13 Secrets to Making Your Email Websites Marketing Effective

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. The task of  marketing isn’t easy, is it? It seems to go on forever, and in reality it does. Like in making your email websites marketing secrets work effectively. And getting potential customers to think about you and what you have to say.
email websites
Make email websites a priority.
Because email is 40 times more effective than social media in customer acquisition, it can’t be ignored. And that is not going to change anytime soon. Email is a technology that has been with us for over 44 years. The first email was sent in 1971 but the concept was explored at MIT as early as 1965 which is 50 years ago. Here are some other email facts in another excerpt from an infographic at sociallystacked.com.
Related post: Visual Content … 13 Remarkable Marketing Examples to Study
In order to do that, you need your subscribers to not just tolerate your emails but to actually get excited about the next email you send them. But your work doesn’t stop there either. You need to cultivate a relationship with your subscribers if you want them to ever buy from you.
The average email open rate depends on the industry, but typically it ranges from 15-25%. That’s a statistic that always surprises me. It is not terrible, but it certainly isn’t good.
Here are some tips to ponder as you try and make a significant improvement to your email websites numbers:

Email websites … value opinions

Do you value the opinions of your customers? I really hope you answered yes. Now, I think most people answer yes to that question, which is great. So why is it that most email lists feel like transmit and receive conversations? That  is certainly the wrong way to approach it.
So, what’s the solution? Get your readers involved.
real-time marketing
Real-time marketing is a winner.

 Move email marketing to real-time 

 The promise of real-time marketing is to meet the needs of consumers with the right message … in the right place … at the right time. There are several challenges to delivering on the promise of real-time marketing, including the personalization of messages, measuring the effectiveness of the marketing efforts, leveraging the data available, and coordinating communications.
Be sure and keep all of these in mind.

 

Free email accounts … automate and integrate

Deploying multiple campaigns every month can be taxing for any marketing team and can consume a lot of time and effort. Automating certain processes will leave you more time for developing strategy, identifying opportunities, and understanding your email ROI.
Integration is the flip side of automation. By integrating processes around email, your entire marketing program becomes more agile and responsive to market opportunities.
Email marketing
Email marketing evolution or revolution?

Email marketing evolution

Email continues to be a highly effective digital channel to engage consumers. But the consumer is changing the way they read and react to email, so marketers must respond accordingly.
Consumers take email with them as they move from their desktop to their mobile and laptop or tablet devices. While consumers may be able to open and view email on all devices, they aren’t always taking action – which presents a different challenge.
Still, every customer interaction is a moment of opportunity for marketers to better understand the value created by the engagement and the experience the customer has.
 

Types of email accounts … compelling subject line

Once you’ve laid the groundwork, it’s time to start working on crafting future emails that your subscribers can’t help but open.
It always starts with writing a great subject line.
The subject line should be written a lot like the headline of a blog post although you have a little more freedom with it.

 

Focus on the benefit

With this strategy, you focus on the end result from your reader wants most. Answer their question:  “What’s in it for me?”
Composing a good email subject line is akin to writing a great headline. If you’re cold-emailing someone you’ve never met, it’s important to strike a balance between being direct and being interesting.
Keep in mind that while it’s always good to be clear, you also don’t want to give anyone a reason to dismiss your email before reading it. For that reason, you’ll want to avoid the stock or cookie-cutter phrases that might get your email lumped in (and glossed over) with others.

 

Establish your credibility

“Why should I care?” is the tacit question hovering in most people’s minds every time they see an email from someone they don’t know well. This is why establishing your credibility is crucial. Tell your reader why you are different, why you are accomplished, and why they should pay attention to you.

 

All about value

Think about why new subscribers might open that first email: it’s to get something. At this point, you’re not a friend. You’re not even an acquaintance.
But make sure you have something they want, whether it’s knowledge or a tool.
 Related material: Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study

Email websites … trust takes time

You have to earn trust by giving away value, time after time. Once a subscriber realizes that you’re not just trying to make a quick buck off them and that your work is actually making a difference in their lives, they will start to trust you.

