Andrew Pritchard

Predictions for 2009

Andrew Pritchard — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:10:58 GMT

Predicting emerging trends and changes that will shape the coming year has become the fashionable thing to do. So I figured I'd try my hand.

Here then are some trends I think will affect small businesses during 2009.

1. The Economy - Turmoil and a Golden Opportunity

Well, duh! Right? Obviously the weakening economy is a major factor for businesses of all sizes and has been a concern for most of 2008. That's hardly news and hardly a prediction.

But what is news is the ever-increasing severity of the situation; a situation that looks only to worsen in 2009. And my prediction is that this will present the opportunity of a lifetime to savvy business owners.

Unemployment is rising. Spending is down across all sectors of the economy (except of course the public sector which is spending like there's no tomorrow). Credit is effectively unavailable. Balance sheets look like hell (at both the corporate and personal level). Clearly, we are in the midst of one heck of a correction.

So the situation looks frightfully bleak for 2009. Consumers will be strapped for cash, many people will be out of work, and businesses, starved of sales, will go bust. Happy New Year, everybody!

But in this calamity, there is also opportunity.

There is always business to be done. People won't stop needing things. People won't stop wanting certain things either. And with nearly 7 billion people in the world, there will still be a lot of needing and wanting.

Business has never been about "beating" the economy. Actually, the economy is largely irrelevant. It's like the field a football team plays on. Football is played against the opposing team, not against the field. Different field conditions may influence a team's strategy and tactics, but it cannot influence the outcome. Only the teams can do that. If one team wins and another loses, it is the strategies, tactics, and talent of the teams that determined the result, not the field.

Business is exactly the same. A business succeeds because it provides a needed product or service and is able to attract customers through its sales and marketing efforts. A booming economy may make life easier, but it is not the cause of the success. And a business does not go bust because of the economy. It goes bust because of its inability to beat its competitors.

With the economic tumult, it's safe to say that many businesses will not survive 2009. The good news here is that you can kiss goodbye to many of your competitors.

For the business that markets effectively, this represents an unprecedented opportunity for consolidation and, when the time comes, expansion.

The prediction is threefold:

The economy will get worse.
Many of your competitors will fold.
You will have the opportunity of a lifetime to firmly establish your business. Whether that's regionally, nationally, or even internationally is up to you.

2. Customers Will Become More Choosy

Whether your business is B2B or retail, customers are going to become more difficult to sell. Gone are the days when even large-ticket purchases were made in the blink of an eye. Your customers will (rightly) take longer to decide, and will need a lot more information and convincing of the value your product or service will provide them.

Good marketing is essential here. If you already market your business effectively, you have nothing to fear. Your target market has heard of you, your reputation is good, you deliver great value, you efficiently drum up leads and convert those leads into paying customers, and you relentlessly track all of your marketing activities to ensure they remain profitable. Keep doing what you're doing.

On the other hand, if you don't do that, the current conditions will be very rough for you until you change. Your mantra for the coming year needs to be "market effectively or die".

If you're at a loss as to where to start with overhauling your marketing, check out my earlier posts on marketing effectively and on 5 rules for great marketing.

Bottom line: customers won't throw their money around anymore. They'll only spend after careful consideration. You'll need to work harder to demonstrate the value you can provide them.

3. Online Marketing Continues to Grow

Online marketing has been growing for years. It got its first big boost when Google proved that you really could generate revenue cost-effectively through online advertising.

It's about to get another big boost.

For a great many businesses, online advertising is simply the most profitable way to advertise. And why not?

It isn't very expensive: even several dollars per click is nothing compared to the cost of running a large-scale print or TV campaign.
It's highly targeted: when advertising alongside search queries your ad is triggered by the keywords you choose.
It's easy to track: the company running the ad for you can tell you all the stats like clicks and impressions, and you can track on your website whether the click-through resulted in a conversion.

I mentioned above that your customers want value from you. Well you'll also want value from your vendors, and that is value!

With companies watching every penny they spend, existing advertisers will spend a greater proportion of their advertising dollars online while many businesses that have not yet moved their advertising online will do so.

4. The Web Becomes Truly Device Independent

The way people connect to the web has changed. It's no longer good enough to assume that they will be sitting behind a laptop or at a desk browsing your site.

Instead, they might be sitting in a park with a smart phone in hand. Or they might be at the gym using an iPod to connect. In short, they could be just about anywhere, and pretty soon they could be using just about anything to browse the web.

