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Newsletter #782: The “Make It Clear” Issue

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Whenever you can make your marketing clearer for your audience, it makes it easier to understand, accept, and talk about. A few practical ways great marketers are doing it:

1> With photos
2> With emotions
3> With stories
4> Check it out: ShadyURL

1> With photos

Help make your stuff clearer to your customers by featuring photos that show customers how your products will work. Nash Motorcycle Company sells custom parts like handlebars and exhaust pipes — things that can be difficult to imagine on your bike. They overcome it by posting photos of how their customers have used their parts, making it easy for shoppers to see different applications of Nash’s custom materials on lots of different makes and models of motorcycles.

The lesson: Don’t force customers to guess how your stuff will work for them. Remove the doubt with lots of helpful photos.

Learn more: Nash Motorcycle Company

2> With emotions

Make your polls, ratings, and questionnaires clearer by offering more options. Instead of using a traditional star or number scale for readers to rate their stories, NBC has implemented emotional options. So instead of determining if a story should be three or four stars, readers are asked for their reaction to the news with options like “thrilled,” “furious,” “laughing,” and “bored.”

The lesson: Stars and numbers are often an irrelevant indicator of what the content actually is. Instead, try things like feelings and emotions to really highlight what it is.

Learn more: NBC Miami

3> With stories

You can use classic story themes, fairy tales, and characters to immediately make whatever you’re doing clearer for your audience. Teen music sensation Justin Bieber inserted a few “golden tickets” in his debut album. While he wasn’t offering Willy Wonka factory tours, he did offer recipients a private concert. The advantage of putting a twist on a classic story like Wonka is that it’s immediately relatable — everyone gets the concept. It’s easy to talk about, even if you don’t know the details.

The lesson: Putting your twist on a well-known story allows you to immediately relate whatever you’re doing to the ideas associated with it.

Learn more: MTV

4> Check it out: ShadyURL

Ever feel like your URL just isn’t suspicious or frightening enough? ShadyURL can take care of that. It adds phrases like “BEGIN-BANK-XFER” and “TAKE.TWITTER.LOGIN” to your otherwise mundane link.

Check it out: ShadyURL

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