not actually psychological in nature but instinctual. They are in your DNA.

So I’ll share one of his concepts here. One of his research experiments was to determine if a person were asked to inconvenience themselves by allowing someone to cut in line ahead of them how many would do so. The inconvenience of course was time. The experiment went this way. In a line at a library, there was a copy machine where they planted people to wait for it. Then when someone would need to use it, there was a line. Then while waiting, someone would come up to the machine and say, “I need to make some copies. I have 5 copies to make. I’m in a rush?” Surprisingly to me, almost 60% said, “OK”. I’m saying I was surprised because I thought it would be less. Now there is something that was changed that brought that percentage up to almost 93%. That was quite a jump. It was almost 50% jump. What was it that made that big a difference? What would you do when asking someone that people might seem inconvenient?

The only difference was that the second experiment had the person also say, “Because I have to make some copies”. So the extra phrase consisting of the word, “because” caused an increase. He later found that because “anything” also increased the percentage. Knowing this, anytime you have to make a request or ask somebody something, wouldn’t it be wise to use the word “because”?

I know you found this interesting so I”m asking you to reciprocate and either tweet, share, or comment. Because I know it’s something you want to do, you’ll do it.

Are You Ready to Be Called Up to the Majors?

May 2nd, 2010

Baseball and Marketing
Well most of you know I’m a baseball fan. I’ve been a Minnesota Twins fan all my life. There are a lot of clichés out there about America’s game. I’ve also written about one of the Minnesota’s players, Justin Morneau. Justin was a player with high potential who was called up to the big show and demonstrated flashes of potential. However, he struck out a lot. He eventually played a whole season but only managed a low batting average. The next year, he hit .321 with 34 home runs, 97 runs scored and 130 RBIs. That won him the American League’s Most Valuable Player honors. See “Can Your Marketing Have an MVP Season”. I explain what he did and how you can too.

Curiosity is Cool for a Marketing Cat Like You

October 27th, 2009

coolcatOne way you can get traffic to your blog is to get people returning to your blog over and over. You should have a heavy emphasis on your returning visitors. After all, they took the time to visit your blog before and if you can keep your content valuable there is no reason they won’t come back. Yes, people like the valuable information that you provide, but they also enjoy you. Gary Vanerchuck says in his latest book, CRUSH IT, that we have to admit there is a bit of voyeur in all of us. I’m not sure about that but I do know people are curious.

My Mistake
One thing that I may be guilty of but have remedied recently is letting people know more about me. I was remiss in stories about “me”. These stories are the things people like to read. They do it for many reasons. The number one reason in my book is curiosity.

Welcome Curiosity
Curiosity may kill the cat but it will not kill the sale and this is why. If you look at the experience of someone visiting your site, they not only look at the content but also try and make formulated hypothesis about the characters they read about as well. The truth is that people love stories. They like to relate to the story and the characters they read about. They like to read about preferences, history, culture, and practices. They want to be a part of the plot. They do this by finding and reading information about you and those who leave comments on your blog. See http://www.chriskilber.com/using-psychology-to-sell/. The better you are making yourself someone that your readers can relate too, the more they will return.

Curiosity Raises Questions
Curiosity also makes people ask questions. These are usually not questions verbatim to others but questions they ask themselves. If you can figure out what they may be and answer them you then positioned yourself as someone who has great insight and can be considered an authority in your potential customer’s eyes. If you are clever you can also craft your writing to lead people to ask questions to themselves and then answer them. Not only will this build insightfulness into your writing but they will also gain their trust.

Focus on Readers
An aspect of using curiosity in your marketing is that by focusing on the curiosity of your potential customers, you can use it to provide value to your readers that are based on their questions and needs. It will help you hone in on value. Traditional sales and marketing has you always focusing on getting the sale, the closing, or qualifying. These tend to devalue the customer which is the farthest thing from what you want to do.

Respect
Using curiosity helps reinforce that it’s the relationship, not the product that sells. It may surprise the potential customer in a positive way by re-framing their expectations and view of you. It shows the potential customer that you can focus on things outside of yourself and your product. The customer or prospect will also realize you have a process that respects the customer. By using this approach you will always have a reasonable and best possible excuse for a follow up call. Finally, you will gain enormous respect.

