Stephen King, Radio Plays and Online Marketing
What do these 3 things have in common?
It might seem a bit of a jump right now, but
there is a link between the writer Stephen
King, Radio plays of the fifties and
internet marketing….
Words
Let me start from the beginning, I was reading
“Danse Macabre” by Stephen King, a book in
which he gives his take on horror fiction.
In one section he is writing about the radio
plays of the early 1950’s, and how they gripped
the listener by not giving you all the details.
The plays would have a background sound of a
plane and the voice actors would set the scene
they were in. The listener would build his own
image of the plane and the problems the actors
had, building his own sense of fear, and place
himself there, that made it all the more
scary, and built the drama for the listener.
The main thing was, as radio is an aural only
medium, the listener filled in the visual side
for his or herself. The result was that they got
a great thrill ride, just from words and sounds.
So that’s Stephen King linked to the radio
plays, so how do we get to internet marketing?
As I was reading about how successful the plays
were on radio, because of the listeners
imagination filling in the detail, I realised
how we are trying to do the same as online
marketers.
When we try to sell a product, we are using words
to try to entice the website viewer into our
little world, just like the radio plays did.
We have to get the potential customer on our
website to fill in the blanks, and visualise
how our product will help him.
In the same way the best radio plays left out
the complete description of what was happening
and the listener filled in the blanks, we need
to leave out some details, and let the viewer
fill his own mind with the picture of how
his problem will look from his particular
perspective and how he’ll feel when it’s solved
by our product.
Our sales pages need to draw the customer
inside our world, but fill in the blanks
from his own one. We need to pique his
imagination just like those radio plays,
and just like Stephen King does in his books,
the most scary of which are the ones where the
reader is left to make the monster real.
In our case that monster is the perceived
problem, and the hero, is you coming in the
nick of time to fell the monster and save the
day with your world beating product.
Douglas Titchmarsh is the owner of several websites
including
and
He also publishes the DEWDigest
e-zine which you can subscribe to by sending an
email to
