When writing, or even reading, the best way to be clear with our message or to understand the message is to understand the context and the audience. Let me try to explain this with an example from one of my new article web site.
In the blog, The Parables of Jesus, I write about the parables Jesus told to his disciples and the crowds of His time. It is critical for me as a writer to realize that I need first to understand the context in which the author wrote the story as well as the audience Jesus spoke to, and then understand my own audience so that I can write the articles with relevance to that audience today. Read the rest of this entry »
The greatest risk to any business is that no customers will show up, the issue is the mentality that customers are going to drop out of the sky just because you’re so cool.
Maybe marketing feels weird. Maybe selling feels impossible. (Trust me, I have been there.) Maybe you’re making excuses for not pushing out of your comfort zone, by telling yourself that great products don’t need to be marketed and sold — they just sell themselves.
Great products and services deserve great marketing, so they’ll find the audiences they can help. Your brilliant business idea is only as good as your ability to sell it.
Gone are the days (if they ever existed) where you only had to build a web site and people would come. The truth is that if you build it, they won’t come and if they do come, you’ve got only seconds to capture their attention. Read the rest of this entry »
Simon Sinek articulates in this short video and his book Start With Why how it is that some companies are able to better connect with their deeper reason – forbeing, with the result being a deeper resonance in the marketplace.
Simon Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers — and as a counterpoint Tivo, which (until a recent court victory that tripled its stock price) appeared to be struggling.
About Simon Sinek
In 2009, Simon Sinek released the book “Start With Why” — a synopsis of the theory he has begun using to teach others how to become effective leaders and inspire change.
We’ve all heard of the dismal state for reading literacy of the students coming out of our school system and I do not need to add to it in this post. What interest me here is how to I develop a product, a marketing plan or a course to target today’s audience that clearly does not like to read.
Here are some recent stats from the US Census, and I am sure the stats in Canada and the UK are not much more encouraging.
58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
42% of college graduates never read another book.
80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57% of new books are not read to completion.
Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased.
So, does it not make sense to explore different media to target your audience? Over the last year, I had the opportunity to develop a few online courses, and most of them delivered via online video lessons. The feedback and the actual test results from our students are outstanding. Adults like the options to be able to pause, rewind and play back videos at their leisure. They tell us that they also like to be able to even play the video on a larger screen, as it makes them feel more like sitting in a classroom.
On the marketing side, we’ve also started to use short videos on client’s web site with great results. It looks like Google also likes video a lot. Our tests showed that pages with a video posted on it, with a great title and a short paragraph to introduce the topic or product and service showed on the video, ranked people than the similar topic or subject page with a 800-100 words article.
Go figure, people really don’t like reading that much any more. So, don’t quit writing great content but do add a short video – it will pay off.
PS: I’ll start making video posts, or at least make the post available as audio soon.