 

Share interesting personal stories

One of the best ways for someone to get to know you and get a glimpse of your life is for you to share personal stories with them. You can do this in your blog posts, but email is another great time to do it. After all, when friends want to tell us a story, they don’t write us a blog post. They send us an email.

 

Be direct

Never assume that someone is going to read your entire email. You should make it clear from the get-go exactly what you are asking for. That means clarifying why you’re reaching out in the first sentence or two, and no later. Short and sweet is the topic strategy.

Coordinate email & social media

Although powerful email and social media are in their own right, there are still some shortcomings that each one suffers from. Email marketing is totally dependent on the number of users who choose to open the email and click through to the content. It’s also not an immediate response tool.
Social media, on the other hand, is unable to educate users about the wide variety of topics that can be handled in a single email. By its inherent nature, social media ends up scratching the surface of whichever topic it touches.
By syncing email and social media, your brand can make up for the shortcomings of each. Use social media for real-time interaction with your email customers, and deploy emails for in-depth analysis, insights, and conversations with social fans.

Reengage inactive subscribers

Inactive customers typically account for about 60% of a business’s total subscriber base. But, unfortunately, there’s only so much you can do to encourage them to interact with your website or product — someone who’s stopped buying from you usually has reasons for this change in behavior that are impossible to fix via a one-way marketing campaign.
On the other hand, the two-way nature of email communication makes it the perfect, personalized medium for reaching out to inactive users.
Related post: 7 Secrets to the Lego Blog Marketing Campaigns … Effective Marketing?
Through email, you can:
1) understand why they stopped buying from how (and how you can fix it);
2) offer them immediately and sustained incentives to revive their association with your brand (by way of special one-time discounts, coupons, or exclusive service options designed expressly for this purpose).
For example, Dell reaches out to its inactive subscribers to understand the reasons for their prolonged silence, so the folks over there can take corrective measures.

The bottom line

Email marketing is the most effective type of marketing there is by a wide margin. It’s not going away anytime soon.
When you’re attempting to apply these 13 tips to your future emails, remember that they are guidelines, not rules.
If you read this post carefully (maybe even re-read it a few times if you like it), you’ll have a deeper understanding of these principles. At first, they will help a bit. But over time, as you gain experience, there’s no reason you can’t achieve consistent 50+% open rates and record profits.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing created by remarkable customer service. And put it to good use.
 
It’s up to you to keep improving your creative marketing strategies. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
 
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+FacebookTwitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. 
 More reading on marketing  strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
13 Extraordinary Marketing Lessons from Taylor Swift
Learning from 2 of the Best Marketing Strategy Case Studies
14 Jaw-Dropping Guerilla Marketing Lessons and Examples

Marketers Need to Beware These Media Changing Trends

Does your business pay attention to media changing trends going on around you? I hope you do, as they can be critical to your marketing efforts. Knowing as much as you can about your market and your customers is a great way to start your marketing strategy.

media changing trends
Watch for media changing trends.

Within five years, if you’re in the same business you are in now, you’re going to be out of business.

Peter Drucker

For marketers today, everything begins and ends with consumers. Understanding consumer preferences and behaviors are essential to developing a successful campaign, brand, and offers. Consumer trends tell us what habits or behaviors are becoming more prevalent.

They help us track what people buy, why they buy, how they use products, and how they communicate about brands.

“What’s that word again that you used for stealing content,” my newspaper editor friend asked me?  “Curation,” I said, “and it’s not stealing content.”

It seems to me that at the heart of the controversy is a fundamental shift in the value of information.  It used to be scarce, but now we’re drowning in it.  That’s creating a fundamental shift in the economics of media.  Therefore, the answer lies not only in product innovation, but business model innovation, which is even harder.

Trends are driven by basic consumer needs and desires (like in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs), coupled with short-term or long-term cultural shifts, economic undulations, new technology development, politics, or even popular culture.

Are you one that believes that creativity can be learned? We are among that group. We also believe in suggestions for innovative thinking can boost team creativity through effective collaboration. Through a series of sparks and not a single flash of insight. Certainly our way of thinking.

