3 Simple Tips for Creating Eye-Catching Testimonials

We've all seen them. An excellent testimonial grabs attention, solidifies your brand, and convinces customers of the value of your service or product. But sometimes getting those quality testimonials can be like pulling teeth. Short of hiring a copywriter to write them for you, how are you supposed to get your clients and customers to write these perfect testimonials? Here are 3 simple tips for creating those eye-catching, business-winning testimonials we all want:

1. Pick the right people. Choose clients or customers who've told you how much they love and appreciate your service. Keep your eyes open. Enthusiastic customers or clients write enthusiastic testimonials. Make sure these people represent your target customer, too. If you're targeting small business owners, a testimony from a Fortune 500 executive won't have the same impact.

2. Ask the right questions. Don't simply ask for a testimonial! Ask a series of leading, specific questions which will guide your clients or customers in writing a winning testimonial. Here are some good questions you can tweak to your specific product or service:

- Did you have any doubts about this product or service? If so, what were they? Were they overcome?

- How did this product or service benefit you or your business?

- Do you think it will benefit others? If so, how?

- What tangible, measurable results did you experience from using this product or service?

- Was this product or service worth it? Is the cost justified?

3. Shape the testimonial into a convincing form. Take the answers provided and arrange the sentences in a logical order that progress from initial hesitation and doubt to unhesitating endorsement.

Following these simple steps, you'll notice a marked improvement in the quality, power, and impact of your testimonials.

5 Easy Ways to Envigorate Your Copy: How To Keep Readers Reading

Boring copy kills your marketing message. Don't waste valuable time and throw away your precious marketing dollars with writing as stale as day old bread. Here are 5 simple steps to jazz up your writing so readers will read it:

1. Write like you speak. The cardinal rule of copywriting, this will help you infuse new life into otherwise dead copy. If you find this challenging, then try talking aloud and recording what you're trying to say in order to write it down later. Nine times out of ten, you'll say it better than you'd ever write it.

2. Talk directly to your reader. Use the word "you." Then use it again. Don't neglect this attention grabbing, attractive little word. Readers like to hear about themselves, and they want to feel as if you're speaking to them. Give them what they want.

3. Keep it short. Nothing loses a reader like a lazy run-on sentence. Use short sentences and paragraphs to help keep readers in the game. Break complicated ideas or paragraphs down into multiple bite-sized pieces. Of course, you don't want to carry this too far. It's good to vary sentence length in order to sound more natural and less like a stuttering machine gun spitting out words.

4. Create a picture. Use words to make an image in your reader's mind. "The hole was as big as a house." You get the idea. Vivid word pictures will stay with your readers and help them stay with you.

5. Use action words. Avoid the passive voice -- that means the verbs of being like "is," "are," "was," "were," "be," "being," "been," and "become" are off-limits. Anytime you see one of those words, ask it why it's there. If you must keep it, then keep it. But, try to eliminate at least half of the verbs of being you're tempted to use.

Following these tips will ensure your copy grabs attention and captivates audiences.

How To Double Your Qualified Leads Without Taxing Your Budget

It's standard practice to generate leads by requiring web site visitors to exchange personal information for quality content and/or collateral. Walking the fine line between asking for too much information (and scaring prospects off) and asking for too little takes finesse. Here's a simple way to glean more information from prospects, qualify leads, and keep those visitors returning to your site.

1. Identify themes based on why visitors come to your site. This will usually be broken down by the kinds of information and/or product you sell or the services you provide. For example, a Network Services company might identify these themes: Disaster Recovery, IP Address Management, Network Access Control, DNS/DHCP Infrastructure, and Voice Over IP.

2. For each theme, develop five pieces of collateral or content you want site visitors to acquire. This can be whitepapers, data sheets, a webinar, you name it. Your goal is to walk each user through acquiring all five of these pieces.

3. Develop unique registration forms for each interaction. The trick is to keep the forms short with no more than five or six questions each so that users don't stop mid-form. And, instead of asking the same questions over and over, ask a different set of questions with each form. Use cookies to identify the unique visitor, and if the visitor doesn't have cookies enabled, you can also track identical users by asking them to register with their email address. The goal is to get more qualifying information with each round of registration.

4. Score the leads and give them to your sales people. Score the leads based on both the kind and quality of information provided. For example, even if you got quality information from the prospect, they wouldn't score well if they answered that they have no current projects and no budget. A typical scoring system might be:

A - high quality, inside sales follow up
B - good quality, inside sales follow up
C - moderate quality, inside sales follow up as time allows
D - marketable opt-in lead, no follow up required
E - purchased/acquired list, non-opted in
F - junk lead

Believe it or not, implementing this system will allow you to not only generate higher quality leads, but also double the number of leads you receive because you're using shorter, more user-friendly forms.

How To Analyze Your Competition's Marketing

In an interesting and helpful follow-up to Monday's post about finding your USP, Marketing Sherpa interviewed the principal of Messages That Matter, Lawson Abinanti and asked him about how to analyze your competition's marketing.

In a nutshell, the first four common-sense tips he outlined were:

1. Isolate direct competitors. “It would be the hated enemies, the companies that you go head to head with in the battles out on the sales front,” Abinanti says.
2. Collect competitor's marketing materials. He said to check their print advertising first because that represents their most current marketing position and the largest expenditure of their marketing budget.
3. Assemble your analysis team. You want to schedule a group brainstorming session with as many folks as possible so that you can really analyze and understand your competition's pitch.
4. Distill the marketing into competitive positions. Figure out exactly what it is your competition is saying, and to whom. What's their positioning statement?

