No, I am am not suggesting you sell your cat on the internet. But if you really DID want to get rid of "Mittens" in exchange for some financial recompense, this blog post will help you ( although that is really NOT the point ). Regardless of your affinity for your feline this article will show you how you can use your cat, or almost any other pet, to help you drive new revenue to your business with internet marketing.
For the purposes of this article I will assume you have already identified your unique value proposition and some marketing messages that articulate it. The best kinds of marketing messages speak directly to your prospects desires or pain points. For example:
Desire - If you are selling a luxury watch on the internet, you may suggest that people who purchase that watch quickly become the envy of all their friends.
Pain - If you sell an auto phone charger you might remind your audience of the inconvenience of having their phone run dead in the mddle of a chat.
Those concepts, once turned into complete internet marketing messages won't often fit in a tweet and even if they do, still leave out the rest of your marketing story. How then do you entice people to read your entire value proposition? That's where "Mittens" comes in.
The best way to grab someone's attention and/or hold on to it once you have it, is to create some kind of emotional connection. There are a variety of ways to do this but on the internet it happens primarily with imagery and language.
On the language side it is amazing how someone's decision to "read more" or even buy something can be influenced by just one word. Email newsletters that can be personalized are more successful for a reason. People are more likely to engage when they hear or read their name. When you cannot personalize with a name, use words like "you" and "your" for a response rate that is almost as good . Would you rather work with "a discount jewelry store" or "your discount jewelry store"? Other words that make an emotional connection are:
- Secret
- Proven
- Shocking
- Powerful
- New
- Love
- Instantly
- and of course.... Free.
There are many more, but you get the point. While language has been PROVEN to provide SHOCKING results INSTANTLY (sorry, could not help it), imagery usually does an even better job. Enter Fido.
There are few photo subjects that speak to the heart as quickly as an animal can and obviously the cuter or funnier looking the animal the better. I have heard a few people at my office say they "like animals a lot more than people" and how many times have you heard people talk about their pets as family members.
The internet is full of pet photos, just look at the profiles of a few of your facebook friends. There are lots of other images that build emotional connections but animals are almost always a slam dunk.
Everyone is bombarded on a daily basis with information, conversations, and advertisements about social media networks, blogging, SEO and other inbound marketing platforms. Because they are technology related it is easy for a lot of business folks who are not in the tech world to become confused or overwhelmed. Moreover, it is easy to forget that internet marketing is still marketing, and most of the offline concepts, like making an emotional connection, still apply.