With consumer behavior and preferences changing faster than ever, businesses need to seek to regularly understand and apply consumer and market trends to marketing strategy.

We consistently study the market and consumer trends.

For this article, we have categorized them into three groups: social care, time-related, and technology. Let’s get going in discussing them.

Social care

Creativity is the biggest need

No matter how much you are spending time on social media, it won’t fetch any result until and unless you are creative. You cannot expect the audience to react positively to messages that are cliché and old. Instead, try to think something out of the box.

Be it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform, you will have to design the content in a manner as creative as possible. And once it is created, the content is sure to attract lots of viewers.

Most of the major social media platforms are likely to remain relevant well into the future. However, marketers will need to put more time and energy in creative content to keep in front of potential customers.

Related post: Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study

Personalization continues its surge

Customization is becoming more routine in all marketing tactics. As we move forward in time, it will be harder to market mass-produced products and services.

The “one size fits all” approach to marketing where mass messages on television and traditional media are becoming less effective due to media saturation.

We are seeing the rise of personalized marketing on e-commerce sites, websites, and emails that tailor the advertising and user interface to the relevant interests of consumers.

Visit an online store once and come back and the website knows that you are male and like Nike runners. The next email that arrives has also been personalized with products that you visited while shopping online.

The web is capturing your habits as it reads the data applies intelligence and serves up information that is relevant to “you”.

This trend is being driven by technology using “big data” to increase marketing effectiveness.

This reorganization and repackaging of the web’s growing content is an example of the consumer’s desire for personalized experiences. Consumers are no longer reliant on brands or news outlets to satiate their intellectual curiosities.

Instead, we are seeing the rise of user-centric platforms that discover, reformat, and organize a myriad of digital content outlets.

Spawned from crowd-shaped content discovery tools like Digg, BuzzFeed, and Reddit, the next generation of content consumption platforms is highly personalized, catering to users’ interests, social networks, and preferred learning styles.

Consider Flipboard, the mobile application that lets users aggregate content from the news, blogs, and their social networks into a magazine-style format, heavy on visual and sensory cues.

Upping the ante of content personalization, Flipboard recently purchased Zite, a competing content curation platform that relies on algorithms and user feedback to personalize the stream of articles displayed to users.

On the other end of the content customization spectrum, there’s the app Umano. Serving the busy lives of consumers on the go and catering to audiophiles, Umano reads articles aloud to users so they can catch up on the news at the office while driving, or while working out.

The iPhone app relies on a mix of behavioral algorithms and editorial oversight to curate important news stories each day and then has voice actors record audio clips of top stories.

Time-related trends

Real-time marketing

The intersection of location awareness, social media, and mobility is finally delivering the ability to target customers with incentives and coupons at the point of decision-making.

This is compressing buying cycles and creating the need for more agile thinking and actions. But these tools are also providing a powerful way to listen to customers and understand trends and micro-trends as they pop up.

Social media is an excellent process for companies to connect directly with their customers. Most of the companies are likely to continue utilizing this opportunity to the fullest. And in addition, the concept of real-time marketing is going to become more and more popular.

So, brands need to be consistent in their activities. They have to respond as fast as possible to the comments and queries that the end-users and potential customers are posting on the social media platform.

However, companies need to be prudent enough to leverage different opportunities to remain connected with the audience on a regular basis.

sense and respond
Use sense and respond actions.

Sense and respond

Sense and respond not to make and sell. Be more nimble, fast and responsive based on customer insights

Although the vast majority of retail sales are still made in-store, online shopping is grabbing market share at an explosive rate.

As consumers become more reliant on online shopping, the demand for expedited shipping will continue to grow, especially for high-income tech-savvy Millennials.

Major tech companies and retailers are taking notice and scrambling to meet the demand. eBay, Google, Amazon, and Walmart are all actively testing same-day delivery offerings.

As an example, eBay launched eBay Now, allowing consumers in targeted metro areas to receive products from local merchants, including Target, Best Buy, and Walgreen’s, within one to two hours for $5 per order.

