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Yep - he's in marketing too

Over the last few days I've been talking about marketing. You may have thought that I was talking about words but you would be mistaken because what I was really talking about was how to sell things. It just so happens that to sell something effectively you need words.

I started off by talking about power words and the power that they can bring to your sales pitches. Then yesterday I talked about headlines and integrating power words into those headlines.

Newspapers use headlines to sell papers - marketers use headlines to attract potential customers and get them interested in the products the marketers want to sell. Perhaps headlines are more important here in adult, where so many people think that it's all about impulse, than anywhere else.

So yesterday I gave you some examples of very bad and very boring headlines as well as a few that were somewhat more appealing from a marketing perspective. And just to refresh your memory here are two more headlines to compare and contrast.

5 Tools for Spying on Your Competition

Have You Been Stumbling in the Darkness of Internet Marketing? Now There is a New Service to be Launched to Help Average Man or Woman to Succeed in Online Business

Once again I have to say that both of those headlines are re-produced exactly as they appeared in my email box.

Now remembering that the headline is what attracts people to read further, and both headlines were aimed at Internet marketers, which headline would encourage you to read further?

Obviously the short headline is always going to be read more often than the short story that's masquerading as a headline. The short headline immediately arouses interest and draws people in. It hints at something a little sneaky and maybe even underhanded that can give you the edge over your competitors and that will guarantee that almost everyone who reads the headline will want to go on and read what follows.

If you did see that headline come through your email and you read what followed you may have been a little disappointed because what followed was rather bland and talked about using simple search tools and Google Alerts that most of us already use.

So what do you do to ensure that your readers aren't disappointed by what follows your hard hitting headline?

Well that's where my father comes into the equation. If you saw him on the street you could easily confuse him with Uncle Festus from the Adams Family but in real life he is a very switched on marketer who manages a large department store in a busy mall.

While it's not part of his job description, and not something that any other manager in the chain of stores he works for does, you will often find him out the front of the store with the latest store catalogue in hand. And he's there to talk to passers-by who stop to look in the windows.

When he sees someone looking at a product that's on display he approaches them and starts telling them what the benefits of owning that product would be for them. Steve and he often joke about just how much he can sell before the customer has even entered the store but it's a fact - he can and does make sales before people have even stepped through the front door.

And he does it by focusing on what the benefits of owning a product might be rather than trying to sell something on the features. At the same time he's listening to what the people are saying and he can switch from selling one item to another in the blink of an eye. Once again, he's zooming in on the benefits and letting the features speak for themselves.

And it works; Steve and I have stood there and watched him. We've even stood there and been his target and that sales technique is very persuasive. He stresses the benefits of owning an item and somehow that appeals to the customer - suddenly they can see how it fits into their home, their life, their experience, and how it meets a need they didn't realize they had.

When I was growing up I never realized how talented my father really was but as I drifted into Internet marketing I began to see just how easy he made the art of selling look.

Fathers can teach us lots of things - even how to sell stuff.

Right now we're off to have lunch with my father and I am so pleased that he's on holidays, otherwise we would probably find ourselves buying something we hadn't realized we needed so badly.