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So, ancient Roman Cicero, who was kind of a perv, was also a spectacular speaker; moreover, he was an excellent persuader.  With a prodigious ability to entertain and manipulate his audience, Cicero seemed to effortlessly massage them over to join his position.  This is also the hidden secret dream of every marketer…or at least it should be.  Inbound marketing or content marketing, or whatever you may call it, lives and dies on the non-disruption invitation model of attraction.  While this is a wonderful new and fresh way of interacting with your leads, prospects, and clients it’s a very old method of persuasion.  If he was alive today Cicero would be the foremost marketing expert mainly because of three interesting points he discovered.  To quote Jay Heinrich’s wonderful book Thank you for Arguing, “[Cicero] came up with three goals for persuading people, in order of increasing difficulty.”

1. Stimulate your audience’s emotions

This is pretty broad and less difficult than one may assume.  All this usually requires is to appeal to the audience’s fears or amusement.  If you talk to a CEO about a possible grim future due to countless variables, he will be more likely to listen to new ideas and research that support solutions.  Similarly with a person who is bored, amuse them and they will drop their defenses and accept you more openly.

2. Change the audience’s mind

This is, as stated, a little more difficult.  Here you have to convince your attentive audience that your position (or product/service) is right for them.  The best and simplest way to do this is to provide proof.  Appealing to the mind with trends research, survey results, and solid stats are an excellent way of changing opinions.  Use words like ‘fact’, ‘value’, ‘truth’, and the most important word in marketing, ‘YOU’.

3. Get the audience to act

Create inspiration to follow your calls-to-action.  This really starts with the philosophy of your organization.  If your message is simple and easy to understand it’s going to make this phase easier.  Think of your audience as sharing the skittishness of a young deer in the wild.  Don’t approach too boldly,  maintain a positive energy, and, heck, hold something in your hand they want. If a layperson can’t gather what you do  by looking at your home page from 15 feet away that’s a good reason to re-evaluate your brand message.

It’s foolish to overcomplicate things and these are some very simple ways to visualize your goals.  One of the real advantages to these three goals is that they take into account the self interested incentive of the audience, that is, concerning yourself with that with which they are concerned.  The reality is that you have to manipulate people to get them to let you help them.  They have defenses that can create a non-action that can prove to be more hurtful, and if you can both help them and serve them, that manipulation becomes a part of the service itself.

How have you inspired action in your audience?  Leave us a comment with your tips.