By Charlie Cook

You could be generating 50 percent to 100 percent more sales with your marketing. How? By working with basic human nature to convert more of your prospects to customers. Marketing for Success author Charlie Cook shares three vital rules of human nature you need to remember for successful marketing. Read more.

First Rule of Human Nature: People are attracted by solutions to their problems. Your prospects want to know what your product or service will do for them. They want to know if it will help them solve a particular problem.

Your marketing should lead with the product benefit and then go on to explain more about how your products or services help them and you’ll capture their interest. Lead with pricing, obscure product names or too much technical detail and you’ll lose your prospects. Their overriding concern is how your products or services will help them.

The Second Rule of Human Nature: People forget. Think about your own purchasing behavior. What do you do when you’re looking for a new computer, a new lawyer, a new investment, or a new graphic designer? You may have seen an ad that attracted you or visited a web site that looked helpful, but can you remember where?

Most people take some time to make their decision, often weeks or even months. Even if they’ve read your marketing materials and even if you’ve got the perfect product or service for them, your prospects are most likely going to forget you exist.

That’s why 80 percent of potential new business is lost because small business owners don’t have a marketing strategy for following up with prospects. Each time your prospects hear or read about another similar service or product, your information gets pushed further down into the recesses of their brain. Eventually it just gets forgotten and you’ve lost the sale unless you have a strategy that helps them remember your products and services.

Third Rule of Human Nature: People want to be confident they are making the right decision. Whether you’re buying a new car, a new computer or legal or financial services, you want to know that when you make your purchase you’ll be satisfied with the products or services you buy. Your prospects are the same. So how do you help them trust you and your products and services?

Give them proof! Prospects want to know if your products or services worked for others and if they’ll work for them. When you use referrals, testimonials and ‘test drives’ you provide proof that helps them feel confident in making their purchase.

Common Sense Small Business Marketing: It’s common sense to base your marketing on these three rules of human nature. If you want to increase your sales, you need to give people the information they want and need to buy from you.

By Mike Pavlish

Ever wondered how you can seriously double your marketing response? Trying to find ways to make your sales and profits skyrocket? Mike Pavlish, founder of Profit Boosters Copywriting, shows us how.

#1. Forget What You’ve Always Done If you want a response breakthrough, you must forget about what you’ve always done, and what everybody else in your industry does. That’s tunnel vision. You need to look at your copywriting with a fresh set of eyes and a wide-open mind. The fact is, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting the same results. Remember, the 8-word battle cry of a dying company is, “that’s the way we have always done it.” Be different … be bold … be original. You must use your imagination if you want a breakthrough.

#2. Start With Your Prospect’s Wants Most marketing falls short for one reason – it focuses on the product or service. The inevitable result of this line of thinking is a list of features that may or may not be of interest to anyone but you. Start, instead, with the benefits your prospect wants. This requires research, interviews, brainstorming and multi-industry experience to look at what you’re selling through the eyes of your potential customer. But this is only one way to develop the best customer benefits that make your sales and profits skyrocket!

#3. Promise To Give Your Prospect Exactly What He Wants Most Great copywriting is great salesmanship in print. The best salespeople find out what the prospect wants most and then promise to deliver on it. Write as if you are the prospect. What benefit does your reader want most from this product? What end result? What hidden benefit? What would be the ultimate benefit? Once you determine the most important benefits, start with them and keep stressing them throughout the copy, and prove them with specifics facts, a guarantee and no-risk offer.

#4. Double Or Triple Your Response With A Great Offer Your offer includes how you present and combine your product, product name, price, terms, payment options, ordering information, bonuses, and guarantee. The right offer can double, even triple your response, so it pays to put a lot of thought into this … and continually test.

#5. Write A “Dynamite” Headline To Get More Response Legendary copywriter John Caples saw response to an ad increase by 19 1/2 times simply with a different headline and no other copy changes. Your headline must feature the benefit(s) your customer wants most in a specific, easily digestible, believable way. Try to use the magic words of guaranteed, new, secret, fast, easy and free. It also helps to include your strong offer in the headline. For example, if you know your customer’s main desire is to save time, and your product will do that for them, tell them boldly and specifically like this: “You Will Save 6 Hours Every Week …Or You Won’t Pay A Dime!”

Mike Pavlish of Profit Boosters Copywriting has written hundreds of successful email and online promotions for clients since 1978.

FOR WHAT MUST BE THE worst direct mail campaign in the history of the craft, look no further than a recent effort from Kia of Paramus, NJ, aiming to get customers to trade their 2000 models for 2005 or 2006 vehicles.

The effort was so bad it’s difficult to know where to begin. Moreover, it couldn’t have reached its target at a worse time.

First, the letter spelled my wife’s name wrong and addressed her incorrectly throughout.

