People As Sheep, The Power of Words and a Brilliant Bald Guy

Each month I come across some brilliant videos, quotes, books, articles, etc. (and plenty of crappy ones too!).

Here are three that particularly resonated with me, in a good way, this month…

An Article: The Power of Words

Stuck on what to do with your website?

Thinking of changing the layout? Adding some cool graphics? Did you see some fancy bells and whistles on another site you think would be cool on yours?

Justin Jackson lays out what you REALLY need to be focusing on with incredible simplicity and clarity. It’s great perspective that a lot of business owners and marketers desperately need.

Read his concise, yet powerful, article here.

A Quote: People Are Like Sheep

Claude Hopkins is one of the true pioneers of direct response advertising. Ask any direct marketer worth their weight in salt and they’ve read his books Scientific Advertising and My Life in Advertising… many times.

The following quote is from My Life in Advertising…

“People are like sheep. They cannot judge values, nor can you and I. We judge things largely by others’ impressions, by popular favor. We go with the crowd. So the most effective thing I have ever found in advertising is the trend of the crowd.

That is a factor not to be overlooked. People follow styles and preferences. We rarely decide for ourselves, because we don’t know the facts. But when we see the crowd taking any certain direction, we are much inclined to go with them.”

Claude Hopkins wrote these words in 1927. And they are just as true now as they were then. The only thing that’s changed is the ways that are available to demonstrate the trend of the crowd behind your company including…

• Reviews
• Video testimonials
• LinkedIn connections/recommendations
• Twitter followers
• Facebook Likes/Wall activity/Shares

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve said before that the web has not changed the fundamentals of effective marketing. What it’s changed are the TOOLS you have at your disposal to take marketing strategies that have worked for decades and execute them in new ways.

Social Proof is programmed into our brains. We’re all afraid of making bad decisions and will often rely heavily on the trend of the crowd to guide us in making decisions.

Adding elements of Social Proof to your site puts the power of the crowd behind you and can heavily influence a prospect’s decision to do business with you or not.

So use the tools at your disposal to add social proof to your marketing efforts and use them often!

And a Video: A Brilliant Bald Guy

I’m sure most of you have heard of marketing genius (and fellow Smokin’ Hot Piece of Brain Candy) Seth Godin.

There’s really not much to add about this video from his TED Talk in 2003. He pretty much covers it all.

But since my main newsletter article this month covers the importance of research, I want to highlight one quote from Seth’s talk…

“Find out what people want and give it to them.”

And how do you find out what people want? Observation and research.

Here’s Seth talking about giving people what they want and being remarkable…