There’s a saying that goes,”If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.” Does that apply to your marketing strategies and campaigns? Are you still doing the same thing expecting new results?

Textbook marketing approaches can go a long way toward building product sales and images. They can be just good enough to get noticed, but they might not produce the results you’re after. If you’re ready to go beyond what you learned in school or even by trial and error, there is an area of study worth paying attention to.

What is that area of study?

The real secret to marketing success lies in understanding human beings. People are complex creatures that are often compelled to believe they are ruled by their minds, logic and reason. To an extent, this is true.

People, however, are also highly motivated by influences that are much less black and white in nature. They will purchase products and take particular actions if they are appealed to on an emotional or want-based level.

Tap into both areas with a marketing campaign and the results can stagger. Use emotion or storytelling in your copy and see what happens to your conversions.

Learning how to successfully market in a manner that falls outside the traditional box is not necessarily easy. There are ways to learn the ropes and gain insight from those who have mastered the art of making a decent product one that people will not pass by.

If you are ready to change your marketing approach and take campaigns beyond expectations, human nature and the forces that influence it should be your focus of study.

Speak to the person behind the “customer” and you’ll learn more about both your market and your customers.

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There’s a dark cloud looming on the horizon. It’s gathering in energy and getting bigger as we speak. It’s as destructive as a tornado and just as indiscriminate. What I’m talking about is the next G-Slap; be ready for big changes from the monster of search engines around the first of the year. They’ve already been tinkering with the algorithms and are definitely trending away from current PR and content rich based results. Early next year, though you may have noticed it already if you’re sharp enough, the big G will display rankings based on the intent of the searcher. This means that your content will be less relevant if you’re not:

1. Geo-targeting (G is doing this already based on users IP whether the user is signed in or not)
2. Relevance - generically speaking, if a room full of searchers were to type java into the query box, some would be looking for software, some would be looking for drinks and yet others would be looking for travel sites.
3. Using video on your site
4. Preparing for the changes NOW.

Getting prepared for the next ominous  G-slap is an adventure in speculation. One line of thought says that if you concentrate your marketing on single keywords you may want to offer content for the other possible synonymous uses of your keywords. It means a shift in methodology, but for the studious and adaptive marketers out there that can make the necessary changes and move ahead of the trend it can be the difference between having top ranking for you kw’s today and being off the chart completely overnight or keeping your top listings by adapting and overcoming. The proliferation of “scraper sites” and “spam sites” that steal the top rankings by virtually scraping the content from its competitors and republishing it, most times without proper credit to the original authors, has prompted the change. They have managed to skew the results based on current trends at G and the other major search engines. When you think about it, this change will mean even more success for the marketer that is savvy enough to ride the wave. It’s kind of like the analogy for marketing to baby-boomers; the bowling ball in the garden hose. Baby-boomers make up the vast majority of the demographic of buyers that Internet Marketers target. When those boomers pick up on a new trend it’s like a bowling ball in a garden hose, thus the .com millionaire boom of the 90’s. Get in at the upswing of the trend and you’ll ride a very profitable and somewhat predictable course. Transfer that thought over to this looming change and you can see how the change SHOULD actually bring even MORE targeted traffic, intent on BUYING your products. Wouldn’t you rather have the searcher that was looking for your new java software product be the first at your site? This change will ultimately alter the way that Internet Marketers promote products. The question is whether or not we should do anything at all. This new way of presenting search results only make a difference by weeding out those less targeted results for a particular searcher based on their search and usage histories. I think it will be a win/win/win situation.