The list of web-enabled devices is large and growing. Cell phones, iPods, game consoles (Xbox and the Wii), radios, Blu-Ray, DVRs, and even refrigerators and cars are all being given the ability to connect.

For small businesses this means ensuring that your website works on these new devices and that, just as importantly, people are able to do what you need them to on the site.

For example, if your site uses dropdown menus in the navigation, and ordinarily those dropdown menus are triggered by hovering the mouse pointer over the navigation button, you'll need to be aware that devices like smart phones may not be able to complete the task. They can click a link, but they can't hover over a button to trigger the drop down. So you'd better have another way for the user to get where they need to go, and it had better be easy and intuitive or you'll have just lost the visitor.

5. Social Networking Becomes Mainstream

Okay, social networking already is pretty mainstream. Let's face it, every teenager in the country has a MySpace page, and even my aunt is on Facebook. But I'm talking mainstream for small businesses.

Right now, social networking for small businesses is still pretty cutting edge. How many of your competitors use Twitter? How many have a Facebook account? How many have a blog? Probably very few, if any. That's going to change next year.

The trick for businesses will be to embrace this new medium effectively. Social networking is a great tool for building, maintaining, and strengthening relationships with people. It's not an open invitation to spam your network with a hard sell.

Overall

So that's it! My top five predictions for 2009.

It's going to be a tough year for many people, but with the right business approach it could also be your breakout year.

But that's next year. For now, relax, enjoy the holidays, and be sure to toast yourself and your continued success in 2009.

Happy holidays!

Simple Tips for Creating a Brochure

Andrew Pritchard — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:12:49 GMT

Brochures are essential sales and marketing tools.

Even in today's increasingly digital world, printed collateral such as brochures and catalogs play a vital role in marketing your products and services. And although you may be doing more and more online marketing, no small business should go totally paperless just yet.

So how do you create a brochure? Whether you're doing it yourself or hiring some outside help, here are some tips to help you create a winning brochure from the first printing.

Planning Your Brochure

What is your message? What is your main point? What do you want readers to walk away with? What action should they take? Creating a brochure is easier if you never forget what your purpose is.

Identify your target audience and speak directly to them. Never try to address everyone. “Everyone” is not a target audience.

Always include a compelling call-to-action. Make your call-to-action enticing, simple, and (if possible) utterly risk-free. The response you desire should be as painless as possible for your reader.

You don’t have to get it “right” the first time. Your plan should allow for the testing of different elements in the brochure (such as headlines, pictures, calls-to-action, etc.) to see what works.

The first thing to test is your main headline. Next you should test your subheadings and your call-to-action. Test different pictures and captions. Finally, test changes in your body copy.

Don't plan to print massive quantities of your “version one” brochure. Start with a small print-run so that you can do some testing. Only print large quantities of a brochure once you know it works. Try to avoid printing more than a six-month supply of brochures so that you can continue to make improvements.

Getting Your Brochure Started

Avoid “perfection paralysis.” Just start writing. Don’t try to be perfect right from the first draft. A passable effort today is usually better than near-perfect next month. You can always come back and perfect it later.

Say to yourself, “I won’t use the first four paragraphs I write, but I’ll write them anyway and see where they lead. Maybe by the fifth paragraph I’ll have something worth keeping.”

If you’re stuck writing your opening, then skip it and start writing in the middle.

Pretend you’re being interviewed about why your product or service has been such a runaway success. Answer questions such as “where did the inspiration for this service come from?” or “why do you think it has been so popular?”

Pretend you’re writing to friends about it. Enthusiastically explain to them why it’s so great.

Writing Your Brochure

Always include a meaningful headline. Your headline should clearly communicate the message you want your reader to take away. Your headline should contain your main point so that even if the reader reads nothing else, they will get the gist of what you are about.

Don’t try to be funny, cute, clever, or abstract with your headline. Don’t expect a reader to read your body copy simply to ‘get’ the joke or cleverness in the headline. They won’t. They will only read if your headline interests them sufficiently.

On average, five times as many people will read your headline as will read your body copy. Therefore your headline had better say something meaningful.

Don’t feel compelled to keep your headline short. Long headlines (even headlines of 15 words or more) can be very effective.

Tell the whole story in your writing. Be concise, but tell the whole story. Your writing can never be too long, only too boring.

Write your body copy in plain English. Pretend you’re explaining your message to a friend. Use the simplest language possible. Avoid jargon. Never use pompous, highfalutin language. Never write in “marketingese.”

Keep your opening paragraph short. It should be three lines or less. Longer opening paragraphs tend to frighten readers away.

