We have recently seen a flood of new products, service or solution and subsequent marketing messages (even the human body can be used as billboard now).
But, attention is scarce and limited – prospects and customers can’t digest it all.
They see on average 362 marketing messages per day.
That is approximately 100,000 marketing messages per year!
It’s impossible to take all of that information in and process it.
“Ad blockers” and native content are on the rise to combat this situation by both prospects and customers and brands, respectively.
Cognitive psychologist George A Miller said the human mind can only hold on average seven individual units of information in working memory at once.
99% of these messages will be missed by prospects and customers.
So, unless your marketing message stands out, as you can probably guess, it will be lost forever.
Therefore, positioning helps simplify a marketing message, make a good impression and break through all the other competing marketing noise.
This means you must get attention.
And Clickbait is a way of doing so.
Clickbait is internet content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.
The term Clickbait had become popular via the internet but has existed far longer than the internet, in fact, arguably back to when direct mail started around the 1900s.
Clickbait can be seen as negative, such as wasting people time to prop up advertisers.
But it can also be positive – that is getting a message to someone who wants to hear it but is overwhelmed by irrelevant marketing messages.
I recently got the flowing Direct Mail package in my letterbox:
That’s a juicy headline that I want to open (click) to find out.
But the branding on the envelope gives it away – it’s commercial and a non-profit, so they must want a donation.
If it didn’t have the logo on there, I would have opened it to see what it was about.
I work in marketing and sales, so I always keep my eyes peeled for how business are approaching their marketing and sales.
Why?
So I can see what the competition is doing!
So, I kept proceeding.
They had a sales script that looked like this:
The sales script is really good.
It has:
- Direct response;
- Makes the donate easy to return through at reply paid envelope; and
- Easy order form.
What they could have done better:
- No branding on the envelope; and
- Handwritten envelope or letter.
There is a maxim that goes like this: don’t make an ad look like an ad – handwriting sales scripts are a great idea, but as it’s time-consuming.
For this to be worthwhile, you need to get the most return on investment which is considering how this fits within sales psychology and sales funnels as I previously mentioned.
Fix this, and you have a great direct marketing piece.