Could This Mistake Be Costing You Sales & Leads?

You slaved over writing an ad or sales letter, and you really thought it was going to work miracles. But then, the moment of truth comes, and your ad did poorly. You’re left wondering if it’s the economy, or the media you advertised in or if your competitors are outflanking you. Does this sound familiar?

You can’t control the economy or what your competitors or suppliers do for the most part. But you can control your advertising. And one of the single-best ways to turbo-charge your advertising is by making your ads more emotional. What do I mean by “more emotional?”

You see, there’s an old axiom in sales that goes like this, “Buying decisions are based upon emotion and backed up by logic.” This isn’t just the opinion of a bunch of grizzled old sales veterans; it’s based on Behavioral Psychology.

There are two primary reasons why you want to make your advertising more emotional. The first is because getting a human being you’ve never met before to read your ad is a feat in of itself. Most ads that are not emotional are dull and boring, consequently those ads will not sell for you.

The second reason is when you know how to get a hold of someone by his or her emotions; you can dramatically increase the probability that they will buy. So how do you do this? Start by removing jargon and complex concepts from your advertising. Try to replace most multi-syllable words with simple, one or two-syllable words. Replace left-brain, logic-oriented words with emotional words. Here are a few examples:

Replace “accelerate” with “speed up”

Replace “donate” with “give”

Replace “immediately” with “right now”

Replace “ill” with “sick”

Replace “learn” with “find out”

Replace “difficult” with “tough”

This is just a small example of words you can replace. You can also use dashes and ellipses throughout your ad for more emotional impact. Here’s an example:

“Hurry – before this sale expires at midnight.”

Another way to make your copy more emotional is by inserting stories or metaphors into them. You can also use moving pictures. You can also work to stir anger, jealousy, excitement, hope and love by the words you write.

It’s important to make what you’re selling seem exciting (emotional) but many people end up using too many exclamation marks. By using too many exclamation marks, you hurt your credibility and the value of your exclamation marks is reduced.

Don’t think that emotional advertising works only for B2C markets, it certainly works for B2B. Most people don’t realize this, so this gives you an instant advantage if you can properly make your advertising more emotional than the competition’s.

– Mike