The Psychology of Why “Less Is More”

The Psychology of Why “Less Is More”

Even if your audience likes what you’re saying, when you give them too much information to process, they subconsciously lower their opinion of you. This applies not just to marketing but to all our interactions in life.

by Matt Stokes | MARCH 21, 2018

“Less is more” is repeated so often in discussions of marketing that it’s easy to ignore and dismiss as an empty cliché. But clichés often become clichés for a reason, and when you seriously consider whether less is more, you ask a fascinating question.

What exactly is meant by the cliché? If we limit it to marketing jargon, we are saying that an audience is more receptive to a simple message than a complicated one.

If, for example, I purchase an expensive billboard, I naturally want to overload it with information about my business—I want to make the most of the limited real estate I have, after all, so I want to get my website in there, my hours of operation, my phone number, address, and a list of services I provide. But this can see diminishing returns, and when I try to cram too many messages into one small space, drivers are more likely to ignore the billboard entirely. To get the most bang for my buck, it’d be better if I thought carefully and strategically about my message to make it more palatable and memorable to my audience.

But psychological research suggests that it goes even further—that when I put too much information on a billboard it not only increases the likelihood my billboard will be ignored, but will actually give the audience a negative impression of my brand, to the point that I’d have been better off not advertising at all. Why is this?

Should You Be Podcasting?

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Should you be podcasting?

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Podcasts are great… but can they help you market your business?

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by MATT STOKES | AUGUST 1, 2017

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Many businesses are adding audio podcasting to the weapons in their marketing arsenal. Whether or not creating and maintaining a podcast to promote your business is worthwhile depends mainly on your capacity for creating new content, your budget, and the nature of your existing marketing.

If you’re unfamiliar with podcasts, think of them as on-demand radio shows. Podcasts become more and more popular every year, and businesses can create podcasts to connect with consumers in a unique way.

Creating Unique Content

But how can you make your podcast stand out? What are you going to discuss? How are you going to produce it? Who’s even going to listen?

The short answer is that if you have an idea good enough to blog about or post on social media, then it’s probably a good enough idea to record to a podcast. The problem is that podcasts are generally longer in length and go more in-depth on topics. What you would communicate in a 30-second TV commercial won’t suffice for a podcast. The upside is that podcasts give you the freedom to say what you are limited by time and space to otherwise say.

Share Success Stories

Explain what your business does, who your employees are, and how they do what they do. Tell success stories clients and customers have had working with your business. Share funny or unusual stories about experiences you’ve had in your career. The goal is to build a relationship with the listener so that they’ll think of you when they need your services and tell all their friends and family about you as well.

What If You Don’t Have Enough Time?

If you don’t have enough time to record a podcast, it’s still worth thinking about how to make a podcast happen. Are you recording YouTube videos? You can easily take the sound from the YouTube videos and create an audio-only version for the podcast. Are you blogging? Record one of your employees reading your favorite blog posts. The point is to get your voice out there, to be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

How Do You Podcast, Anyway?

Almost all computers and smartphones have solid microphones that will allow you to record audio. If you want to edit and enhance your recording, GarageBand and similar apps will get the job done.

Once you’ve produced your podcast, you’ll need a way to distribute it online. A podcast hosting service will allow you to upload your recording and distribute it to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and other popular podcasting platforms.

The most trusted name in the game is LibSyn, which offers monthly packages for as little as $5. Prices increase the more size you require… in other words, the more podcasts you release, the more bandwidth you’ll have to purchase. LibSyn also offers great analytics, so you’ll be able to track and get insight into your audience.

A free alternative to LibSyn is SoundCloud, which offers limited podcast hosting, with paid packages for users who need more space and tools.

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How to optimize a PDF for mobile devices

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How to optimize a PDF for mobile devices

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by MATT STOKES | JULY 27, 2017

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One of my clients is a political organization that wanted to distribute its recommendations to voters on Election Day. Traditionally, this would be a “punch card”—a pocket-sized piece of sturdy cardboard paper clipped from a mailer or a newspaper ad. But we had a short turnaround time and we wanted to do something a little more modern, so we came up with the idea of encouraging voters to use their phones in the voting booth and pull up this organization’s recommendations that way.