Summary
So you see curiosity can helps both the potential customer and you by staying focused on the customers internal and external questions that they may have. You can use this to come across as being insightful and an absolute authority in your niche.

Questions
Have you use curiosity to help attract customers or clients?
What was it specifically?
Do you have any examples that you particularly like best?

Learn Without Memorizing

October 13th, 2009

tsnPart of being an entrepreneur involves having to where many hats. If you’ve been studying using social media for your marketing there are a lot of things to remember. In the context of having to be as efficient as possible through daily habits, there are many things we have to remember that matter greatly. While no single task involved with it is extremely difficult, having to remember them all can be challenging, especially when literally the next day you may be teaching someone else what you just learned today.

With that I offer you a blog post called How to Learn Without Memorizing written by Scott Young on a Blog site called Think Simple Now. In it he describes a completely different system of learning by connecting ideas together. Scott describes this as creative learning.

What I’d like to advocate in this article is a more creative, spontaneous form of learning than the style you were probably coached for in school. Instead of repeatedly scanning the same information for minimal benefit, invest your time learning in creating connections with the information you are learning. Not only is it a more natural way to learn, it isn’t painfully boring like most memorization tasks are.

He goes on to describe many different strategies that you can implement as well. I find this kind of learning fascinating and will certainly delve more into it. I may even try and use it to try and explain some abstract technical information. Don’t be surprised if you find it in one of my later 101 traffic generation strategies in the near future.

Not only is this post interesting but the whole blog seems to be as well. Again it’s called Think Simple Now.

Have a remarkable day.

How to Market Like a Spartan

September 30th, 2009

spartan300
One of my favorite movies within the last few years was a movie called 300. It depicted a group of Greek warriors led by 300 Spartans who fought against a Persian army of an almost limitless size. Despite the odds, the Spartans did not flee or surrender, even if it meant their deaths.

What’s In You?
I believe that inside of everyone there is someone who is rooting for the underdog. The movie was also symbolic in that Greece stood as one of the last bastions of freedom and democracy against it’s antithesis, government, represented by Persia’s slavery and tyranny. The Spartans were an example of the power of a patriotic army of freemen who were defending their native soil. The bravery of the Spartans stands today, as a symbol of courage against overwhelming odds.

Qualities
What made the Spartans so brave? Courage? Of course. Resolute Character? More than likely. Boldness? Most certainly. The list could go on. We have dauntlessness, fearlessness, daring, firmness, prepared, seasoned, gallant, heroic, determined, spirited, valiant, purposeful, and stout. But even though they all had these qualities, what and who did they did it for?

Why did they do it?
They did it because it was ingrained into them from when they were able to think on their own. It was their way of life. Their duty was to nurture their way of life surrounded by their families and friends. This meant having to defend themselves against others who would want to take away that life. That very existence, noble indeed.

What about your world?
In the world of online marketing, mostly because the playing field is ever changing, I don’t know if we ever can really NOT be labeled as a NEW marketer. Things are changing all the time. So things you learned last month may not be as applicable or as relevant as they are today.

Take Action!
If you educate yourself to not only learn the application of the new concepts you study, but to understand the reasoning behind them, you stand to educate yourself at a little different level. It is at this level that you can utilize your time at it’s best best efficiency which will result in increased achievement. If you understand the rational and underlying principals in your marketing techniques, it stands that new implementation of new ideas will manifest other ideas and techniques. Ideas and concepts will start to automatically come to you.

Conclusion
To get to that point you are going to have to ingrain learning and self development into your lifestyle. You are going to have to grow. Daily. Unless you had Spartan like parents and were raised in a family that teaches marketing from the get go, the only path you have will be to always be trying to learn something every day. What this entails is being courageous and persistent. This is not unlike the Spartans. You have to learn never to give up. Courage and confidence can be taught and learned. When you mix the two, you will be a Spartan in your own right.

Questions
What are you learning new today?
Is your education on a different plane?
Do you learn things well enough to be able to teach them?
What’s stopping you?

Can Your Marketing Have a MVP Season?

September 27th, 2009

justinI’m a fan
I’ve been a fan of baseball for all of my life. I can also proudly say that I’ve been a Twins fan all my life as well. This year has been an interesting year for the Twins. The manager has thrown over 20 different pitchers on the mound this year and for the most of the year they have had a .500 record.