Orders are delivered by the courier closest to the merchants in question, and users can track the delivery’s progress and phone the courier directly. While it’s currently available in limited metro areas, eBay has plans to expand the service.

Amazon charges $8.99 for most same-day delivery purchases, or just $3.99 for Amazon Prime subscribers, who already receive free two-day shipping for their annual membership fee.

Same-day delivery is available as long as the item is in stock at a nearby warehouse or a third-party seller can quickly send the item.

To further improve delivery time, Amazon is building new warehouses, adding refrigerators and robots to existing warehouses, and routing deliveries through multiple carriers, including FedEx, UPS, and now the USPS for Sunday deliveries.

Implications for marketers
Shipping and delivery times will become a much more important incentive for marketers to use in converting shoppers into buyers.

E-commerce and brick-and-mortar retailers will need to cater to demanding consumers by shortening fulfillment and shipping times, along with concrete delivery dates and times.

There is an opportunity to work with established shipping services (e.g., UPS and FedEx) or integrate third-party crowdsourced services like PostMates, Deliv, Zipments, or WeDeliver.

Deliv, for example, connects e-commerce retailers with local crowdsourced delivery personnel to allow online shoppers to receive their orders in hours, not days. Postmates, on the other hand, serves local brick-and-mortar retailers by offering delivery from any local store or restaurant within an hour.

Consumers will also place increasing pressure on retailers to offer universal free shipping for all non-expedited orders.

For years, e-commerce retailers have fought to offer free shipping on all purchases due to costs, but with the advent of same-day and near-instant shipping options, consumers will further question the value of paying for regular ground shipments.

Retailers will need to adjust their strategy or lose the business.

trends in technology
Observe trends in technology.

Trends in technology

Growth rate continues for video marketing

Visual content always has had a major impact on marketing endeavors.

So, its use on social media platforms is expected to increase as well. But the use of visual content on social media is not going to be limited to images only.

With the dwindling patience of people, short videos are also likely to emerge as a new mode of communication in the near future. So, video marketing is going to be one of the most important forms of marketing on social media platforms.

Companies are likely to create short but informative videos on their products and services. And this is going to be one of the best ways to connect with the target audience within the shortest possible time.

Visual marketing

With 70% of marketers recently reporting that they planned on increasing their use of images in 2015, image-centric content is becoming a central part of most marketing plans.

Using attractive and well-placed images within your blog and social media posts, as well as using infographics to drive traffic and build inbound links, are both now common practices among businesses who understand the importance of visual design.

Businesses looking to reach certain demographics – such as women and teens – will need to continue to expand their presence on visually based social platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.

We first saw the creep of visual marketing into the landscape when YouTube entered mainstream consciousness a few years ago. Since then this creep has turned into a torrent of visual marketing with the emergence of Pinterest, Instagram, and even Slideshare.

This has gone to a whole new level as Vine’s 6-second snack-size video and now Instagram’s new 15-second video app has marketers scrambling for creative inspiration to apply and leverage this new trend.

The bottom line

Our message for businesses is simple. Think more like an innovator. Learn the innovation process. Spend time at the front end on what the marketplace needs, rather than trying to build a slick marketing campaign selling your invention.

That is the best way to succeed. Innovation isn’t about talking, it’s about doing. The action.

Like anything else, fostering creative business ideas require practice. And distinguishing between creativity, invention, and innovation. So exercise and practice this skill and utilize it in as many areas of your business as you can.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Case Studies to Evaluate New World Marketing Concepts

How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement

Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study

Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Lessons and Examples 

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on FacebookTwitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

Marketers Need to Beware Media Changing Trends

Does your business pay attention and beware media changing trends going on around you? I hope you do, as they can be critical to your marketing efforts. Knowing as much as you can about your market and your customers is a great way to start your marketing strategy.

media trends
Watch for media trends.

Most breakthrough organizations aren’t built on a bundle of wonderment, novelty and new ideas. In fact, they usually involve just one big idea. The rest is execution, patience, tactics, and people.

The ability to see what’s happening and to act on it. The rest is doing the stuff we already know how to do, the stuff we’ve seen before, but doing it beautifully.