Use terse, pithy copy. Avoid long sentences.

Use subheadings liberally. Subheads break up long copy and help draw a reader through the text. Ideally, a reader should be able to get a good grasp of your message by reading only the headings and subheadings.

The style of the writing should not draw attention to itself. Avoid flowery, overly-stylized writing.

Brochure Design

Content is more important than design. Nobody has ever bought anything solely because an ad or brochure looked good.

Design, however, is not unimportant. Lay out your brochure neatly, cleanly, and professionally. The design should draw the reader in and ease the process of reading. The design, however, should never draw attention to itself and it should never make your brochure even slightly harder to read.

Avoid the temptation to place your company name and logo front-and-center on your brochure. Your headline should dominate the front of the brochure. Your name and logo should be prominent, but not dominant. Place it at the bottom of the front cover.

Use pictures that have meaning. Always include a caption under the picture.

A drop cap in the opening paragraph can help to draw the reader into the copy.

Use an absolute maximum of three different fonts throughout. Any more starts to become “font soup.”

Need Help with Your Brochure?

Inspire Consulting can help your business create a winning brochure. If you need some assistance implementing any of these suggestions, contact us today.

5 Rules for Great Marketing

Andrew Pritchard — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:15:15 GMT

Does your business have all the customers it needs? Does it have a potent marketing system that reliably goes out into the marketplace and brings in profitable business?

Most businesses don't.

But marketing effectively isn't that hard, and it's not that complicated. It just takes a little bit of discipline and consistent adherence to some basic rules.

If your business is struggling to bring in customers, or if you're just looking to give your sales a boost, review all of your marketing materials and make sure they follow some basic fundamentals.

Here are a few things to pay close attention to:

1. It's All About the Customer

You must start thinking about things from your customer's point of view.

Most businesses focus on themselves. This is a mistake. Forget about your business, your products and services, and what you need from your prospect. Instead, approach everything from the standpoint of your customer.

Start focusing on your prospective customer, show them how you can help them, and fully explain how they'll benefit from working with you.

2. Response is King

You must ask for a response in every marketing activity you do. If you don't get a good response, change your approach.

Whether the desired response is the completion of a sale or simply a request for more information, you must make this response as straightforward and as enticing as possible for your prospects.

You must ask for response on your website, in your advertisements, and in your mailers. When meeting people for the first time, have something for them to do such as signing up for an ezine. If you're giving a speech, ask for business cards from your audience and offer to mail them a transcript of your presentation or a free report that provides additional information.

Asking for a response is one of the simplest ways to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. If one marketing method generates more response than another, you know that it is more effective and you can adjust your strategy accordingly. If another isn't pulling a response, make changes to it. Don't just hope that by repeating it unchanged it will somehow manage to generate the results you're looking for.

Let response guide your marketing. Repeat successful efforts, change unsuccessful ones, and always ask for a response so that you know which is which.

3. Make Your Offers Shamelessly Irresistible

Whatever response you ask for, the more attractive you can make it the better. In fact, a shamelessly irresistible offer is one of the best ways to generate response.

You don't need to give away the farm to make your offers attractive. All you need to do is think about things from your customer's point of view. Ask yourself objectively "If I were my customer, would I respond to this?"

You should fully explain the benefits you can deliver through your product or service so that your prospects know exactly what's in it for them. This alone will often drastically improve the results you see.

But you might go further in making your offer as irresistible as possible. An advertisement might offer a valuable, informative free report. Your website might offer a free trial. Your direct mail may include a coupon for a discount.

This is where creativity is important in marketing. Don't waste your time (and money) trying to make your advertising "creative" in the sense that most people think of the word. That is, don't waste time trying to be funny, cute, or clever. Instead, invest your time in thinking about ways that you can make your offers more enticing and in ways that you can continue to add greater value. That's creativity!

4. Repetition

Repetition in marketing is grossly misunderstood.

Most business owners think it means that they must keep hammering away with their marketing efforts, confident that once people have seen their company's message enough times, they'll start to respond.

This is complete nonsense!

You should never repeat your marketing efforts unless they're generating a profitable response for you. So the trick here is to repeat the ones that work, and make changes to the ones that don't before you attempt them again.

When it comes to marketing, never give up. Always continue to market and advertise. Just don't repeat ads or offers that fail to appeal to your customers. As we said above: Response is King!

5. Delight Your Customers

Make doing business with your company as easy and enjoyable as possible.

