The focus of this lesson is about using persuasive language and techniques in writing to promote or market a place. You'll develop vocabulary to promote a place, use persuasive techniques to promote a location, and identify and use positive language instructions to describe a location for a marketing piece about your hometown or another great location. First, let me provide a little context. We're going to imagine that you have a job as the marketing manager for this resort that has a hotel, a golf course, and a conference center. As you'll soon see, their homepage needs some rewriting. So we're going to look at that as we go through the lesson. At the end of the lesson, you're going to write some short marketing materials of your own, to promote a place, possibly your city, or some other location.

First, who's the target customer for the conference center of this resort? It's not families with children. It's someone who's responsible for planning conferences, either at a company, an organization, or even an event planning company like you were introduced to in course three in negotiations. Basically, you're trying to persuade people who choose where to hold conferences to come to your resort. And you'd like to host two or three day conferences because you can fill a lot of hotel rooms. Now, let's go through what's written here piece by piece. Here's the first part of the description on the website. Do you think it's a good persuasive piece of writing? If you were the person reading the sentences, would you be persuaded to choose this place for your next conference? You probably see the problem with this one. There aren't any strong persuasive words here. And it's what we call wordy because it has a lot of unnecessary words. The passive voice has been used. It's also not really very effective. It'd be better to change the focus there to the companies and the organizations that love having conferences there so the active voice would be a better choice.

Here's the next part. What do you think? The information here is true, but it's just a series of facts. It doesn't connect with or excite your reader. Okay, another one to look at. Hmm, this one is also quite long and it has a lot of superlatives. The most beautiful, the largest, the most experienced staff. So how do I know that this is the truth? So many superlatives may be doubted. How about this one? This one has a lot of positive adjectives, but actually it has so many adjectives that it's hard to read. We're going to go back in a couple of minutes and fix these examples. But first, let's take a step back and talk about some marketing principles.

One of the major problems with all these examples is that they described the conference center that they didn't focus on the customers. First, what do your customers really want? What problems or pain points are they worried about? And what are they willing to pay for? On the flip side of this, from another perspective, what are you really selling? Years ago, one of my marketing professors gave me two examples that I'll pass on. He was talking about a company that sold drills. But what they were really selling wasn't the drill. They were selling the holes that it made. His other example was makeup. A cosmetics company isn't just selling those products. They're selling beauty or hope, right? So when you're marketing something, think about what problem your customers might have that you can solve.

Now, back to the conference center. Think about what you offer from the customer's perspective. What problem does it help solve or help avoid? So first, is that planning conferences is stressful. So your staff can help with that. They know the answers to the customer's questions because they're very experienced. The conference planners are also thinking about the success of the conference. That usually means that participants are able to learn things or share ideas in a comfortable place with reliable equipment. They also want this to be a positive experience for their participants. So the amenities you offer like grade hotel rooms, good food, maybe entertainment are definitely positives. And keep in mind, of course, that your customers are comparing other venues. What's your advantage compared to your competition? What makes you different or even unique?

Now, let's look at those sentences from the website again and look at guidelines for positive language and persuasive techniques in writing marketing pieces. Here's the sentence that was first in the website above. It's not a great way to start. Just like when you use a hook to start a presentation, the first words of what you write should get your reader's attention and make them want to continue reading. So we need to keep it short and easy to read. When we rewrite, we also want to think about using words that appeal to the senses or give people a picture of what we're saying. This first example definitely does not do that. But the second one makes the reader imagine being there. That's much more effective.

Here's another example again, the one with lots of facts. The focus here is totally on what I'm selling. There's no focus on the customer. So turn it around. What benefit does all this space provide for the customer? Here's the way you might rewrite this. This was the example with too many adjectives in a series. It also doesn't show a benefit to the customers. To keep the focus on your customer, use you much more than we. Help them imagine themselves using your facilities successfully. Be careful with the use of superlatives. Show that your place is the best in other ways. This is the time to use facts. They help build credibility. And remember from the first lesson that people are persuaded by other people who are similar to them. Demonstrate your success by mentioning other happy customers.

If you do use superlatives, use it in a quote or an indirect way like in this question. There's some famous research in marketing about several people waiting to make copies at a coffee machine. If someone came up to the first person in line and just said, can I make a copy please? The person using the machine would say, oh, just a minute. No, sorry, I need to finish this. Or I'm almost done. So it didn't work as a way to persuade someone to let you copy. But if someone gave a reason, like, can I make a copy please? I'm in a meeting. We need some copies. The person using the copy machine would stop and let them use it first. And the amazing thing was that worked even when the person's reason was I need to make a copy, which is of course what everyone needed to do at the coffee machine. So this shows that people are more persuaded when they hear or see a reason. So use a reason when you say that you're the best.

So far, we've talked about the benefits you could show to your customers. But they may also have some concerns. If possible, address the concerns. For example, what if my conference center is way out in the country? People may be concerned that there'll be nothing to do or that it's difficult to get there. So what are some ways that you could address this? One is to turn the negative into a positive. You could write some short catchy sentences like these. To end your writing, be direct about the action that you want the reader to take and show the benefit that your customer will get. To summarize, here's a list of the guidelines that we've talked about. And here's a look at a rewrite of the original website. It's much more persuasive. And I think we might get some customers with this one.