The 1st 7 Seconds Rule for Billboards

February 18, 2010

You may be surprised I’m writing on billboards, particularly with my B-2-B emphasis. True, smaller B-2-B businesses probably shouldn’t use billboards, but there may be a few that can. For the most part, it’s B-2-C businesses that can make use of these huge messages in the sky, but even then you can waste money. Like [...]

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The 1st 7 Seconds Rule for Sales Mailers

February 16, 2010

How to cause prospects to open and read your sales mailers using Relevance Marketing. Like emails, there are two aspects to getting your targeted recipients to read your snail mailings: 1) The outside has to cause them to want to open it, and 2) Your content must grab them within 7 seconds or so to [...]

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The 1st 7 Seconds Rule for Websites

February 11, 2010

My introductory 1st 7 Seconds Rules of Relevance Marketing article stated that the idea for this series came from the marketing concept that a typical website viewer spends on average 7 seconds on a webpage. Here are my Relevance Marketing suggestions to increase that time for your site. The “F” Pattern is the natural viewing [...]

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The 1st 7 Seconds Rule for Emails

February 9, 2010

There are really two 1st 7 seconds for emails, and Relevance Marketing can help with both – getting your recipients to open the email in the first place, and causing them to want to read the message once they open it. Both are equally important, but if they don’t open the email, you could be [...]

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The 1st 7 Seconds Rule for Trade Shows

February 4, 2010

You might say, “How can you talk about the 1st 7 seconds of a trade show? People attend trade shows for hours, if not days.” True. But it is possible, by using the Principles of Relevance Marketing, for your prospects to finish checking in for the show, walk past security, and then wonder where your [...]

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The “1st 7 Seconds Rule” for White Papers

February 2, 2010

Perhaps if you write whitepapers strictly for academic purposes, you can ignore the principle of Relevance Marketing. Yet, scholars who write white papers are usually trying to garner funding. If so, they should look at these rules to help cause those who give grants the opportunity to say, “Wow! This is the type of research [...]

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The “1st 7 Seconds Rule” for Brochures – Part 2

January 28, 2010

(I discussed the concepts and pitfalls of designing any brochure in the previous post, The 1st 7 Seconds Rule for Brochures – Part 1.) The Capabilities Brochure is a big offender of the principles of Relevance Marketing because this brochure is all about the salesperson’s/marketer’s company, not about their prospects. Here are a few factoids: [...]

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The “1st 7 Seconds Rule” for Brochures – Part 1

January 26, 2010

If all of your prospects are identical, then all of your brochures can be designed as one size fits all – that is, one brochure for everyone. (Even at that Relevance Marketing states that you need to make the brochure about the prospect, not your product/service.) But it’s highly unlikely that all your prospects are [...]

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The 1st 7 Seconds Rule About Sales Phone Calls

January 21, 2010

Getting the prospect on the phone to actually start an ongoing sales conversation is one of the biggest sales barriers to overcome. Attention marketing professionals. Before you leave this article, thinking it doesn’t pertain to you since you don’t make sales phone calls, please realize the odds are that most in your sales staff are [...]

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The 1st 7 Seconds Rules of Relevance Marketing

January 18, 2010

It’s an axiom out there that the average time a person spends on a web page is 7 seconds.  My corollary to that is that in most cases people give your marketing/sales messages 7 seconds before they decide to continue with it or blow it off and go to the next email, voice mail, letter, [...]

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