Is Your Marketing Believable? Ask Yourself These Questions
by Peter Geisheker

One of the big problems I see in advertising today, particularly on the Internet, is the believability factor. When I see an advertisement, email, or sales letter that sounds too good to be true, I instantly ignore it. There is so much snake oil being sold in the world today, especially on the Internet, that when I see big claims made for anything, I ignore them as being junk.

For example, today I received an email with the subject line saying, “How to double your business.” My instant response was, “yeah sure, BS” and I hit the delete key. Then I received another email with the subject line saying, “FREE CHEAT SHEET: My 10 Most Important Business Insights This Decade.” My response was, “yeah right, if you are such a business genius, why are you sending out spam emails like this instead of having a cover story done on you in the Wall Street Journal?” Delete.

Many marketers seem to think that for their advertising to get a person’s attention, they have to make huge claims about their product/service being the best thing since the invention of the automobile and that it will change the world. The problem with that type of marketing is, NOBODY BELIEVES YOU! People are becoming so desensitized to big claims that they ignore them.

So, as a marketer what do you do? How do you mark your marketing and advertising more believable? Well, first of all, stop saying what you have is the best the world has ever seen. It’s not. And even if it was, people would not believe you. Every company says what they are selling is the best, so there is no believability any more. It is just corporate hype and goes in one ear and out the other.

The second thing you can do is tone it down a bit. Saying you can increase a company’s manufacturing output by 6% over 10 months is far more believable than saying you will increase a company’s manufacturing output by 50% in a week. The first claim sounds like it could possibly be true. The second claim sounds too good to be true, so it will in all likelihood be ignored. Do not use whole numbers. An increase in profits of 6.2% sounds far more believable than 10%, 15% or 20%.

Another marketing tactic you can use is to include testimonials where your customers state how your product or service helped them. For example, “I bought the XYZ Widget from ABC Company and now my zipzopadoodler is not breaking down anymore and it is producing 3.8% more zibblyboos each month. Thank you ABC Company for making a great product I can rely on. Joe Doe, COO, Zibblyboo, Inc.” And finally, use brief case studies that prove quantitatively how your product or service has helped a customer. It does not have to be long; 3-4 paragraphs is fine. The key is that your case study is believable and not over-hyped so your prospects can put themselves in the shoes of your clients and say, “I have that same problem and it sounds like this product/service is exactly what I need.”
About the Author
Peter Geisheker is the CEO of The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm. Peter develops and implements strategic marketing programs for businesses of all sizes with a specialty in law firm marketing. For a no-obligation quote, contact The Geisheker Group marketing firm today. www.geisheker.com (920) 471-1638.

Please Note... All links within articles are placed by their author-owners and not by this blog.Products with in those links may or may not be the best in the world.If it sounds too good to be true it could be a scam.Articles are posted for their info,ideas and or entertainment value only.

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Search Engine Optimization and Advertising

In today’s net-savvy world it has become common for any business to have a website which they use mostly for advertising their products and services. With the advent of search engines it has become even easier for the customers to search for the stuff online. For a website to be successful its link should land in the first three pages which the search engine brings and the rank of the page should be high which means many visitors come to the site. This can be achieved by applying search engine optimization or popularly known as SEO. This is a marketing strategy which increases the quality and quantity of traffic flow to a particular website via search engines.

SEO not only affects the search engine results, but also image search, video search and industry specific vertical search engines. It determines how a search algorithm functions and searches what is popular with people. When a website link is submitted to a search engine, a spider crawls through a page to gather links which lead to other pages and stores those pages on the server of the search engine. The information collected from these pages is sent to the indexer, whose job is to extract information from those pages such as the keywords and their weights, the location of the page and other links that are stored for the spider to crawl in future.

In the beginning, the search engine optimizer algorithms were dependant on the keywords, Meta tags, and index files provided by the Webmaster. Meta tags provided information about a particular page, but using them for indexing the pages didn’t prove to be successful as some Webmasters added irrelevant Meta tags to increase the number of hits and earn huge ad revenue. They even changed the HTML of the web pages to achieve a good rank for the page. But this was a case of abuse as it fetched irrelevant pages.

Search engines then began utilizing complex ranking algorithm, which were difficult for the webmasters to manipulate so as to provide web surfers with genuine results. The rank of the web page was calculated mathematically by functions using strength and quantity of the inbound links. The higher the rank of the page the more chances it had to be viewed by a person. Later algorithms were developed which considered various other on-page factors such as rank and off-page factors such as hyperlink. Since the webmasters couldn’t manipulate the page rank, they began exchanging, selling and buying links, which lead to link spamming and even creation of numerous sites dedicated for this purpose.

Algorithms became more complex by every passing day and top search engines kept their algorithms a secret. As the cost of SEO increased, advertisers were roped in to pay for it, which finally resulted in high quality web pages. Although investing in SEO is very fruitful, but at the same time is risky because with out any prior notice the algorithms being used are bound to change and the search engine will stop directing visitors to the page. Many consultants are available in the market that provides SEO services. They manipulate the HTML source code of the web site like menus, shopping carts and sometimes even the content of the website to draw more traffic. Search engines like Yahoo has algorithms that extract pages not according to the page rank but according to the cost per click or set fee, that is if a advertiser desires that the page containing his ad be displayed, he is expected to pay money for it. This is a point of controversy, as only the big businesses will be able to increase the number of hits of their page but not the small business who might be having a better quality page.

Google Ad Words explores ads which have words typed in the search box by the surfer. The Million Dollar Homepage started the concept of Pixel advertising, which is a graphical kind of advertising. Depending on the pixels, the space is sold to the advertiser. Keyword advertising involves advertisers who buy URLs of a site and place their ads at that location. Thus SEO is a market in its own which is yielding great results for businesses on Internet.

Please Note... All links within articles are placed by their author-owners and not by this blog.Products with in those links may or may not be the best in the world.If it sounds too good to be true it could be a scam.Articles are posted for their info,ideas and or entertainment value only.

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