Any marketing without motivating your target audience to action is a waste of your time and money. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about your business blog, your web site, a postcard mailing, or even an expensive magazine or television ad. Directing people to take specific action, and then getting them to take that action is all that counts for effective marketing. Cute, catchy, or funny is for losers. (People who want to lose money that is.)

Here’s a perfect example of how NOT market.

The other night I was watching a recording of CSI on my DVR. At one point as I was jumping forward through commercials, I saw a beautiful scene that caught my eye. I backed up to watch the entire commercial. (On a digital recording! Go figure, since the whole reason for using a DVR to begin with is to save time not watching commercials. But some commercials are just plain entertaining.)

Now you might think, “that must’ve been a pretty powerful commercial.” But, that would depend on your goal as a business owner or marketer. As a viewer, the ad was a visual delight. But from a marketing standpoint, it was painful to watch. Here’s how it went…

There were gorgeous snowcapped Colorado Mountains in the background with rolling fields in the valley below. A thunderous sound became louder and louder as the cameras panned across to focus in on a herd of wild mustangs galloping across a field.

All of a sudden the herd comes to a screeching stop and all the horses turn to stare off to the side. The cameras pan again and there is what caused them to stop dead in their tracks. A glistening black 4×4 truck with a man working nearby. The man smiles at the mustangs, turns toward his truck, back towards the mustangs and they rear up and gallop on. Wow, impressive! This truck can get a herd of mustangs to stop and stare.

Was it entertaining? Yes. Visually stimulating? Sure, if the awesome Rocky Mountains are something you find appealing. But does any of that motivate you as the viewer to take action right then and there while you’re emotionally charged… if you even are? For 99,999 out of 100,000 people — they’re not going to take any action after watching that advertisement!

Now maybe a big Fortune 500 company with tens of millions of dollars in their advertising budget can afford that sort of creative license and still not get someone to take immediate action. But I bet you couldn’t afford that luxury. Am I right?

I shared this experience with you because it’s the perfect lead-in to the eleventh law in this series on Marketing With Business Blogs.

Law # 11. Direct response marketing is the ONLY marketing you want to invest in

Off-line and online. Marketing in a magazine or on the Web. In a press release or a postcard. In every sales letter and occasionally in posts on your business blog. The only thing that matters, and all you should focus on is — getting your prospects or clients to respond by taking some type of action.

What that action is will depend on what you’re trying to achieve

If your goal is to generate leads and build a list of prospects that you can help with your product or service, you’ll want a you’ll want the person to join your newsletter or request a free report that you’ve created for them. Or maybe you want a prospect to call immediately to make an appointment for a consultation.

If your product or service lends itself to single-step selling, you’ll want them to place an order right then and there. If it’s publicity you’re after, you’ll want to time your press releases with the extensive media coverage of a challenging situation by the media. A challenging situation your product or service helps solve.

No matter what response you’re looking for, you must always remember that you want a prospect to take some action step on the spot.

Two reasons why you MUST demand that your marketing motivate prospects to action

Reason #1. Action that can be directly attributed to one of your marketing channels is the only way can determine the effectiveness of that channel in reaching your target audience. To be as successful as possible with your marketing, it’s essential to be able to test and know precisely how well or how poorly each of your efforts performed. Getting prospects to take action is the only way to measure this.

It’s not enough to know that your sales are up over the same period from the previous year. You must know specifically why they’re up.

· Which specific marketing channels and strategies are superstars?
· Which are breakeven on ROI?
· Which are slugs draining cash, tim, and energy away from your business?

Without this critical information, you’ll continue to dump your hard earned cash into worthless marketing efforts. And without this feedback you won’t know how to improve your business blogging, web site structure, or any of your off-line marketing.

Reason #2.In today’s jaded and overcrowded marketplace you must build relationships with your prospects and clients. You want to learn more about their needs, develop trust, build rapport and prove to them you have their best interest at heart. How can you do that if you never communicate with them? The fact is — you can’t. But when a prospect responds by joining your list or calling your office — you have that chance.

From my earlier story about the television commercial, you may get the impression that I think emotions and “intangibles” have nothing to do with outstanding advertising and result-generating marketing. Nothing could be further from the truth!

The power of emotion to influence and motivate

Drawing emotion out of your prospects and using it to motivate your prospects to action is a crucial component of successful marketing. This is the way ALL people buy — based on their emotional needs. (Yes that’s right, even if you think you’re being logical, a motions are at the root of the decision.)

In the multimedia coaching course Marketing with Business Blogs we go into detail on harnessing the power of emotions, along with other proven strategies to motivate people to take action. You can use that course to get a huge jumpstart integrating business blogging into your overall marketing strategy. Or if you’d like to try and get going on your own — here are some general guidelines you can put into use to supercharge your marketing efforts, both online and off-line.

Two marketing rules that will give you rock solid results

These two simple rules, when put into practice, will assure that every marketing effort you choose to invest in from here on out will give you solid results and business boosting action on the part of prospects and clients.

Rule #1. Each and every one of your marketing efforts must be completely measurable.

Measurable means your marketing efforts cause prospects or clients take some kind of action based on your marketing. Measuring and improving the results of your marketing methods will allow you to cut your costs significantly while getting much better results for every dollar you invest.

Rule #2. To get the maximum ROI on every marketing effort, you must constantly eliminate dead weight.

If a marketing strategy doesn’t generate action — modify it and test again. Test one ad against another. Try one style of business blogging against another. Monitor results, modify your approach, and when you have enough data — drop the dead weight and focus on what’s working better. If you’re not measuring results, you’re wasting your own marketing dollars.

Remember that your marketing goal — whether with business blogs, your web site, a postcard mailing, or more expensive off-line strategies – is to motivate and influence your target audience to take action! Directing people to take specific action, and then getting them to take that action is all that counts. Keep this in mind and you’ll succeed where so many other business owners fail.

In the final installment of the 12 Laws of Marketing With Business Blogs series, we’ll wrap things up with a deceptively simple principle that has an unsurpassed power to give you a leadership position in your niche, industry, or profession.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.