I designed a nice-looking list of recommendations but, once I’d saved it as a PDF and pulled it up on my phone, I was frustrated that it wouldn’t fit a mobile screen.

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It looked something like this.

I wanted the image to appear designed for mobile phones—because, after all, that was its point for being. So I recreated the list in Adobe Illustrator as a graphic, using the dimensions for the most popular smart phones. I exported the final image as a PDF, pulled it up on my phone, and just like that, I’d found a quick, elegant solution.

mobile-pdf
Much better, with nothing cut off.

Final product ready to go, we uploaded the PDF to the organization’s website, and voters were able to enter the voting booth and pull up a sleek PDF optimized just for their phones.

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Do You Need a Newsletter?

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Do you need a newsletter?

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by MATT STOKES | JULY 7, 2017

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Does your company need to be doing email marketing? Does it need to send out a newsletter?

The answer, regardless of what kind of business you are engaged in, is almost certainly yes. In fact, many people think email marketing is the single most effective form of marketing or advertising.

Email marketing puts you directly into the inbox of people who have already indicated that want to hear from you (by giving you their email address). Staying in touch via newsletters keeps your audience engaged and potentially builds awareness of your brand.

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Who Is Your Audience?

For most businesses, the audience is their pool of former, current, and potential customers. For others, the audience might be a network of colleagues, with the hope of generating referrals. Determining who the email newsletter is for is a key part in figuring out the most important question of email marketing:

Why Should Anybody Ever Read Your Email? 

When sending a newsletter, you have to give the audience a reason to care; if the recipient opens your email and finds nothing of value, chances are they’ll either unsubscribe or ignore your future emails. So be careful in choosing what to include in the email—do not overload the message with updates on your company that a customer is unlikely to care about.

You’ll also want to build around the main subject of the email. If you’re having a customer appreciation day where every customer gets a free car wash, for example, be sure to provide enough information about the event while avoiding unnecessary and distracting information about unrelated topics. The main goals of the newsletter are to remind your customer about your business and build up goodwill with them so they’ll want to use you again and tell their friends about you.

How Do You Create and Send Newsletters? 

The old-fashioned method of sending out a blast email is to simply type it up and put all the recipients in the BCC field, so that nobody knows who else the email is going to. But there are certainly more sophisticated newsletter tools, and there are two major players in that field: Constant Contact and MailChimpSnip20160607_39

Both Constant Contact and MailChimp have been on the email marketing scene for many years, and they generally have the same features for similar prices. They both offer creative design templates and analytics to help you track how many of your emails are getting read, and who is actually clicking on the links you share.

Snip20160607_40Analytics are a great tool in email marketing, and you’ll want to take them very seriously. They allow you to experiment, to see what is and is not working, and to adjust your approach accordingly.

Both apps also have a robust contact management feature. You can easily import your the email addresses on your mailing list from virtually any other program.

 

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Why Busy Attorneys Looking to Boost Their Marketing Game Need Ghostwriters

Why Busy Attorneys Looking to Boost Their Marketing Game Need Ghostwriters

Most lawyers can write well—it comes with the territory. They also understand that “content is king,” and know that producing more client- and industry-focused content could go a long way to generate new business for their firms and grow their own personal brand. There’s just one problem: Who has the time?

by Matt Stokes | FEBRUARY 27, 2017

Most lawyers can write well—it comes with the territory. They also understand that “content is king,” and know that producing more client- and industry-focused content could go a long way to generate new business for their firms and grow their own personal brand. There’s just one problem: WHO HAS THE TIME?

Answer: A professional ghostwriter does.

Two Easy Ways to Get Short Links

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Two Easy Ways to Get Short Links

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Don’t burden your readers with hulky, bulky, intolerably long URLs.

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by MATT STOKES | NOVEMBER 1, 2016

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A Long, Long URL
Got all that?

News broke yesterday that Twitter will most likely stop counting links and photos against the 140-character limit of every Tweet. The 140-character limit has inspired many workarounds such as screenshots of longer messages, but the innovation that has really taken off is the short link.

