Migrating with the birds
The last few months have been busy but that is no excuse for not keeping my news items current. Recent projects have been a wonderfully eclectic mix of writing promotional material,a successful $100,000 R&D grant for $100,000, speech writing and standardising client request emails.
In addition, we fled winter to enjoy a month of late summer back in New York. A highlight was putting on my Living Streets hat and meeting with a couple of wonderfully passionate people from the NY Department of Transportation about pedestrian and cycle friendly initiatives in the big apple. www.nyc.gov/dot I particularly liked their comment that the ability to get changes made are 95% political will and courage. Fantastic that New York City have a mayor (Michael Bloomberg) and a Transport Commissioner (Janette Sadik-Khan) who have both the necessary will and the courage. The walkers and cyclists, and the city planners are loving it! The image below is of Times Square showing some of the newly created pedestrian precincts.
We have now headed back south into spring but last night brought snow flurries, hopefully the last for the year. Made for less than ideal road conditions driving back from Dunedin after attending a speech about the restoration of an historic building after a devastating fire. I helped put the speech together and it was great to be there for the presentation.
Working to keep on track with updates from here on in!
Keeping the cat alive and happy
We’ve all heard that curiosity killed the cat. Most of us have also heard that satisfaction brought it back. And that’s what you want for your customers – satisfaction. And you can achieve this through the use of open loops in your sales material.
I have had the good fortune to be a trainer in a past life and the even better fortune to have attended a training for trainers program run by Dr. Richard Allen, educator and master trainer with a PhD in Educational Psychology. Rich explained the importance of open loops. An open loop is a hook that captures your reader’s attention. Quite simply, the human mind seeks completion. Writers of serials understand this so they create cliff hangers. The episode ends on a breathless note, a dramatic event, and you wait impatiently for the next episode to find out what happened. That’s an open loop. The mind returns to it over and over seeking closure. As I see it, open loops can work in two great ways for getting and keeping your customers’ attention and helping them make the decision to purchase.
Open loop one is the attention grabber working on emotions like curiosity, fear, wonder, and insecurity. Open the loop by using a great headline, like a recent one I read that simply said “hamburger as weapon”. The mind leaps into question mode…what? how? huh??? Gotta know what happened! What Dr. Allen made clear is that if you open a loop, you can keep your audience focussed by dangling the loop in front of them but eventually, if you want to be credible, you must close the loop, give them satisfaction. This makes you trustworthy, someone who delivers what they say they will. Give completion and then invite your readers to go further with a call to action. This is the second type of open loop and helps move your prospective customers to satisfied purchasers. Pose such a great open ended question that the only way they can create a sense of completion is by taking action. Again, you start by opening a loop…only instead of the response being what the? huh? how? This sort of question gets the response of....yeah, why am I not happy? Hmmm why can’t I have what I want? And there you are with the “Of course you can and here’s how!” answer. Boom, you have action. These questions are non judgemental and open ended – how? what? when? why? These questions give the power back to your readers, it puts the solution to what is keeping them from being fulfilled right there in their hands. They can close the loop themselves! This is different from the burger as weapon because that loop must be closed by the writer. Leave these open and your prospect will lose faith in you. And don’t keep them dangling too long or they may give up. And if they do they’ll hate you for it. They’ll view you as a broken promise and they will mistrust you, no way will they want to buy from someone who doesn’t deliver. Remember the need for credibility? Leaving a loop open will blow your credibility for sure!
PS As to the hamburger as weapon, apparently someone did assault a restaurant worker with a hamburger in New Hampshire. The police found the mayonnaise smeared worker and the hamburger but the assailant had fled before the police arrived and as far as I know is still at large.
Launch of this website
Here it is. The launch of the ArronWords website. Creating a website is an interesting process, more thought provoking than I expected. Maybe I think too much or maybe it has to do with knowing that as a copywriter what I put on a website is going to showcase my writing style. Maybe it is just the uncomfortable idea that this website is putting my business out there in the big wide world and I'd feel the same no matter what business I was in. Whatever the case, the process has forced me to think a lot about my idea, my customers, my approach to business so be warned. If you are thinking about setting up a website and you have do not yet have a business plan or at least a marketing plan, a website is going to force you into the same internal dialogue that a plan does. But don't let that stop you! Putting together the site has been fun and websites are fast becoming a necessary tool to business success.