Archive for Brain Based Content Marketing – Page 3

What Are Your Target Audience’s 5 Top Web Sites?

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

If you want to create content that engages readers, you have to know their online habits and interests. Yet how many of us scramble to post on a blog or upload a  video to YouTube without taking time to survey our target audience?

Here’s a quick list of survey questions for your target audience:

  1. What are the five top web sites you visit frequently in your work?
  2. What are your online reading habits, blogs, websites, articles, videos, podcasts?
  3. Do you use social media like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn?
  4. Do you access web content via RSS feeds?
  5. Subscribe to e-newsletter and blogs?
  6. Do you read web content from a smartphone?

You have about eight seconds to engage someone before they click away. Clever headlines will get them to click over to your content. But unless you know what your audience wants, you’re shooting in the dark. They won’t stay. Click and bye-bye.

Good content builds momentum and always has an objective, according to Ann Handley and CC Chapman in their book Content Rules. Therefore your content needs to trigger to action. That’s the way you engage readers to respond. Your content should be created with the end in mind: to further a relationship. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing
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Content Marketing Challenge: What to Write?

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

A survey of more than 1,000 businesses this past Spring found that “producing engaging content” is the top challenge for people charged with marketing. The Content Marketing Institute published these results here:

When 36% of marketers struggle with producing engaging content and another 21% with coming up with enough engaging content, well over half of content marketing challenges involves what to say or write.

Many of the small business clients I consult with have this problem. They spend a nice sum on a good-looking website designed only to find that it’s delivered with “lorem ipsom” text as a place holder for content.

What do they write to replace the lorem ipsom? Of course it’s all about their company products and services, why wouldn’t it be? It’s their website and people want to know what they do.

Yes, except for the fact that people are bored, in a hurry, and completely focused on themselves. Web visitors only want to know what you’ll do for them, and if you are unique, amusing, shocking or outrageous they’ll stay and read your pages.

Only the problem is, if you’re in a field like leadership development or executive coaching, or a serious provider of any kind of services, you can’t grab readers’ attention by being rude like some of the videos on YouTube…

Here are three things the brain can’t ignore, to keep in mind when you create content for your home page:

  1. Novelty
  2. Human faces and eye contact
  3. Promise of rewards and satisfaction of desires

Can you see how hard this might be when you’re selling serious products and services? Let’s take life insurance, for example. Novel? No, not really. But wait a minute. The Aflac Duck is a very novel way to attract attention. The trick is tying it into what your staid company does for people.

The Aflac Duck story is brilliant branding. It contains three of the elements required for marketing to get actionable results:

  1. Attention
  2. Emotional response
  3. Memorable

What can coaches and consultants do then, to provide content that grabs readers’ attention in a way that makes an impact?

That’s right, you guessed. Tell engaging stories of real people with real problems and how you can help.

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing

Content Marketing Tasks: Practice Makes Progress

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, December 13th, 2010

If you’ve spent your career avoiding certain marketing tasks because you don’t think you’re any good at them, you struggle each time you try, and you end up with weak results, take heart. Persistence has been touted by poets for a reason.

Your brain learns a lot each time you try something, even if you fail. If you stop trying, you’ll walk away with nothing. If you persist, however, the rewards are huge.

Example: public speaking. Many small business owners and entrepreneurs including many of my clients love getting the chance to get up and speak. The larger the group, the better. In my experience, they are extroverts. They love people and love conversations.

On the other hand, they usually don’t like writing. (Which is why they are my clients… they need content and they need to publish on the web – blogs, e-newsletters, ebooks, etc.)

Other people tend to focus their online marketing on content; they write books and they publish blogs and newsletters… and they hate speaking. They would rather have a root canal than deliver even a 3 minute elevator speech at a networking event. Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Writing Speeches
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Emotional Marketing Makes Memories

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010

If you want your content marketing messages to be remembered, you must engage the emotional memories of your readers. Memory formation happens in two ways:

  1. A new memory is formed when it hits the amygdala and makes an emotional connection.
  2. A stimulus may hit the amygdala and be assimilated because it resembles a previously established emotional connection.

What results is a neural network of recalled associations that gets triggered by a memory of a hot-button stimulus. Everything we retain in memory is because it’s gained an emotional place in our brain. At some point, something was important enough because it was emotional. That’s what hot-buttons are… we feel as if someone has poked us.

What can you do to stimulate memory formation? Make an emotional impact.

How? As a content marketing professional, you have words and visuals in your quiver of tools. How do you poke someone and push their hot buttons?

Stories are key. Negative stories can get people’s attention, but can also leave a negative aftertaste, if not followed by positive stories. I’ve talked about this before:

► Grab the audience’s attention ► Stimulate desire ► Reinforce with reasons

What else can you do to poke someone’s hot buttons? How else do you make an emotional impact? Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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7 Mistakes Speakers Make with Presentations

By Patsi Krakoff
Monday, November 29th, 2010

We’ve often heard the brain can only hold seven things in mind. The brain research behind this is valid, and in everyday life we experience it with 7-digit phone numbers.

This week in Las Vegas, at Chris Farrell’s and Mike Filsaime’s Affiliatedotcom.com event, many speakers presented “7 Steps” to better internet marketing. But I think there’s a perception that an audience will listen and remember 7 things from a presentation which is wrong.

