Be Evil, But Not Lame Evil - Carney
The Daily Carnage

Be Evil, But Not Lame Evil

There’s a difference.

7 Ways to Improve Your Marketing by Harnessing the Power of Evil

For some, marketing is inherently evil. As in, our main goal is persuading people away from free will so that they do our bidding. Sounds dastardly when you put it that way… Hey, it’s Friday, why not embrace your dark side

Today’s Listen will show you how. Comically taking some tips from Dr. Evil himself, this 9-minute podcast cleverly weaves “evil” into the marketing narrative to show you how to get more customers.

  • (3:00) #1: Ask for the order. Boost a response just by simply issuing a CTA that’s clear and well-defined. Tell people what to do next, like “Enter email here” or “Click here”.
  • (4:38) #2: Offer an unfair guarantee. When you offer a freakishly strong guarantee, you take the risk upon yourself instead of the customer.
  • (5:17) #3: Give them a reason to act today. Like an exclusive, limited, or time-sensitive offer.
  • (6:11) But, like, don’t lie. Just because you’re evil doesn’t mean you’re immoral. Fake scarcity is not only evil, it’s a lame evil.
  • (6:45) #4: Have higher standards. The quality of product, service, business ethics, brilliant complexity, etc., for example.
  • (7:45) #5: Use secret language to enthrall people to your will ~ Spooky.
  • (8:05) The two secret trigger words that turn prospects into customers… Click here to see what they are. 
  • (8:30) #6: Use the power of numbers. Numbered list posts are more powerful, and that’s just how it is. 
  • (9:11) #7: Deploy the unfair offer. If you make an offer for something your market really, really wants, it takes almost no persuasion to get your prospects to take it.

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Get 10,000 Hyper-Targeted Website Visitors in 3 Weeks

We gotta ask you a question: is your content attracting the right audience? If your content isn’t attracting the right people, then you’re just wasting your time…and money.

This is the problem that Modernweb was running into. They were creating content, but weren’t writing content for the right audience.

So how did they fix it?

Modernweb hired a content marketing agency, Grow & Convert. G&C took a serious look at the previous posts that were published on Modernweb’s blog. They noticed that the content was way too technical for their target audience. It was great at attracting lower-level people who weren’t decision makers in their target organizations.

Once they figured that out, it was time to get down to business. Here’s what G&C did to create a new content plan that resulted in 10,000 new website visitors in just 3 weeks.

  1. Start with extensive user research. If you’re just guessing as to who your customers are, you might be way off.
  2. Figure out your target customer’s actual day-to-day pain points. In this case, the decision makers weren’t focused on technical issues like Modernweb thought.
  3. Build a content strategy. They started from scratch with this and pivoted from the old content strategy. Modernweb’s target audience wanted to hear stories from other industry experts who had solved their pain points. This was the jumping off point for their new content strategy.
  4. Get in touch and interview other industry experts.
  5. Promote that content. If you’re publishing and not promoting, are you really even publishing? (Obviously yes, but you need to get your content out there so people read it.) We’ve written about content promotion a lot. It’s vital to your content marketing!

So much more in this case study that we couldn’t cover…

10 of the Best Ads from August

Maybe it was the cosmic power of the eclipse, but August showed us so many intriguing and creative ads. (Not to mention the literal power of the eclipse that gave brands the inspiration to promote alongside the phenomenon.)

In fact, a lot of the ads featured in HubSpot’s list, part of today’s Watch, made it into the Carnage last month for being so rad. Plus a handful of other innovative creations, like a tower of sugar, a stop-action clock made with 30,000 different objects, and JetBlue’s funny reminder to take a vacation. See what made the list!

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Take me to the nearest bar.”

Ads from the Past

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