You probably don’t need yet another new idea. Better to figure out what to do with the ones you’ve got.

Within five years, if you’re in the same business you are in now, you’re going to be out of business.

Peter Drucker

For marketers today, everything begins and ends with consumers. Understanding consumer preferences and behaviors are essential to developing a successful campaign, brand, and offers. Consumer trends tell us what habits or behaviors are becoming more prevalent.

They help us track what people buy, why they buy, how they use products, and how they communicate about brands.

Trends are driven by basic consumer needs and desires (like in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs), coupled with short-term or long-term cultural shifts, economic undulations, new technology development, politics, or even popular culture.

With consumer behavior and preferences changing faster than ever, businesses need to seek to regularly understand and apply consumer and market trends to marketing strategy.

We consistently study the market and consumer trends.

For this article, we have categorized them into three groups: social care, time-related, and technology. Let’s get going in discussing them.

Media trends … social care

Creativity is the biggest need

No matter how much you are spending time on social media, it won’t fetch any result until and unless you are creative. You cannot expect the audience to react positively to messages that are cliché and old. Instead, try to think something out of the box.

Be it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform, you will have to design the content in a manner as creative as possible. And once it is created, the content is sure to attract lots of viewers.

Most of the major social media platforms are likely to remain relevant well into the future. However, marketers will need to put more time and energy in creating content to keep in front of potential customers.

Related post: Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study

Personalization continues its surge

Customization is becoming more routine in all marketing tactics. As we move forward in time, it will be harder to market mass-produced products and services.

The “one size fits all” approach to marketing where mass messages on television and traditional media are becoming less effective due to media saturation.

We are seeing the rise of personalized marketing on e-commerce sites, websites, and emails that tailor the advertising and user interface to the relevant interests of consumers.

Visit an online store once and come back and the website knows that you are male and like Nike runners. The next email that arrives has also been personalized with products that you visited while shopping online.

The web is capturing your habits as it reads the data applies intelligence and serves up information that is relevant to “you”.

This trend is being driven by technology using “big data” to increase marketing effectiveness.

This reorganization and repackaging of the web’s growing content is an example of the consumer’s desire for personalized experiences. Consumers are no longer reliant on brands or news outlets to satiate their intellectual curiosities.

Instead, we are seeing the rise of user-centric platforms that discover, reformat, and organize a myriad of digital content outlets.

Spawned from crowd-shaped content discovery tools like Digg, BuzzFeed, and Reddit, the next generation of content consumption platforms is highly personalized, catering to users’ interests, social networks, and preferred learning style.

Consider Flipboard, the mobile application that lets users aggregate content from the news, blogs, and their social networks into a magazine-style format, heavy on visual and sensory cues.

Upping the ante of content personalization, Flipboard recently purchased Zite, a competing content curation platform that relies on algorithms and user feedback to personalize the stream of articles displayed to users.

On the other end of the content customization spectrum, there’s the app Umano. Serving the busy lives of consumers on the go and catering to audiophiles, Umano reads articles aloud to users so they can catch up on the news at the office while driving, or while working out.

The iPhone app relies on a mix of behavioral algorithms and editorial oversight to curate important news stories each day and then has voice actors record audio clips of top stories.

Media trends 2018 … time related trends

Change the landscape trends … real-time marketing

The intersection of location awareness, social media, and mobility is finally delivering the ability to target customers with incentives and coupons at the point of decision-making.

This is compressing buying cycles and creating the need for more agile thinking and actions. But these tools are also providing a powerful way to listen to customers and understand trends and micro-trends as they pop up.

Social media is an excellent process for companies to connect directly with their customers. Most of the companies are likely to continue utilizing this opportunity to the fullest. And in addition, the concept of real-time marketing is going to become more and more popular.

So, brands need to be consistent in their activities. They have to respond as fast as possible to the comments and queries that the end-users and potential customers are posting on the social media platform.

However, companies need to be prudent enough to leverage different opportunities to remain connected with the audience on a regular basis.

sense and respond
Use sense and respond actions.

