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Communication

How to Circumvent Resistance and Stay Out of the Trash Bin

by Travis Heermann July 29, 2010 Communication
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In an age super-saturated with marketing messages, your prospects have developed such an aversion to being sold anything that you have to overcome resistance at every step. They pick up your direct mail package, see what it is… and toss it in the garbage. So you add some intriguing copy or graphics to the envelope, [...]

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How to Be a Marketing Drama Queen

by Travis Heermann July 21, 2010 Communication
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Evoking response is the primary duty of any marketing campaign. Generating more sales and revenue than the campaign cost to produce is the bottom line. Any good marketer knows that the first step is understanding the benefits of the product or service. Why should the customer care about what you’re saying? How can your widget [...]

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What Motivates Your Prospect?

by Travis Heermann July 14, 2010 Audience
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The Myers-Briggs Temperament Test is an increasingly popular way to identify what makes a person tick. The Myers-Briggs Test, originally developed in the 1950s, is now used worldwide to identify patterns of behavior and attitude. The expansion of the test’s popularity has been spurred in large part by Dr. David Keirsey, who refined and expanded [...]

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Does Your Message Make an ‘Ass’ of ‘U’ and ‘Me’?

by Travis Heermann June 29, 2010 Business Development
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Any good copywriter knows how to capture and lead the audience’s wants and capitalize on its needs, and he knows how to help the audience justify assenting to the call to action. All persuasive writing, including marketing messages, asks the audience to agree and to act based on an endless variety of specific reasons. For [...]

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3 Important Reasons to Use Lift Notes in Sales Letters

by Travis Heermann June 15, 2010 Business Development
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Lift notes, also known as lift letters, are so-called because studies have shown that they can increase the response rate of a sales letter by as much as 50%.  But what is a lift note exactly? A lift note is a short letter or note from someone other than the writer of the main sales [...]

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4 Essential Tips for Writing an Effective Letter

by Travis Heermann June 8, 2010 Audience
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Does anyone write letters anymore? We have e-mail, text messaging, social media web sites, and the soul of communicational brevity, Twitter. With all these other forms of communication, do we still need to know how to write a good letter? Whether you’re seeking employment, trying to sell widgets, or contacting business associates, now, more than [...]

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7 Attention-Grabbing Words for the 21st Century

by Travis Heermann June 1, 2010 Communication
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Culture evolves and language evolves with it. Words that worked in 1950 will not necessarily work in the 21st century. The following list of words seize the attention of your audience–whether your audience is sales prospects, potential donors, or voters–and elicit powerful internal responses with American audiences. In the direction our culture is evolving, these [...]

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Why Good Writing Doesn’t Matter

by Mistina Picciano April 29, 2010 Business Development
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When people find out I have a business writing agency, they often smile and nod. Then, invariably they tell me about their wife, nephew, fourth cousin, etc., who’s “a good writer.” What, exactly, does it mean to be a good writer?   Signs of writing competency Vivid storytelling abilities Creative, effective syntax Mastery of grammar [...]

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Do you invite clients to check out or check in?

by Mistina Picciano April 23, 2010 Audience
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My husband and I are vacationing in Charleston, S.C., next month. We’re renting a charming house across the street from Folly Beach, which looks perfect: a good-sized kitchen for culinary experiments, easy access to the beach, close proximity to historic downtown Charleston. Yesterday the homeowner emailed instructions on picking up the key. I perked up [...]

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Top 10 Writing Mistakes Part 2: Today

by Travis Heermann March 31, 2010 Communication
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In Part 1, we examined error studies of writing during three decades of the 20th Century: 1917, the late 1930s, and 1986. We found that the nature of the errors shifted slightly–even though the primary errors were with comma usage, pronouns, spelling/misused words, verb tense–but the incidence of errors held steady, at about 2.1-2.2 errors [...]

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