Ugh -- Does Marketing Have to Be So Manipulative?

This morning I read a squeeze page* for a copywriting workshop. The longer it got, the more nauseated I felt.

No question this guy is a brilliant copywriter. He knows all the psychological hooks into the subconscious mind that create the urgent, even desperate, desire to buy whatever can be sold. To borrow a phrase I heard on a tv show, he could sell you the clothes you're already wearing.

Counselors, coaches and naturopathic doctors who try to emulate these types of sales letters for their websites will likely turn off more clients than they attract. It's the type of marketing we all hate, feel slimed by, that makes us want to run away screaming from the computer straight into the shower. UGH!

But, what can we learn that we can ethically use? Here are a few tips I'm translating from his tactics:

• Individuals in your target niche will be at various stages of readiness for your services. It's wise to have different methods for speaking to each level of readiness, and keep providing more and more useful help until they have decided to hire you to help them.

• More than touting your unique selling points -- a concept from the 1940s! -- is needed. We have to match a specific USP with our ideal clients' level of perception of pain or problem and their timeline of readiness to hire.

• Your website home page will work best if it follows the AIDA format: grab attention, connect with self interest, speak to your prospective clients' emotionally compelling desire, and use a motivating call to action.

• Tone, tempo and pattern in your content is important. Use them to create a sense of safety, rapport, trust, and confidence that you are the right person to help them resolve their pain or problem.

This stuff really isn't as hard as it appears, but it is a skillset that isn't as developed as it needs to be for most solopreneur counselors, coaches, and NDs.

I'd be happy to help you learn to use the marketing tricks that work AND are ethical for our professions.

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*A squeeze page is often a very long, one page website that pushes a single product or high ticket conference in a way that manufactures need, installs a sense of fear of losing out if you don't buy now, like it would be a bad decision to resist and affect your life or your business for years down the road. Usually the cost involved is not given until the bottom of the page, sometimes not even until you press the shopping cart button.