Colin Sprake defines marketing practically for small businesses: (1) marketing is creating compelling materials and tools that assist a prospect and drive them to take action, and (2) marketing is making the world know about your product/service and convincing them to buy. He emphasizes two linked ideas — being convincing and creating eagerness — and gives a four-word checklist to guide all marketing copy: compelling, action, convincing, eager. Practical advice includes putting a clear call to action on every page, offering constrained choices when scheduling, listening more than talking in sales, and avoiding self-focused "product puke."
So what is marketing? So let me give you a couple of examples of marketing so you can write these down. Here's two definitions of marketing. Two definitions of marketing. So marketing is having compelling materials and tools. Marketing is having compelling materials and tools that assist a prospect and drive them forward to taking action. Let me read that for you again. Marketing is having compelling materials and tools that assist a prospect and drive them forward to taking action. What are the two key words in that definition? Sorry? Prospect. Prospect. Come on, Deborah, what do you think? Assist. Assist. What else? Action is, of course, one of the most important. What's the most important word before that? Compelling. Absolutely compelling. Want me to read it one more time? Sure. Marketing is having compelling materials and tools that assist a prospect and drive them forward to taking action. So here it is. The two key words are compelling and action. Compelling to who? To the reader or the viewer if it's on a. Or the viewer if it's on a video, whatever it might be. Action is always a call to action. So understanding that, really what you really want is that everything you write needs to be compelling to the person who's reading it. How do we write most things, though? We talk about ourselves, how fantastic we are. I've got a PhD in this and been in business for 40 years, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How does that benefit me as a client? At make youe Mark, we call that when you write all about yourself and that's all you write about, product puke. It is. It's like puking on your clients. And it's a great analogy because people go, oh, well, just think when somebody asks you, so, Gordon, what do you do? And he doesn't shut up. That's puking on somebody. What he should be doing is saying, this is what I do in maybe two or three sentences. So, Colin, what do you do? Force it back to me. Because remember, in sales, the one who's doing all the talking is not in control of the situation. The one who's doing the listening is in control of the full communication. The sad part is most sales people don't know that the one who's doing all the listening is actually in control of the communication. So compelling is very important. Your websites, your brochures, how compelling are they to the reader? Really, really important. And what Call to action. How many of you have a call to action on every page of your website? So here's call to action. People go, what you have to buy now, purchase. No, no, no. Calls to action can be very subtle. But what happens when you read A web page, and you get to the end and it doesn't tell you to do something. What do you do? Whatever you feel like doing. Clients are like children. If you give them guidance, they'll go exactly where you want them to go. What happens if you give your children no guidance? Chaos. Okay, so you want your kids, your clients to go somewhere. You ask them to go somewhere. So it might be at the end of your home page. On your home page, it might be. Click here for further information. Phone now and put the phone number. Those are calls to action. But if you don't put a call to action, people don't know what to do with the information. They'll just get to the end and look all over the page and decide to do something else. You can lead them with having a call to action on every single page, on every single page of your website, on every single page of your brochure. It can be a very subtle call to action. Phone now. For further information, use this email address. Very subtle calls to action. But you need to have calls to action. Otherwise they'll do whatever they feel like doing. So let me give you a second definition of marketing. That's the first one. There's a second one which goes hand in hand with this one. Both of them are really extremely powerful. This is a lot longer. So you can write this one down. If you can do it in shorthand, it'll be great. Is marketing is allowing the world Marketing is allowing the world to know about your product or service and convincing them to buy it. So I'll read that first sentence again. Marketing is allowing the world to know about your product or service and convincing them to buy it. It's the business activity of presenting products or services to potential customers in such a way as to make them eager to buy. So I'll read the second sentence again. Let me go through the whole thing. Marketing is allowing the world to know about your product or service, convincing them to buy it. It's the business activity of presenting products or services to potential customers in such a way as to make them eager to buy. Two key words. Eager. Everyone always gets eager. First, absolute convincing. Here we go again. Convincing to who? Convincing to the client or to the reader or the viewer. And when it comes to eager, that invokes the emotions and actions. So what are the four key words? Compelling, action, convincing, and eager. When you write any marketing materials, this is one of the simplest things you can take away from this evening. Take one page. Write those four words on those page with what I say below. It Remember, remember, convincing to the reader, compelling to the reader. Every time you write something, use those four words. Tell yourself, what I'm writing right now. Is it compelling to the reader? Does it convince them about who we are and what we do? Is there a call to action in my email? Phone me now. Most people, it's like chat to you soon. That is not a call to action. You want a call to action that is very focused, very structured. When you send out emails, how many of you, when you send out an email, oh, I was going to say to you, I'm not going to ask you a question. When you send out an email and someone says, I'd like to book an appointment with you, just send them two times and days back. That suit you? I can meet you on Friday at 3 or Monday at 4. What suits you? They'll choose one and you can fit them into your diary according to what you want. If you say choose a time and date, you'll go backwards and forwards 20 times. If you give them two choices, they'll choose one of them. If they haven't got that availability, they will. So, yeah, neither of those work for me. But it's one of the key things to do because then you can structure your diary because then you can have your commitments planned so you're not spending time going to Vancouver every single day. When you can go to Vancouver for one day and do all your appointments on the same day. That's all the way you manage your. Manage and plan your commitments. So that's marketing. Compelling action, Convincing and eager. Put those onto one page and put them up somewhere next to your computer screen on your phone. Even when you phone somebody, am I on product puke or am I talking to them about what we do and how it can benefit them? How compelling am I saying to them on the phone? What am I saying on the phone right now? How compelling is that to the person that's listening to me? Or is it just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? That's unfortunately what most of it is. How many of you realize you talk too much? Most people do in sales because we think if we talk enough, the person will buy. If we listen enough, they will tell us so much stuff about themselves, we'll have everything we need to do to close the deal.
