Tips for Web Marketing Advocacy and Persuasion
Guidelines for Generating Traffic and How to Get Consumers to Act
Apr 15, 2009
To enjoy the full benefits of online marketing, corporate firms need to, first of all, be concerned about how to generate maximum visits to their advertising or corporate websites. Such visitors will usually be potential consumers or customers. It is only when potential consumers or target audience visit the specific advertising, advocacy or persuasion websites that they can be made aware of what is being offered and then be persuaded to act or buy a product.
Generating maximum traffic alone will, however, not be the key for successful online marketing though it is an essential first step. The next step, which may produce the full benefits of online advertising, is the strategies for persuading site visitors to act after being persuaded about the benefits of a product or service. Some basic principles of persuasion on the web may therefore be useful
Basic Principles of Internet Marketing Promotion
Increasing sales through the promotion of Internet marketing, should be viewed as involving a chain of marketing communications elements. The chain should typically include the following elements: good website content; Maximum traffic from potential consumers; persuasion through emotional and passion-generating content; and consumer action (buying or being influenced to join a course).
To ensure effective internet marketing promotion, therefore, writers and designers of corporate websites or online advertisers, should be well informed about what constitutes informative messages, advocacy messages and marketing messages.
Differences Between Information, Persuasion and Marketing
Using the prescriptions of Web writing specialist, Crawford Kilian (1999), the difference among the three concepts of information, persuasion and marketing, as they relate to online marketing can be illustrated as follows: Information is telling people how many Hotels are in New York; advocacy messages will be persuading tourists or travelers to visit New York because there are good hotels there to meet their needs; and marketing messages will be persuading people to make a reservation at one of those hotels in New York. Online marketing content producers should therefore know how to couch their messages in other to meet the objectives of businesses.
Three Top Elements of Web Persuasion
Web writing specialist, Crawford Kilian, identified the following as the three aspects of persuasion on the web:
• Logical argument
• Emotional appeal and
• Credibility
Kilian is of the view that, changing the beliefs of readers may be hard and requires making them trust that their interests are being served by what they read. When the beliefs of readers are changed by what they read on the site, that change in belief could equally lead them into changing their thinking about a particular brand and beginning to have a positive attitude or mindset for the advertised brand. Changing the beliefs of potential consumers is a good first step but the crucial stage is getting them to act in the form of buying a new product or deciding to try the product.
Accomplishing these two essential steps of getting readers to change their beliefs and getting them to act, requires the marketing strategies of having to come out with logically persuasive arguments backed by supporting reasons; having messages with strong emotional appeals ( those that are capable of invoking ideas, images and passions of readers); and, as recommended by Kilian, using readers’ language and register that they are comfortable with, as a way of enhancing the credibility of messages.
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