Offer dazzling service. Instruct your sales people to educate your prospects as much as possible, so that even if they don't buy, they've still learned a lot about the benefits of your products and services. Make sure your phone is always answered, and if you do miss a call, return it promptly.

Outstanding service is part of successful marketing. All it takes is a commitment to good service and a relentless approach to follow up.

Overall

There are scores of other things you should do in marketing your business, but if you focus on the five rules we've discussed here, you'll be way ahead of most of your competitors.

If you're not happy with the way your marketing is working for you, try incorporating even just one or two of these rules into what you're doing and your effectiveness will improve.

And as always, if you need any help putting some of this into practice in your business, contact Inspire Consulting. We'd love to help you generate a steady stream of business from your marketing efforts.

Take Dead Aim at Your Target Market

Andrew Pritchard — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:10:03 GMT

What's the single most important factor in the success of a marketing campaign?

How clever the advertisements are? How good the product or service is? The price being charged?

If you said "none of the above", then I have to agree with you. The most important factor in marketing is targeting.

You simply have to know what to sell, and to whom to sell it.

If you're selling something that doesn't appeal to the people you're speaking to, then you can forget about a good return. Regardless of how good your product is, regardless of how brilliant the advertisements are, and regardless of the price you're charging, if your targeting is off, then your whole marketing campaign will be missing the mark.

Moldy Grape Juice or Heavenly Elixir?

If I offered you a bottle of 1995 Domaine de la Romanée Conti La Tâche for $500, would you buy? For the non-oenophiles among us, the Domaine de la Romanée Conti is a producer of wine in Burgundy in France. They make some of the finest and most highly coveted wines in the world, and La Tâche is one of their finest. But at $500, would you buy?

Some people might, but many others wouldn't. And fair enough. Some would argue that no wine is worth that kind of price. Some people just don't like the taste of wine and wouldn't buy no matter how highly esteemed the wine was. And others, for whatever reason, just don't drink alcohol.

But if I make my offer to some serious wine-lovers, to people who have no problem dropping a hefty wad of cash on a great bottle, then however many bottles I have available will be gone soon. That's because a bottle of 1995 La Tâche for $500 is a steal.

But it's only a steal to the people who are interested in that sort of thing. So if I want to sell my bottles, I have to do everything I can to make my offer to people who are interested.

Targeting: The Key to Effective Marketing

So how do I get my offer in front of people who are interested? That's where targeting comes in.

If I were to advertise the bottles of wine that I wanted to sell in Car and Driver magazine, I'm sure you'd agree that I'd be wasting a lot of my advertising dollars.

I'd have a better, more targeted audience if I were to advertise in a wine-oriented publication such as Wine Spectator. This magazine's readers are obviously interested wine, and many of them are probably even interested to the extent that a mere $500 for the wine I'm pitching would have them licking their lips and dusting off the Riedel glasses.

All this stands to reason. You're obviously going to get a better response advertising high-end fine wine to an audience that is at least predisposed towards wine. But can we do better?

While Wine Spectator caters to wine-lovers, not all of them will be sufficiently loaded to seriously contemplate dropping that kind of moolah on a single bottle of wine. In other words, I'll be paying for the privilege of advertising to Wine Spectator's millions of readers, when all I really want to do is advertise to the five percent or so who are likely to be interested in my offer.

With Car and Driver I was way off-target. Wine Spectator is on-target, but I'm using a shotgun. To get the most bang for my buck, I want to find a way to put my offer only in front of people likely to be interested. I want to use a rifle to hit my target and nothing but my target.

There are several ways I could do this. Obviously if there were a publication geared more specifically to wine-collectors, that would be a good place to advertise.

Another excellent alternative would be to send a mailing to my existing customers. I could search through my customer database and select only those customers whose buying-history indicated an interest in the wines on sale, and send the mailing to them. If I didn't have a large customer list, I could find additional prospects by arranging for access to a related business' customer list. In this case, a company specializing in wine cellar installation might be a good choice.

As you can see, the mailing would be going out to a very select group of people. By zeroing in on my target market, I can get the results I need much more cost-effectively than if I either failed to target altogether, or took the shotgun approach.

And that's really all there is to it. The more you can target your offer, the better your response will be.

How to Target Your Marketing

As you can see, the concept of targeting is pretty simple. Take your product or service and offer it to people who are likely to be interested. But there are a few things you'll want to keep in mind.

Narrow Your Niche

I don't care what you sell; your market is smaller than you think. A large percentage of the population owns a car, but a much smaller percentage is in the market for a new car this month. Many people use an accountant, but far fewer are looking to switch accountants.

