As you sit there with your eyes focused on the computer screen in front of you, reading this blog post with your hand on the mouse deciding whether or not further reading will be worth your time, you realize how language patterns can bring enormous power to your advertising. . .
The above sentence is an example of pacing an immediate experience and leading it into a suggestion.
Ericksonian Hypnosis uses pacing and leading to bring on and deepen trance states, as well as making clients more suggestible.
“As you sit comfortably in that brown chair with your feet firmly on the ground, you are listening to my voice and feeling your arms resting on the chair you are starting to relax deeply…”
This is the same principle as the “Agreement Train” in sales. During a sales presentation you start getting your prospect to say “yes” to practically every question you ask. The first questions are the easiest ones to answer first, “You are Ted Marcus, aren’t you?” “Today is August fourteenth, right?” You continue building on agreement because as the prospect keeps saying ‘yes,’ the more of a climate of agreement is built and bigger requests can then be made. “People really need quality these days?” “Everyone likes to pay with credit cards, don’t they?” “So, you’ll be buying this today, right?”
To use pacing and leading in your marketing, start by using words like “As” and “While” and then follow with what your readers are probably experiencing at the moment. Then lead up to a suggestion. You can begin the suggestion with awareness words: “know”, “realize”, “become”, etc.
Another way to pace your prospect’s experience is to empathize with a problem they are currently having. For example, if I were trying to sell my NLP Language Patterns for Advertising to Internet marketers, I’d say something like this:
“You’ve spent all that time and money creating a product and putting up a website, and yet everyday you look in your Clickbank account you see 0 SALES. Every time you look in your PayPal account you see BALANCE: $00.00. You have a good product. You are getting plenty of visitors to your website. The internet gurus said your bank account would be stuffed with cash. Why isn’t anybody buying? The real reason nobody is buying from you is that you’re not convincing enough. You need a way to….”