Style D, or: I’m the boss here – even if it’s your fan page or your offer!
Style D (dominant) is the most directive and authoritative of all the styles. It has its own charm, and once we accept it and learn to play D’s games with it, we gain a very good client.
D is a born boss, even if it currently isn’t one at work or at home – all the more reason it may want to throw its weight around online. The world needs it, so D has no time to read offers stretched across five screens’ worth of scrolling. It is bold and direct, so if it has no time, it says so outright. Unfortunately, not everyone is able to appreciate this, and it sometimes happens that D’s honesty is treated as an insult.
Style D – quick decisions
This is borne out by the story of a certain blogger who had already built a well-known brand and sold her flagship online course twice a year. During the campaign for one edition of the course, in the recurring newsletter she sent to her subscribers, she shared the following story:
One of her subscribers, having received a marketing email with a course offer that ran across several screens and required constant scrolling, wrote to the blogger honestly and directly, in an email that went roughly like this: „I want to buy your course, I’ve made up my mind, I don’t have time to scroll and read five screens of descriptions, just give me the price, I want to pay.”
Outraged by this message, the blogger wrote about it in her newsletter, informing her readers that, faced with such impertinence, she had simply removed the email’s author from her mailing list. In doing so, she failed to sell the course to the very person who so badly wanted to buy it, and she informed her neither of this nor of the reasons behind her decision. The author of the email in question certainly never found out about them either, because the blogger wrote about it not to her, but to her other subscribers, who reacted exactly as she had hoped, praising the decision she had made.
How many subscribers did the blogger lose after this confession? I don’t know, because I was one of them.
This situation shows how easy it is to offend someone with a style different from our own, and how hard it can sometimes be to understand how people with a style unlike ours think and function. After all, the author of the email had in fact told the blogger her problem: a lack of time. And the course, aptly enough, was about… effective time management (or, as it is nicely if oddly put, managing yourself within time). The blogger – the author of a course teaching others how to manage their time – took the potential client’s problem (the very problem her course was meant to solve) as a personal affront. Her newsletter subscribers are supposed to struggle with a lack of free time, yet they must somehow find the time to read her offer, meticulously crafted to require scrolling through five screens. Isn’t that paradoxical?
Such clashes happen when one D runs into another D. Each of them demands recognition of its own importance, which will be difficult for both.
How to do it right?
Another blogger from the same circle drew a lesson from the whole situation and, at the very top of the landing page selling her own course, wrote: „If you don’t have time to read the whole offer, click this link to go straight to payment.” Can it be done? It can!
So if you are creating content for D, let it make the decision, give it the right not to read your entire offer, even if you put a lot of effort into it. After all, your goal is to sell your offer, right? Not to earn possible expressions of goodwill from people who may not want to buy anything from you at all.
When writing for D, give it two or three options to choose from. Let it make decisions at every stage of reading your offer. Also provide a money-back guarantee in case it is dissatisfied with the purchase, in case the product or service it buys fails to meet its expectations. There is a slim risk that your product will completely miss the mark of D’s expectations, but it is equally highly likely that D will not want to waste time – from its point of view – „fooling around” with complaints and will not want to come across to anyone as a penny-pincher.
Though other styles sometimes find it hard to believe, Style D, if it wants something, knows it fairly quickly. Because D makes decisions fast. Keep that in mind when creating content for D. Just as when you write for I, so when you write for D, give it several ways to make the purchase within your offer – that is, place a call-to-action button in several different spots. And enjoy a quickly closed sale.
If D reaches a point in the offer with a ticking clock, it will in fact make little difference to it, because D made its purchasing decision much earlier.
Keywords that reach Style D effectively
Each style has its own keywords. For D, the fundamental one will be the word best and its synonyms – first, leader, original, leading, branded, top-quality, high-class, prestigious, renowned, award-winning as well as the words: fast, decision, now, already.