The misspelling would be bad enough, but oh, that was only the beginning.

The upper right corner of the letter had the words “second notice.” Never mind that we couldn’t remember receiving the first notice, should a company aiming to make a five-figure sale begin its pitch as if it were a collections warning? Probably not.

Then, with no salutation, the all-black-type pitch began in sans-serif caps: “PLEASE REVIEW THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION CAREFULLY:”

At this point, we think we’re about to be threatened.

“Kia of Paramus on Route 4 East, Paramus NJ has been selected as a site to conduct a special week long market test pricing and financing event. Your status as a Kia of Paramus customer qualifies you for this private sale,” the letter continued, once again in that hard-to-read sans-serif type.

“Kia of Paramus is in desperate need to acquire several pre-owned 2000 models in order to fulfill special used vehicle requests. Our records indicate you own a used car [How can a car owner not own a used car?] and our new car managers have been authorized to buy back your current vehicle.”

Yes, we did own a Kia Sportage, “did” being the operative word in that sentence. We leased it for five years [I know, too long]. And when the lease came up we decided to buy it because it had been such a trouble-free vehicle for 60,000 miles.

Then, less than a month after we bought it — I swear I’m not making this up — it broke down to the tune of about $2,000. Several weeks later, it broke down again at a cost of another $2,000. And some weeks after that, it broke down again…and as before, the repairs were in the couple-thousand-dollar range.

Because we are not complete idiots, after the third breakdown — each mechanically unrelated to the other — we figured maybe it was time to unload the Kia. We found a Honda Pilot we liked and told the dealer we were prepared to buy the following weekend. He offered us a $4,000 trade-in on the Sportage. Deal!

We drove away in the Kia relieved that we’d be rid of it in a week. Then…as we were driving on New York Route 17 to our house in the Catskills, a weird grinding sound began to come from the engine.

“Don’t you think you ought to pull over?” asked my wife.

“No, dammit. We need to get to the house,” I responded — as if saying it would make it so.

As the grinding grew louder, the dashboard temperature gauge buried itself on “high” and the car began to lose power. I had to pull over.

This was the third time the Sportage stranded us on a Northeastern highway. The two other times involved hundreds of dollars in towing fees.

Once safely on the side of Route 17, the Kia began to emit billows of steam from under its hood.

As cars whizzed by us at 70 miles per hour in 90-degree heat, I began to pound my fists on the steering wheel, saying “I [POUND] CAN’T [POUND] FRIGGIN’ [POUND] BELIEVE [POUND] THIS! I [POUND] HATE [POUND] THIS [POUND] FRIGGIN’ [POUND] CAR [POUND, POUND, POUND]!

Then my 2-year-old son began to cry in the back seat. Nice job, dad. Now you’ve scared Max.

“It’s OK, buddy. Daddy’s just a little frustrated. I’m OK now. Everything will be fine,” I said.

So we called Triple-A for the third time in two months. This time the Sportage was finished. The engine had spun a bearing and the car had to be junked. And the warranty ran out at 60,000 miles, just two months before.

Counting the trade-in money we didn’t get, that car nailed us for $10,000 in about 60 days, and dropped dead.

Then came the letter from Kia of Paramus inviting us to a “private” sale.

“We would like you to exchange your 2000 Kia Sportage for any new 2005 or 2006 vehicle. With factory incentives and generous trade-in values, we feel confident that you can make this exchange with little or no out of pocket expense and with a monthly payment that fits your budget,” the letter said.

We didn’t buy our Sportage from Kia of Paramus. We simply had it serviced and repaired there, which means if anyone would’ve taken two minutes to check our service records, they’d know our auto budget had taken some pretty serious hits in the previous few months.

“Due to the nature of this event and your status as a customer of Kia of Paramus, this event will not be advertised to the general public. This will be your only form of notification.”

The letter read as if Hal from Kia’s accounting department took a direct mail course, learned that creating a sense of urgency and exclusivity can help sell, and decided to use one of his accounts-receivable form letters as a template.

“Do you think everybody’s 2000 Kia is breaking down, and this is just a quiet way to do a recall?” asked my wife in all seriousness.

Yes, we’re that scarred.

Almost one in six Americans sells items on the Internet and increasingly is doing so through online classified ads. The Pew Internet & American Life Project has reported that on a typical day 2% of Internet users are selling something, with the Craigslist.org network of classified-ad marts in 100 cities drawing nearly a third of the traffic.

News Corp.’s founder predicted the demise of classified ads, according to the Financial Times. Rupert Murdoch, who once called classified revenues a “river of gold,” has changed his tune, saying: “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In an interview with the U.K.’s Press Gazette, he added, “I don’t know anybody under 30 who has ever looked at a classified advertisement in a newspaper