What’s true for phone numbers isn’t true for concepts.

Try 3-4 things instead. There’s no way anyone can  remember seven tips from a presentation. No way. Especially when there are 6-7 other speakers on the podium per day, over two days.

Let’s get real, folks. The other things is, that to be effective, you need to repeat your message several times. Now some of the speakers were able to do this, even in spite of having 7  tips. But that makes for a lot of repeating and it’s still not going to be remembered.

But with 3 things, yes, you can drill them home. 1-2-3. Repeat at least 7 times, and you’ve got a message that will be remembered and associated with your name.

The more I think about this, this “rule of 3” should also apply to other content you publish and communicate: newsletters, blogs, white papers, ebooks, etc.

Especially in this era of information overload, we need to become more aware and considerate of our target audiences’ capacity to receive and retain messages. Only 3 main points or steps to your solutions. Not 7. Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Persuasion, Writing Speeches
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Neuromarketing and How Content Marketing Works

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

What are 3 ways to frustrated your reader’s brains? Last week, I presented a speech at the 5th International Customer Media Congress in Haarlem, The Netherlands. Besides sharing what neuromarketing is teaching us about the brain and marketing, there are tips here for most web-based content publications.

I hope you enjoy it and learn something. Let me know if you have questions…

Categories : About Blogs, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, On Writing Better, Online Persuasion
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Print Consumer Magazines Score Big in Europe

By Patsi Krakoff
Thursday, November 18th, 2010

Print magazines are alive and well, but they’re in transition. The ones that are thriving are customer magazines, designed to be helpful and relevant to consumers while delivering marketing messages and building brand loyalty.

Yesterday I led a workshop in the Netherlands at Media Partners Group. They specialize in both Dutch and English language publications for large companies, like Shell Oil and Heineken Beer, among others. Here’s the way they describe themselves:

MediaPartners Group inspires with text and images. We build relationships, stimulate sales and promote loyalty. We reach clients or employees by performing the unexpected, but without being creative for creativity’s sake.

Our dedicated team of specialists in the areas of strategy, design, content, copy, account and project management provide clients with sponsored magazines, web design, direct marketing solutions, in store communications, advertising and loyalty programmes for internal and external target groups.

As almost everywhere in Holland, professional people all speak English. There were several staff members from the UK, which is why they are able to create high quality communications for huge global corporations. The other reasons are because they are a group of talented smart people who love their work. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Persuasion
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Customer Media Congress: Patsi’s in Dutch…

By Patsi Krakoff
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

There aren’t many conferences that I’d fly 5700 miles to get to, but the 5th International Customer Media Congress looks as if it’s going to be another smash hit. I’ve been invited to speak, by uber-publishing-content-marketing icon, Sak van den Boom.

Somewhow in my family it meant you were in real trouble when you were “in dutch…”

Patsi Krakoff keynote speaker op 7 november: een effectieve tekst raakt je onderbewuste

Met wat voor tekst scoor je nu het beste op het web. Internetguru Patsi Krakoff uit Mexico blogt dagelijks en heeft wereldwijd veel volgers. Ze komt speciaal voor het jubleumcongres naar Haarlem om haar kennis te delen. 11 topvrouwen in marketing en communicatie op het netwerkcongres over customer media in de Philharmonie in Haarlem. Verzeker jezelf van een plaats. Schrijf nu in.

I don’t suppose I’ll see you there, but consider yourself invited. Here’s the line-up: 11 top notch experts in creating content that engages the hearts and minds of customers through custom publishing. Who says print is dying? Read More→

Categories : Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, In the News..., Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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Content Marketing Tips: The Brain Runs the Show

By Patsi Krakoff
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

If you’re going to create content that grabs readers’ attention, sparks emotional engagement, and gets them to take action, you need to know what makes people tick. Although traditionally the heart is referred to as “the ticker,” it’s the brain that runs the show.

Your brain:

  • Occupies 2-3% of your body space
  • Is a small organ of 1,500 cubic centimeters
  • Weighs 6 kilograms
  • Contains 100 billion cells
  • Houses 1 million kilometers of interconnecting fiber
  • Uses up 20% of your body’s energy supply of glucose

This last tidbit of information is key. Although it’s a small organ, it is a huge consumer of energy. The way it conserves energy is by going on automatic pilot, similar to the way Kindle and laptops go into sleep mode.

This is why the brain prefers to not have to think. If it can rely on the subconscious parts of the brain, it will, because this part decides without thinking, using intuition. It doesn’t have to use up precious energy reserves.

Your brain is responsible for a huge number of functions:

  1. Sensory perceptions
  2. Interpretations, assigning meaning
  3. Emotions
  4. Memory
  5. Bodily movements, both autonomic and voluntary
  6. Motivations, drive
  7. Planning, goal setting
  8. Imagining, anticipating
  9. Speaking, communicating
  10. Innovations, creativity
  11. Decisions, both conscious and subconscious, both logically and irrationally

Feelings Come  First

The emotional parts of the brain are larger than the rational part. Feelings come first, and are processed five times more rapidly in the subconscious brain than in the conscious, thinking brain. Read More→

Categories : Attracting Clients, Brain Based Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Persuasion
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