A mental strategy for marketing and presentation. This article will focus on how you develop software, web sites, press releases, pamphlets, or marketing copy. Basically, anything you present to the world and want to draw users into.

When offering a new application, a new web site, a new service offering, or anything else you want to drive users to there are three concepts to remember, fortunately they all start with the letter “E.”

1. Entice
   • First you must entice the user to check your offering out. There’s a lot of ways to do this, think of what works best for you. Offer something for free, coupons, a trial, an interesting tag-line, stellar graphics, pose a question, point out that you can fix a problem in the users life. The enticement has to be short, sweet, and to the point. You have to hook the users attention and you only have a few seconds to do it here.
2. Educate
   • So you’ve done a great job enticing the user, the next step is to educate your audience about what you’re offering. You have more time to do this, but don’t take more than 30 seconds up to a few minutes of the users time. The nature of your offering and audience will dictate how much user attention span you have here.

     If you have an offering that is compelling, solves a problem, and is scarce you’ll have more opportunity to talk to the user. If you have an offering that is in a saturated market place you’ll have less attention span.Don’t go overboard here, give the benefits and value proposition to the user as concisely as possible. List your features and benefits, provide cost information, testimonials, quotes, or links to further information such as white papers or case studies.

3. Engage
   • If you’ve gotten the user this far and your offering is compelling you’ve done a great job. Now’s the time to make a call to action. Sign up now, order here, do something, talk to a representative, get a free trial, try the demo. This is where you want to engage your user to an action. Let them explore your offering and learn more.

     Ask the user to make an investment of themselves, even if it’s only a few minutes of their time.Remember to continually engage the user. Give the user opportunities to try different things, learn different aspects, and interact. At this point the user probably wants your offering and they’re making sure it’s something they can actually use. The more engaging your offering the more the user will invest. A positive investment of time and research in your offering will give the user an emotional connection to go with you.

These may seem common sense, I think they are. But it’s the type of thing to keep in mind when writing code or writing copy. If any “E” is weak you’ll lessen your chance of closing the deal and gaining the user. And, of course, having a great offering is the prerequisite to all of this!

Good luck with your ventures!

As you may or may not know, this year I left my position with Spectre Gaming to pursue new ventures. During that time, my significant other, Moniece, and I have been working on a socially conscious project called The Human Known Project. The goal of our efforts is to create a place that is open to the world to share, read, and connect over real-life human stories and experiences. We are building a resource and infrastructure to advance personal knowledge, education, research, the humanities, and communities.

We have a lot of work to do yet, but some people have found the site already even though it’s not officially been publicized. Here’s a few very interesting stories that you should read:

• An Entire Year Alone – This year alone is unique.  It is our first deployment of the Iraq war, having spent the first three years of the conflict in Recruiting.  Before that, the war didn’t exist and there were no fears of separations besides the short term schooling he was to attend.  Our world shifted slightly when the war started…
• The San Diego Firestorm, Staying Behind to Protect Home and Community – On Sunday we first saw… and smelled smoke. It’s O.K. to see smoke, but when you smell it in the wind driven conditions… it is coming at you. On went the TV… and the monitoring began…
• The Heirloom Duck Lamp – While I was growing up, everywhere we moved we had this lamp, my parents had received it as a wedding present. A carved wooden duck as the base, an oval lampshade, and three metal-and-wood cattails “growing” up from the base and visible above the top of the lampshade. If we ran or stomped past the lamp, sometimes the cattails would rattle against the metal parts concealed by the shade. When Mom and Dad got divorced, they both loved that lamp, so they found a solution…

Thank you to everyone that’s been helping with the project and everyone that has come across our site and shared an experience. This resource is about all of us, including you. Please contribute to the effort and make yourself known at The Human Known Project.