If you’re unfamiliar with them, short links are, well, short links. Rather than Tweeting a URL that might take up all of your space (https://rothstokes.com/2016/05/two-easy-ways-to-get-short-links/), you can convert it into a short link (bit.ly/1OBscpr) that usually has 15 or fewer characters.

But while Twitter will start allowing long links, short links are still quite useful, For one thing, they just look better. What’s more, brevity is still key in all content—you want to say what you have to say in as little space as possible.

How To Make a Short Link

There are many different apps and websites that will generate short links, but my go-to is Bitly. Simply go to their website, bit.ly, paste your URL, and they’ll instantly generate a unique, permanent, short link for you. It’s that simple.

Bitly's Short Link Generator
Bitly’s Short Link Generator

There are many, many alternatives to Bitly, but the one with which I am most familiar is Google’s URL Shortener. You can go directly to URL Shortener by going to goo.gl. Google’s app works just as quickly and easily as Bitly’s, and I use one over the other only out of habit.

Google's URL Shortener
Google’s URL Shortener

So ladies and gentlemen, I implore you, take advantage of this most wondrous technology that is the short link, and let us do away with the abominable eyesore that is the long URL.

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Anatomy Of Great Marketing: The Oreo Eclipse

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Anatomy Of Great Marketing: The Oreo Eclipse

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Oreos turned a major eclipse in Britain into a marketing bonanza.

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by MATT STOKES | SEPTEMBER 22, 2016

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This is an entry in an ongoing series of looks at successful modern marketing campaigns. 

Social media has caused an explosion of “real-time marketing”—that is, marketing done in conjunction with unrelated, independent, or unexpected events. For example, a commercial during the Super Bowl might be about football, but a real-time marketing campaign could react to something that actually happens during the Super Bowl—”Peyton Manning fumbles the football! Don’t fumble your dishes… clean them with Dawn dish soap!”

Though real-time marketing campaigns often involve decisions made on the fly, they can also be prepared for well in advance. And a great example of this is last year’s Oreo Eclipse.

The Oreo Eclipse

Nabisco built an integrated marketing plan for its Oreo cookies brand that centered around a much-anticipated event in the United Kingdom: the total solar eclipse of March 20, 2015. Knowing the eclipse would be widely discussed throughout the country, the company created a campaign that incorporated many types of traditional and new media.

Oreo Eclipse, Next One

Digital signs throughout the country showed an Oreo cookie moving in front of its cream filling, in a real-time parallel with the moon’s movement in front of the sun. Using astronomical data, each sign showed an Oreo cookie moving in a real-time parallel to the position of the moon from the vantage point of the sign’s location.

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On the day of the eclipse, Oreo had purchased millions of display covers on the Sun newspaper (so that Oreo could “cover” the Sun). The ad was so clever it generated media attention of its own, extending its reach beyond readers of that particular newspaper.

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The company also encouraged social media users to create their own Oreo Eclipses by holding an Oreo in front of the sun and taking a picture of it. The hashtag #OreoEclipse trended worldwide as a result.

Oreo Eclipse Selfie

 

Did It Work?

The Oreo Eclipse campaign ensured that, on March 20, 2015, millions of people throughout the UK were thinking about Oreos. The brand’s sales rose 59% in the country from the same period the previous year, and Oreo UK had its highest-selling month ever. So while it was undoubtedly an expensive and complicated effort, the revenue and goodwill generated meant the campaign paid for itself.

For companies that don’t have the marketing budget of a Nabisco, much can still be learned from the Oreo Eclipse. There are many occurrences that we know will happen in the future—sporting events, awards ceremonies, and presidential elections are but a few examples. Creating anticipation for the event (and tying your brand in) is key, and Oreo pulled this off to great effect with its commercials and social media posts in the days leading up to the eclipse (“11 days to go… #OreoEclipse”).

Oreo also made wise use of different platforms, playing to each’s strengths, whether it was traditional advertising (such as newspapers and billboards) or social media. Making the right choices about which types of marketing to use, and knowing what it can and cannot do for you, is worth careful consideration.

