“Don’t give them 4, give them 2+2.”
Pixar’s Andrew Stanton said this during a TED talk on storytelling. Marketing effectively is all about telling your audience a beautiful story that moves them to look favorably upon whatever you are trying to sell them.
The world is absolutely inundated with marketing efforts. The people you really want to affect are usually those too busy to sit down and read a long-winded argument on how your product is the bee’s knees. Here are some tips for you to keep in mind when trying to get people to read your content.
Tell effective stories
In the age of short attention spans and information overload, a great marketing technique to get you noticed is to tell effective stories. Don’t be afraid to be personal with your stories. Consumers receive thousands of run of the mill marking messages every day. Personal stories about real people are one way to make yours stand out.
Show don’t tell
Remember back in 11th grade English class when your teacher would harp on everyone to “show not tell” well, unfortunately, this is actually a valuable piece of advice. People are quite intimidated by a large block of text. According to research done over at LookBookHQ, press releases that contain multimedia get 77 percent more responses than those with just text. Take advantage of design and include graphics and other multimedia in your emails.
Make information easy to digest
Don’t deny it. Before reading this paragraph, or even this whole post, you skimmed the page to see if the information would be worth your time. Data shows that 79 percent of people scan online documents rather than read it word for word. This means that you better be making your most important information easy to access. (See how we have little headers, we’re just trying to help you out).
Write catchy headlines
Enclosed in this email is a blog post that was written to inform you the reader of how you can market to people who don’t have an abundance of time in their schedule, also I am a boring person.
Can you even imagine opening an email with that headline? No of course not, I’m doubtful if you even read the whole sentence.
Anywho, the most important thing in getting people to read your content is to have a great headline. You could have the prose of Shakespeare enclosed in that email, but no one will ever read it because you have an awful headline. Busy people don’t have the time to gamble that your writing is worthwhile. If the headline sucks, they are breezing right past you.
Now, to all the busy people who just finished up reading this article. Thank you, I really did try to keep in mind my own points. If you have anything to add to the discussion, tweet it to us @digitalbrew_co or drop us a line at
info@digitalbrew.com!
