The best marketing campaign ever?

Sometimes humour is a great way of getting a message across.

Apart from being an amusing cartoon, it does demonstrate that the window repair company understand what the 'A' in 'AIDA' stands for, although their unorthodox marketing strategy will probably start to untangle at the 'Desire' stage. (Who would have the desire for their products after that 'intro'?)

As authors our first objective is to gain attention for our book(s). If we are using tools such as Twitter to grab that attention, then the message has to stand out from the crowd. That is a huge challenge with only 140 characters to play with, particularly if 20 of those characters are being used to create a link to your book. 

Three strategies often adopted to grab attention, which utilise an approach called disruption, are:

Location: Placing adverts or messages in very unexpected situations. I once ran a full-page newspaper advert upside down. It certainly created a spike in sales, but after requests from other advertisers, who wanted to do the same thing, the paper refused to run any more adverts upside down again. Coming up with an idea before your competitors is always an advantage, as ideas can quickly go stale.

Shock factor: Grabbing people's attention can be done easily with a shock. The cartoon above being an example. Shock is a dangerous strategy if it goes wrong, but get the balance right, and it can have dramatic results on sales.

Personalisation: It's hard to ignore something if it is aimed at you specifically. Many authors run blogs similar to daily newspapers, and their tweets state 'top stories today from ________' Imagine the blank space contains your Twitter handle. Will you click the link? You bet.

I hope this post has inspired you to think of different ways to grab the attention of your target market.