Trying to reduce every aspect of marketing through blogs, email, postal direct mail and web sites into just three points is actually quite hard.

Well it seemed quite hard to me as I tried to do it on the late evening train from London to Kettering last night.

I had given myself the 55 minutes that my journey home from London takes, in order to come up with the answer.  Indeed I had thought I might knock it off before we got to Bedford – but it proved to be what Holmes called a “three pipe problem”.  (Not quite relevant these days of course since you can’t smoke in trains, and I don’t smoke anyway, but you know what I mean.  Or maybe not.)

Anyway, the three key issues that I ended up with are…

1: Be different from the competition.  If your ads have the same look, feel and style as anyone else, that is bad news.   I’m not thinking of detail here, but rather of the whole approach.  If you want to be remembered – then you really have to be different.   (That is why I often push the notion of the conversational style and of humour – very few people use them, and so you are instantly different in your advertising style).

2: Look at each advert you have created, imagine you are a potential customer reading this for the first time, and ask, “Why should I buy this?”  If the answer does not leap into your head immediately, having read the advert, then you need to do some more work.  (Of course if you are intriguing the reader and keeping him/her with you, then that’s different, because the reader is still with you.  What I mean here is that by the time the reader stops interacting with your advert, blog, web site or whatever, he/she must know the answer to the question, “Why should I buy this?”

3: And following on from part two there is the follow up question to which the reader must also know the answer: “why should I buy this from you?”

So there we are

a) Be different

b) Answer the question, “why should I buy this?”

c) Answer the question, “why should I buy this from you?”

Of course there can be many other issues, but once you have got those three right, I believe you will always be on the right road.

If you would like to talk about this at any time, please do give me a call on 01536 399 013 or indeed send me over an advert and I’ll call you back and let you know what I think about it.  No charge, no obligation, no pipes.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.