But the real curve ball, for me at least, came in his fifth step, and this is what I think you'll find most handy.

5. Map the competitive positions you discover.

From Marketing Sherpa's interview:

After identifying competitors’ marketing positions, you need to create a map of the competitive landscape to help you visualize where competitors have staked out territory -- and where openings might exist that you can exploit.

Start by logging the results in a table, placing the names of the companies in column headings and then assigning the different marketing positions to rows. Type an “X” underneath each company next to the primary message (or messages) of their ad statement.

Next, turn that table into a graphic. Abinanti has a team member build an Excel application that turns tables into star-shaped charts that plot competitors’ names along or between different legs representing each marketing position statement (see creative samples below). You can also build a chart manually in PowerPoint.

If you find that each competitor is using a unique marketing concept and, therefore, no clear groupings are emerging, consider combining similar ideas into a single concept to see if a pattern exists. For example, in Abinanti’s analysis of the enterprise CPM market he combined concepts such as predictable performance and better business performance to group companies.

A good competitive map will show you where competitors are clustered and which marketing concepts are most commonly employed. From there, it’s back to brainstorming (preferably with the same team who performed the competitive analysis) to determine your own company’s marketing position that will stand out from the crowd.

New Study Shows 53% of All Subject Lines Are Broken!

Are your subject lines broken? Even if you think you don't have a problem, you need to keep reading. A new study released by Pivotal Veracity shows that 53% of all subject lines are broken, meaning they'll be improperly rendered in your recipient's email reader! Fortunately, the study also gave us tips to make sure we avoid this pitfall.

For a test conducted with 18 major ISPs, the results are alarming. Basically, the problem boils down to a simple error -- copying & pasting subject lines from a word processing program like Microsoft Word into your email program. MSWord and others like it show ASCII type characters when you're viewing your document, but they aren't ASCII encoded. Copy and pasting these non-ASCII encoded characters into your subject lines can render disastrous results of gobbledegook. And, we all know what that means. Not only might you lose a sale, you might even get reported as a SPAMMER.

Three simple solutions:

1. Don't copy & paste. Manually type your subject lines into your email program. This will help ensure your emails are deliverable and readable.

2. Use an ASCII text editor. If you're writing in English, and the copy you use only contains characters in the ASCII set, write your subject lines and emails in an ASCII editor.

3. Test, Test, Test! Be sure to test the emails you send in more than one email reader. Open an account with every major email receiver (Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Gmail, Excite, etc.), and send a test email to your account.

Download Pivotal Veracity's full report, including even more tips for ensuring subject readability, here.

3 Simple Steps To Find Your USP

Everyone needs one. Not everyone has one. It's the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – the single thing you tout that sets you apart from your competition. Yet discovering a truly unique selling proposition is daunting and rare. Here are some straightforward tips to help you make your marketing message stand out in a crowd.

Study your competition. What are they saying? How are they saying it? You need to know your playing field before you jump into the game. Whatever their message, you want yours to be different.

Be creative. It doesn't matter if your business, product, or service really is just like your competition's and nothing at all sets you apart (although I think this is unlikely). So long as you're the only one saying what you're saying, your message will be heard. I once helped a massage parlor double its response rate on a direct mail postcard simply by highlighting how they served hot teas in their lobby. Almost all the local massage parlors served hot teas, but this was the only one to advertise the complimentary service.

Be unique. Don't succumb to the rudderless, nondescript, “me too” method of business that relies solely on the sheer momentum of the marketplace. Be unique. A local midwife I know saw her business increase by 40% when she began renting out office space to and holding monthly workshops by other like-minded professionals (a homeopathic natural doctor, a lactation consultant, and a yoga instructor). Think of ways you can dress up your product or service, pick one that sounds easy, and then do it.

You are not your competition. So, why are you trying your hardest to look like them, sound like them, and perform like them? Don't follow the throng! Find your USP and multiply your marketing dollars!

How To Stand Out From Your Competition -- Say Thank You

Hectic schedules and busy workdays eat away at our time. They eat away at your prospect's time, too. When you land a meeting or a phone call, the most important thing you can do is say “thank you for your time.” Here are a few tried and true methods for saying “thank you” that will keep you fresh in your prospect's mind:

1. Send a quick “thank you” email. The secret is in the system. Save the text of your “thank you” email as a draft so you can quickly copy and paste it into a new email composition. This way, you can quickly send out emails to prospects after phone calls or face to face meetings. You want to sound polite and grateful, and you also want to remind your client about why you're qualified to do the job. Here's the email I send out after phone meetings:

Hi {{NAME}},

Pleasure talking with you today; thanks for your time. Keep me in mind if you need informative copy written in an engaging, accessible style. Experience working in the marketing and creative departments of a software promotions firm, as well as my years of experience as a copywriter means I understand audience and have a strong command of language. Please view some samples of my work at: www.wonderworkingwords.com.

I look forward to working with you down the line. Best of continued success.

2. Follow your email with a “thank you” card. Pick a card that's eye-catching and artistic. A lovely card is more likely to hang around your prospect's desk space or be displayed on a tack board; learn to think of a card that's not immediately thrown away as free advertising. Handwritten cards are best, as are hand addressed and stamped envelopes. Details like this tell your prospect you care.

3. Follow your “thank you” card with a phone call. Remember, anytime you send your prospects something in the mail, you have a ready made excuse to make yet one more touch and keep you and your product or services fresh in their minds. Did they receive what you sent them? Do they have any questions you can answer? You communicate your availability while creating a positive experience for them to associate with you.

Employing these few tips, you'll be leaps ahead of your competition...and that much closer to making the sale.