If you blast away with the shotgun approach and try to hit everyone, you won't like the results.

You might argue that even if people aren't in the market yet, you should still try to expose them to your advertisements so that when they are, your company's name will be at the top of their minds. This is a really dangerous approach for a small business to take for several reasons.

The response to your advertisements (if there even is any) won't be immediate and will be much more difficult to track. You'll therefore have a much harder time determining whether the advertisement is working for you or not. Anytime you can't tell if your money is well-spent, you're dicing with death.
The investment required to effectively achieve top-of-mind awareness is usually enormous. There are cheaper ways to get good results.
People are really good at ignoring advertising. When an advertisement does finally get their attention, it's frequently because the advertisement is selling something that will be of immediate benefit to them. In other words, good luck getting them to pay attention to your advertisements and remember your name when they aren't even interested in what you're selling yet.

To avoid these problems, do yourself a favor and take dead aim at a much smaller target by narrowing your niche.

In the above example, we went from advertising a wine to millions of Wine Spectator readers, to sending out a mailing to only those people whose buying-history demonstrated an interest in the specific wine we were pitching. We went from everyone interested in wine to only those interested in high-end red Burgundy. That's a much smaller niche!

The accountant mentioned above might market to people who are unhappy with their current accountant for one specific reason. Alternatively, she might narrow her niche by marketing directly to one specific type of customer, such as dentists.

Narrowing your niche doesn't mean that you won't also do business with customers outside that niche, it just means that a given marketing campaign or an individual advertisement might not be aimed directly at them. Instead, your marketing takes dead aim at a much more specific target that is a whole lot easier to hit.

Determine Your Ideal Customer

One of the best ways to get your marketing aimed at a smaller target is to identify your ideal customer and market only to prospects that fit that profile.

This is actually one of the healthiest things you can do for your business. We all end up doing business with customers who are not ideal. In many cases we do business with customers who are far from ideal. These customers are often difficult to deal with, unprofitable, and extremely hard to please.

Now imagine an influx of your ideal customers. More angels who always pay their bills on time, who revere the work you do for them, and who provide word-of-mouth recommendations frequently. Wouldn't that help your business?

If you don't know what your ideal customer looks like, think about which of your current customers are most profitable. With whom do you most enjoy doing business? Who can benefit most from your product or service? It shouldn't take long to form a picture of your perfect client.

Putting It into Practice

Start taking dead aim with your marketing today. Here are some suggestions:

Targeting Your Website

Review the content on your website. Are you addressing everyone or are you zeroed in on your target market?
Make some changes to your pay-per-click advertising. Don't just use the same advertisement for everyone. Instead, create different advertisements for the different types of prospect you're targeting.
Experiment with different landing pages. Landing pages are the pages that people who click on your advertisements are taken to. You should create targeted landing pages for each type of prospect in your target market.

Targeting Your Print Advertising

Don't run the same advertisement everywhere. If you're targeting different types of customer, create an advertisement that addresses each customer type directly and then do everything you can to get the advertisement in front of the prospect it's targeted on.
If your advertisements reference your website, you might consider setting up different landing pages for the different versions of your advertisements. Doing so would enable your prospects to continue experiencing highly-targeted communication.
Experiment with different publications. One publication might have a smaller circulation, but it could be much more targeted for your advertising.

Targeting Your Direct Mail

Break your mailing list into segments based on demographics such as the type and size of business or the income level of the household. Any actual buying-history data should also be factored in. You can then target your mailings based on these factors. If your offer is likely to appeal to customers who have purchased a specific product before, you can extract those names from the list and send the offer only to them.
Establish relationships with non-competing, but related businesses and get permission to market to their clients. In the wine example above, I suggested building a mailing list by gaining access to the customer database of a wine cellar installation firm. If you can arrange for a letter from the other company introducing you (and recommending you) your response will soar. Just be sure you've agreed details such as a commission on any sales and what happens to the list after the campaign is over. Typically you'll get to keep any customers who respond to your mailing, but the master list stays with the other business.
If you direct people to the website for more information, don't let the targeting stop with your letter. Create mailing-specific landing pages so that prospects continue to experience highly targeted communication.

Need Help?

Inspire Consulting can help your business take dead aim at its target market. If you need help planning your marketing strategy or assistance implementing any of these suggestions, contact us today.

Should You Sell the Sizzle or the Steak?

Andrew Pritchard — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:09:12 GMT

We've all heard the expression "Sell the sizzle, not the steak", but which one does your business try to sell? Which one should you sell?

