Must-Reads on Persuasion Architecture for Serious Marketers

By Stephen Palmer • November 4th, 2009 • Email This Post • Print This Post

Persuasion architecture is central to any online marketing campaign or strategy. Every serious marketer needs to understand persuasion architecture in depth and be able to apply it.

Why? For these simple, yet often-overlooked reasons:

1. Website conversion is more important than website traffic.

You can have a million hits to your website, but if those visitors don’t actually convert to leads and sales, traffic is meaningless.

We constantly encounter companies whose main focus is driving traffic. When we analyze what they’re doing, we discover that they haven’t built the core elements needed to capitalize on traffic.

**2. Therefore, building for persuasion comes before driving traffic.**

Imagine trying to advertise a restaurant before it was built. You put out radio ads telling people to go to the restaurant. They drive to the location to discover an empty lot.

Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Then why does driving traffic consume your marketing efforts — especially before you’ve architected a persuasive website?

Don’t waste your time, effort, and money on driving traffic until you’ve absorbed the following must-reads on persuasion architecture:

White Papers

Persuasion Architecture: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing by FutureNow
Getting Started With Building Personas by FutureNow

Online Articles

Books

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg
Call to Action by Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg

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Stephen Palmer is a marketing consultant and persuasive writer with KGaps Consulting, a co-founder of The Center for Social Leadership, and the New York Times best-selling co-author of Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity.

He is a liberal-arts graduate of George Wythe University and a graduate of the “non-traditional business school” Wizard Academy.

Stephen resides in Round Rock, Texas with his gorgeous wife Karina, awesome son Alex, and princess daughters Libby, Avery, and Laela. Stephen and Karina blog about their magical life on Palmer Journeys.