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Direct Your Clients to Your Facebook Page On the Mobile App With This Useful Tip

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Direct your clients to your Facebook page on the mobile app with this useful tip.

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Make it as easy as possible, and point your clients to exactly the right place, to get the most engagement with your clients on social media.

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by MATT STOKES | AUGUST 4, 2016

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You’re a business owner who’s all over marketing; you know how important social media is, and you’re always encouraging your customers to Like you on Facebook and to share and engage with your posts.

But you probably also realize how difficult it is to get people on the internet to do anything that involves more than two steps (at most!). So you want to make it as easy as possible for them to engage with your social media campaigns and help build your brand.

Maybe you’re finishing a meeting with a client who is radiating with happiness at the job you’ve done. You ask that client to look you up on Facebook and Like your page or provide a star rating. But the client searches for your Facebook page, and maybe there are 10 other businesses in the world with a similar name, and the client’s not sure which is yours, maybe clicks on the wrong one… at that point, you’ve already lost them.

...Wait, which Billy's Auto is it??
…Wait, which Billy’s Auto is it??

So, how can we make it as easy as possible? There are several tricks, and here is one of the least well-known but most useful:

Use a Link That Sends The User Directly To Your Page Within the Facebook App

You can generate a link that will send a user directly to your Facebook page within the Facebook mobile app. To get this link, you’ll first need your Facebook ID number.

Step 1: Facebook ID Number 

Every Facebook profile has a numeric code that is called its Facebook ID. Often this number can be found in your Facebook page’s URL:

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If your Facebook ID is in your URL, then great! Copy it and move on to Step 2. If not, there’s an easy way to find your Facebook ID. Just copy your page’s entire URL, and then go to http://findmyfbid.com. Paste your URL and the website will retrieve your numeric ID.

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Step 2: Generate a Native Facebook URL 

To get your Native Facebook URL, just paste your numeric ID to the end of this link: fb://profile/

…And that’s it! Try it out for yourself to see that it works.

Bonus Step 3: Purchase an Easy-to-Say-and-Remember Domain Name Just For Facebook

Of course, telling your customer to type out “fb://profile/” is awkward, so it might behoove you to purchase a domain name (You can usually get one for under ten dollars.) and set that domain name to automatically redirect to this link. For example, use your own website’s domain name and add “fb” to the end of it.

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Why Your Mobile Site Needs Google AMP

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Why Your Mobile Site Needs Google AMP

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by MATT STOKES | MAY 6, 2016

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Studies show that 40% of people browsing the internet on their phones will leave a website if it doesn’t load within three seconds. Three seconds! That’s why it’s so important to optimize your site to load quickly on mobile phones.

You don't want your website to look so 2003...
You don’t want your website to look so 2005…

The problem is that much of the web is still stuck in the pre-smartphone era. Websites designed for desktops, with their slideshows, ads, and sidebars, struggle to fit onto a small screen. What’s more, web developers usually load other elements onto the page that the user can’t see, such as tracking codes to determine how the user found the site. All of this clutter makes the page even slower and clunkier to use on a phone than on a computer.

Clearly then, optimizing your site for mobile use is absolutely crucial. To help web developers, Google has rolled out a project called Accelerated Mobile Pages, or Google AMP. AMP is, essentially, HTML code that web developers add to each page on their site to make the page’s content load almost instantaneously on a mobile device—think of it as creating an instant “printer-friendly” page for users.

AMP-optimized pages
AMP-optimized pages

AMP is an “open-source” project, which means that it is free for users and dependent on users to add to and manage it. Learning how to incorporate it into your website is important not just because you want your users to have the best experience visiting your website, but because Google will prioritize sites that are AMP-optimized in its search results. In other words, if you don’t optimize your site for AMP, your site could lose traffic because it could fall beneath AMP-optimized sites in the results of a Google search.

This post, without AMP and with it
This post, without AMP and with it

As mobile becomes the dominant way we consume the internet, staying on top of mobile optimization trends has never been more important.

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