Wednesday, August 28, 2019

A Little Marketing 101

Okay, so FB has this thing now where you can use bold and italics in group posts.  Which is cool.  (Wish they'd let us use them for personal and page posts, too.)   But I've noticed certain people going a little BOLD crazy out there.  (And this holds true for non-FB marketing, too, btw.)

Just because you can put stuff in bold, doesn't mean you should put everything in bold.  Bold is for emphasis.  So having your entire marketing verbiage in bold means you're emphasizing everything.  And therefore nothing sticks out.  Same with italicsBold and italics together should be used very sparingly. 

Now, look at the above paragraph.  Which words do you see first?  You want to pick certain words to draw your audience's eyes to.  Those emphasized words are the ones that will stick in a consumer's head. 

verbiage TITLE verbiage verbiage verbiage.  On sale now!  more verbiage.  Only 99c.  links and junk and hashtags.

verbiage TITLE verbiage verbiage verbiage.  On sale now!  more verbiage.  Only 99c.  links and junk and hashtags.

See?

Your brain picks up on the bolded words better in the second example because those words stick out.  'Oh, look,' it says, 'Title is on sale for only 99c'.  And you'll be more likely to go back and read the verbiage if the bolded words are interesting to you.

Plus, I look at entirely bolded posts as input overload.  EVERYTHING IS SO EMPHASIZED that my brain skips past it.  (I do the same thing with all caps, so sorry about that.)

When I see an entire marketing post in bold, it makes me sad.  I'm not sure what the thought is there.  Perhaps they're thinking that their whole post in bold will make them stick out from other posts.  I don't think it works that way.   As you scroll along reading stuffs, each post is an individual thing, not part of a whole.  If it was part of the whole, then I guess emphasizing all of your message would make it stand out from the rest.  Like if I bolded this entire paragraph, it would stick out from the rest of the post.  But when you're in the middle of a bunch of individual posts?  :shrug:

Think of emphasizing elements like seasoning on your food - sometimes a little goes a long way.  Choose your emphasis wisely and you might just get more attention.  Jus' sayin'.

Lord knows, I am not the goddess of all things marketing.  This is my opinion.  Take it for what it's worth.

By the way, Once Upon a Djinn is still on sale.  And I'll talk about the success or failure of that sometime next week.

1 comment:

  1. I'm with you on this! And I keep forgetting that you can do that in FB groups because I don't do the groups very often. Ah well. I wish they'd make the ability avalable on pages. That would be helpful. Personal profile pages? Eh. I seldom post on mine, but for marketing (which FB is REALLY trying TO LIMIT!!!, it would be helpful because, HELLO FB! Business pages ARE for marketing!!!

    And now you have a post for another day--the excessive use of EXCLAMATION POINTS 😜

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