But…
But as many pitchers as the Twins have used, we are at the end of the season, the Twins have won 9 out of the last 10 games, and they are only 2 games out of first place with only 8 games left to play. And 4 of those games are with the first place Tigers! It is the classic definition of a pennant race. While I don’t watch as much as I once did, I do get to watch one game a week.

Remembering my Grandparents
As I stated above, I’ve been a Twins fan as far back as I can remember. I remember as a kid listening to Halsey Hall and later Herb Carneal to the game with my grandfather, Adam. That’s one of the things I remember most about my grandfather. He seemed to know everything about baseball and especially the Twins. He not only influenced me as his grandson, but my grandmother, Grace, who will be 98 this year. She still watches the Twins and is very opinionated about them. I think she would have made a great baseball manager. I remember asking my grandfather how a team could be 1 ½ games out of first place. Did they play only ½ a game and it counted? He just answered that if a team was 3-0 and a team was 2-0 which one should be in first place and by how much. The formula works this way; Games Behind = ((difference in wins) + (difference in losses)) / 2. Well at that time I didn’t even know what a fraction was but learned the importance of math at an early age.

I played too…
I did play a lot of baseball as a kid and never was stellar at it. I wasn’t bad either. I did learn it took a lot of skill hitting. I was good at hitting when I was hitting against the neighborhood kids in the local sandlots but going against pitchers at the higher levels, that ball came mighty fast. Hitting a baseball thrown at 85 mph is not easy.

Justin Morneau became an MVP
So why all the nostalgia with baseball and my grandfather? Well the skill needed to play at a Major League level is not easy, even for the ones playing there. The Twins have as a first baseman, Justin Morneau. Justin has played for 7 seasons for the Twins. He first came up with the Twins in 2003 toward the end of the year and the next year was slated to play first base for the Twins. But in 2004 he struggled during the year and only after 74 games was sent back down to the minors. He did manage to play the whole year with the Twins the following year, 2005, but only hit .239 with 22 home runs. So he did show some potential but nothing phenomenal or something to write home about. The next year, 2006, the first baseman hit .321 with 34 home runs, 97 runs scored and 130 RBIs. That won him the American League’s Most Valuable Player honors.

How did he do it?
So what happened between 2005 and 2006? Well it’s not so much about what happened between those years as what has happened over the years. Baseball players are not simply handed a baseball glove and a bat and told to go out on the field. Major league teams have batting coaches, pitching coaches, fielding coaches, dieticians, doctors, psychologists, physical therapists, physiologists, coaches, and many people with a lot of baseball experience. It was the combination of the organizations support staff, some experience, and some talent that earned Justin his MVP honors only 2 years after being sent down to the minors.

Did you pay your dues?
So it is with online marketing. There is no way anyone can just simply decide to start online marketing and be successful with it right from the get go. You are going to need a plan, hopefully from someone who has already had success. You are going to need some training, some coaches, a mentor, and hopefully an organization or team that can help you learn the ropes. Without any of this, the odds of success are not very high. I can’t say it won’t happen, just that the odds are against it.

What you need to do!
If you don’t have a coach or mentor, get one. Follow and study those who have proven track records. Don’t fall for the flashy promises of a Lamborghini and Lear jets. Take action. Track what you are doing. Refine. Seek insight if you don’t understand something. Practice. Split Test. Training is tax deductible. Take advantage of it. Learning online marketing is a process. Staying on top of new trends in marketing is a process. You are going to have to take batting practice every day if you want to be able to keep up with the pitches thrown your way. By keeping at it with the major leagues as a goal, there is no reason you can’t have your own MVP season. Play ball.

House on Marketing

September 26th, 2009

houseHouse
Hey, do you all know the character on the FOX network’s show called House? Hugh Laurie plays an eccentric, grumpy, though poignant, and articulate, doctor lacking in bedside manner. In talking to friends and other people, I’ve found that either you like his character or you hate him. He has a condescending and somewhat biting style that pierces and cuts to the chase. But is his demeanor really brash? I like to think he’s saying what others are thinking. In the end, he always is the one who diagnoses the ailment and saves the day or should I say patient? Does it matter how he accomplished his goal, to save a life?