Sense and respond

Sense and respond not to make and sell. Be more nimble, fast and responsive based on customer insights

Although the vast majority of retail sales are still made in-store, online shopping is grabbing market share at an explosive rate.

As consumers become more reliant on online shopping, the demand for expedited shipping will continue to grow, especially for high-income tech-savvy Millennials.

Major tech companies and retailers are taking notice and scrambling to meet the demand. eBay, Google, Amazon, and Walmart are all actively testing same-day delivery offerings.

As an example, eBay launched eBay Now, allowing consumers in targeted metro areas to receive products from local merchants, including Target, Best Buy, and Walgreen’s, within one to two hours for $5 per order.

Orders are delivered by the courier closest to the merchants in question, and users can track the delivery’s progress and phone the courier directly. While it’s currently available in limited metro areas, eBay has plans to expand the service.

Amazon charges $8.99 for most same-day delivery purchases, or just $3.99 for Amazon Prime subscribers, who already receive free two-day shipping for their annual membership fee.

Same-day delivery is available as long as the item is in stock at a nearby warehouse or a third-party seller can quickly send the item.

To further improve delivery time, Amazon is building new warehouses, adding refrigerators and robots to existing warehouses, and routing deliveries through multiple carriers, including FedEx, UPS, and now the USPS for Sunday deliveries.

Implications for marketers
Shipping and delivery times will become a much more important incentive for marketers to use in converting shoppers into buyers.

E-commerce and brick-and-mortar retailers will need to cater to demanding consumers by shortening fulfillment and shipping times, along with concrete delivery dates and times.

There is an opportunity to work with established shipping services (e.g., UPS and FedEx) or integrate third-party crowdsourced services like PostMates, Deliv, Zipments, or WeDeliver.

Deliv, for example, connects e-commerce retailers with local crowdsourced delivery personnel to allow online shoppers to receive their orders in hours, not days. Postmates, on the other hand, serves local brick-and-mortar retailers by offering delivery from any local store or restaurant within an hour.

Consumers will also place increasing pressure on retailers to offer universal free shipping for all non-expedited orders.

For years, e-commerce retailers have fought to offer free shipping on all purchases due to costs, but with the advent of same-day and near-instant shipping options, consumers will further question the value of paying for regular ground shipments.

Retailers will need to adjust their strategy or lose the business.

trends in technology
Observe trends in technology.

Trends in technology

Growth rate continues for video marketing

Visual content always has had a major impact on marketing endeavors.

So, its use on social media platforms is expected to increase as well. But the use of visual content on social media is not going to be limited to images only.

With the dwindling patience of people, short videos are also likely to emerge as a new mode of communication in the near future. So, video marketing is going to be one of the most important forms of marketing on social media platforms.

Companies are likely to create short but informative videos on their products and services. And this is going to be one of the best ways to connect with the target audience within the shortest possible time.

Visual marketing

With 70% of marketers recently reporting that they planned on increasing their use of images in 2015, image-centric content is becoming a central part of most marketing plans.

Using attractive and well-placed images within your blog and social media posts, as well as using infographics to drive traffic and build inbound links, are both now common practices among businesses who understand the importance of visual design.

Businesses looking to reach certain demographics – such as women and teens – will need to continue to expand their presence on visually based social platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.

We first saw the creep of visual marketing into the landscape when YouTube entered mainstream consciousness a few years ago. Since then this creep has turned into a torrent of visual marketing with the emergence of Pinterest, Instagram, and even Slideshare.

The bottom line

Make your thinking vivid by including what comes naturally to you. For example, you may not be able to imagine sequences of images very well, but you may excel in imagining other modalities such as smell, touch, and sound.

You may be excellent in infusing your visualization with emotional charge and great feelings. DO not feel compelled to stay within any single modality but make your visualizations and imagination vivid and rich by including numerous modalities.

Your senses are wonderful tools for you to engage while unleashing the power of the imaginative mind. Make it colorful and exciting.

Make your imagination your ally and your best friend.

share

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?

Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Case Studies to Evaluate New World Marketing Concepts

How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement

Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study

Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Lessons and Examples 

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on  FacebookTwitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.