For starters, this is a horrible analogy. In fact, it's not really an analogy. Analogies require equivalence or parallelism. Were we to draw parallels between the expression and selling, then sizzle would correlate more directly to hype. After all, have you ever really bought a steak because of its sizzle? More likely, you bought it because of its mouthwatering aroma, its tender texture, or its succulent taste.

Of course, I'm being overly pedantic here, and I do know that the analogy is not intended to be taken literally. By "sizzle" most marketers are referring to the benefits and results your product or service provides. The problem is sizzle itself is not a benefit. Sizzle is not a full stomach or a delicious meal. Sizzle is irrelevant and meaningless. One steak doesn't sizzle any differently than another, or any differently from bacon for that matter.

Am I being too literal? Maybe, but the trouble is that many people do take the analogy literally, and as a result they think that there is some magic to the sales process. They think that if you don't have catchy, urbane one-liners or slick sales patter then, as a salesperson, you're fried. They think that selling involves trickery or deceit. In short, they get so caught up trying to sell something so intangible and irrelevant as sizzle that they lose sight of how easy selling can be.

Translating the weak analogy into plain English, the expression states that you should sell the benefits of the product, not the product itself. And I'll certainly concede that that's pretty good advice.

The trouble is it's an oversimplification of the issue. Benefits are great. Benefits will attract attention. Benefits answer the all-important question of "What's in it for me?" But benefits raise questions too.

For example, your service might include a 100%, money-back guarantee. You'll attract a lot of attention with a benefit like this, but prospects will immediately have questions. How does the guarantee work? What conditions are attached? What would void the guarantee? If I request a refund, will I lose all the work that we've done together? Your sales and marketing materials better follow up pretty quickly with some explanations or many prospects will dismiss your benefits as outlandish claims and hype.

Regardless of what you're selling, in order to sell effectively, you have to sell both the sizzle and the steak in combination. The sizzle (or benefits) will help you get attention; the steak (or the product as it relates to the benefits) will help you keep it.

Now, at no point am I saying bore your prospects to tears with endless feature lists and technical specifications, but please don't focus myopically on only one element of the sales equation.

Prospects need education before they will buy. They need to know that they are making a good choice in buying from you and not your competition. They need to be able to justify their purchase to themselves. By talking about benefits you will help them do this, but to really seal the deal, you'll need to explain the reasons why all these benefits are possible. You'll need to demonstrate the connection between your product or service and those benefits. Doing so adds to the credibility of your offer and makes it significantly more appealing to your prospects.

Putting it into practice

For example, suppose you own a company that produces a revolutionary new kind of insulation that significantly reduces the amount of temperature transfer. You could use a headline like this in your marketing materials:

Do you need new insulation?

Such a headline, however, will probably fail to produce a significant response for a number of reasons. One of the main ones is that it fails to mention a benefit. Your prospects would have no way of knowing what's in it for them based on this headline alone. Some persuasive copy following this headline might lift the response a little, but many prospects won't even get that far. Whether it's a website or a brochure, people won't take long to make up their mind whether or not they'll continue reading.

On the other hand, a headline such as this might work better:

Save 40% on your heating costs

This time we're stating a benefit loud and clear. Who wouldn't be interested in this? Doesn't everyone want to cut their energy bills by as much as possible? But this is not enough on its own. Our headline may have captured a large number of people's attention, but we can lose their attention just as quickly if we don't answer their next question: How?

If revolutionizing insulation technology were your business, you'd know a lot about how your product could save people money on their heating bill. It might have something to do with the polymers used and the way you weave the material together in several layers. Chances are the full explanation would be pretty complex. The trick is to explain the how as fully as possible without getting overly technical. To do this, always keep in mind the benefit you are trying to explain and make everything you write relate directly to it.

For example, you might follow on from the headline with:

"When you insulate your home with Thermalize insulation, you'll save at least 40% on your energy bills. Thermalize is made from a revolutionary new material that is woven together in a patented process allowing it to trap the heat in your house and lock the cold out."

Here we describe some of the details of the product, but in a way that explains how we can make the benefit happen. In this example, we're using both the sizzle and the steak to make the offer more credible and ultimately more compelling.

Sizzle or steak?

So, should you sell the sizzle or the steak? Well, if you want your business to sell effectively, you should sell both. Attract attention by clearly stating the benefits of your offer, and then maintain and build interest by demonstrating the connection between your product and the benefits you're touting. Definitely sell the sizzle, but don't let marketing clichés make you afraid of telling people what it is that's sizzling away on the grill.