Being Honest
How’s this related to marketing? Well we all have first of all have to be honest with our potential customers, affiliates, and others about our products and most importantly, the chances of success when joining our network marketing organizations. Are the promises of 25,000 dollars a month realistic? Are the fist-full’s of cash and Lamborghinis realistic? Is it really turn key and does it only require a limited amount of knowledge? Does it grow itself without any human interaction? Is the marketing really provided by someone else?

Promises and Reality
We all know the promises and even after years in the business, we are still somewhat seeking the ‘Holy Grail’, so to speak. There are even examples of diamonds in the rough of those who have had their dreams realized. But as Dr. House would say:

1. Your prospects really don’t care what you have to say, really!
2. When you’re selling an Network opportunity, the product is secondary!
3. Logic does not win the day when it comes to motivating someone to enter your business.
4. People listen to and respond to hearing negative things.
5. Most people are highly skeptical about the industry.
6. 97% of everyone who starts an online business fails.

Just Tell the Truth
So just as Dr. House can save the day, what or how can you save the day or bottom line when it comes to attracting prospects as your customer or affiliate? Being honest can go far. Choosing the correct marketing style and tactics can go far. Implementing strategies that speak to the items Dr. House espoused above will go far. We don’t need to be as brash as Dr. House when explaining the honest realities of our industry, but we do need to address them. By doing so we can attract prospects with our honesty, and additionally weed out the meek tire kickers by making them aware of the work involved with having your own online business. I think Dr. House would make it big in the network marketing industry.

You Have To Love What You Do

September 19th, 2009

Crush-It-Book-Cover-final-smallIf you haven’t seen or researched Gary Vaynerchuk and his work and life, you’ve missed out on a lot. You can find him at @garyvee on twitter. He has 857,184 followers. Here’s a video on the importance of building a personal brand.

I would love to hear your comments.

I’ve pre-ordered his book and will soon be released. I recommend buying it now.

Made My Day

September 18th, 2009

maslowMy Twitter Account
Yesterday I was looking at my twitter account and ran across these two tweets. It made me feel great. I have the ability to drive a lot of traffic but rarely are they ever to a page or site that says to purchase anything. They are simply posts that help inform, educate, show how-to, help to make decisions, and to motivate. They offer value. Of course not everything that gets tweeted is advertising or spam, there are a lot of great quotes and links to breaking news. Sad to say though is that the majority of it is just that, advertising and spam. People just don’t understand that people don’t want to get sold to. They still have the old school mentality and are using Twitter as a advertising portal. They don’t get that when people are put into situations where they are being sold to, their natural tendency is to run away.

Dr. Joyce Knudsen
It appears Joyce had a lot more to say than she could in a tweet so she had to have two. I’ll bet my tweets stood out like a sore thumb. I get a lot of the same types of responses on my Facebook page as well. I treat it the same way.

knudsen

As contradictory as this sounds, online marketing is a people business. It’s about nurturing relationships. About helping and educating people that you’ve come to know. It’s about sharing your personalities and nuances with each other. It’s empathy and understanding. Selling is never about the product. It’s about relationships.

Thank you so much Joyce!

Joyce is an Image Consultant Trainer and Joyce can be found on twitter @drJoyce_knudsen and her blog, The Image Maker, Inc.

It’s A Message

September 7th, 2009

coin
Social Media Boom
Well it seems now that social media marketing is like a shiny new silver dollar and almost everyone is waking up and getting involved, as they should. There’s no question that social media applications are becoming central to our online lives, and soon social apps will be an integral part of the very operating systems we use. People are using Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube like crazy, and there are no signs of slowing down.

But Don’t Forget
What everyone still needs to realize is that as neat and nifty these online applications are, at the heart of it all, especially for marketers, is they are used to convey messages. You can never forget that these new social technologies are simply different and new ways to communicate. You also need to know that technology by itself is not can not compel anyone to do anything. You need to make sure that you don’t get the social technologies mixed with the message.

It’s Still A Message
So now we know that every status update, Tweet, and Facebook message is nothing more than a communication between a sender and on the other end, a reader. What your message says and how you say it are what matters. Don’t get caught up in the hype of Web 2.0 when it comes to conveying your message. At the core of it all you still need to deliver relevant messages, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, or an email campaign. Make sure you communications deliver a persuasive call to action because when it is all done and said, it’s still only a message. How you choose to craft and convey the words in it will make all the difference.

ChrisKilber.com

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