“Trust me, I'm a marketer”.

Said no one ever.

Because deep down, most people have a slight mistrust of marketing. We know that the goal of marketing is to get us to buy something so we don't fully believe everything we hear.

In fact, one of the best ways I've found to make my marketing believable is to avoid it sounding like marketing.

There seems to be a habit in the marketing world of hyping everything up. Adding superlatives to every sentence.

For me, that immediately causes me to be wary of what I'm reading or seeing.

Of course, on a sales page you expect to be told about the benefits of the product you're looking at and how it can help you. You're reading it expecting to be sold to.

But in emails, videos or blog posts, if you try to sell too overtly it can backfire.

When we read an email, for example, we expect it to give us useful information. We don't mind a gentle pitch to find out more information about a product at the end.

But if the email seems to have been written with the sole purpose of pitching a product to us then we tend to get suspicious. Especially if it feels like the writer is “trying too hard” to tell us how brilliant that product is. We just don't believe it.

Years ago I ran a little campaign where I wanted to offer a free report to people. Initially the email I wrote had a bunch of bullet points about how valuable the report was, how it would teach you a series of wonderful techniques for getting more clients, how you'd get results really fast, etc.

But in the end I got much better results when I toned down the promotion and made it much more low key. I essentially just said “I've written this report. People are getting good results using it. Would you like a copy?”. 

That more low key version did better because it was believable and it didn't feel like I was pushing too hard. I've tried to follow that pattern since.

Take a look at your emails and blog posts as if you were reading someone else's. Do they sound a bit hypey? Or trying a bit too hard?

It may be that making them more low key will get you better results.