Ron Brauner’s Blog

Ron Brauner’s Blog reminds us of “one of the most successful marketing headlines of all time” in Free Marketing Headlines. What is it? The customer testimonial. However, getting customer testimonials can be awkward and even embarrassing. When asked directly by someone to say something nice about them, can you say no, even if you want to? And you don’t want to put customers in a difficult position. Here’s a technique I recently used for a client, which produced results that bowled us over (and not just the one from the… Read MoreAvoiding awkwardness in getting customer testimonials »

Thank you so much for all your flattering comments about last week’s series of articles about the state of online marketing in UK industrial companies. I’ll try to write a few more pieces like that which are closer to home in the future. In the meantime, back to work. I’ve read entire books on writing sales letters, and some of them have even been worth reading. But to fill an entire book on this subject you need to get far too detailed; the really good stuff can be summarised in… Read MoreMaking a sales letter truly great »

Sometimes I link to articles in this blog almost as a way of bookmarking them for myself. Now, I’ve got whole books on writing sales letters, and I’ve even read one or two, but once you get to whole-book-levels of detail, you can’t see the wood for the trees. Here then is Ron Brauner’s Blog on 8 Ways to Improve Your Sales Letters. Nothing revelatory, just good common sense in a two-minute read, and all the better for that. Just like a good sales letter, I guess.

I regularly look through the trade mags which have made it well past the date by which they were supposed to have been blown away by the internet. About half of those which I worked on in the decade or more I was a print magazine editor have now disappeared, but others seem quite healthy (and I’m glad, because a lot of old friends work for them). However, when I study the advertisements which keep them going, I do get the impression that the majority are placed by people who… Read MoreAdvertising: powered by inertia »