Occasionally, I get to speak to business owners who are interested in learning how to make marketing work for them. I start at a strategic level so we don’t get lost in tactics but occasionally provide some practical tips too. I want the audience to see the big pictures and themes so they have a framework to market their brands and services.
Eight essential marketing tips
- Direct Communications. Whenever you can communicate more directly with leads and customers, the greater your chance of communicating value. Indirect or mediated relationships are more difficult for most companies.
- You earn customers every day. You never HAVE customers, you only sell them today and must gain their confidence tomorrow. Taking existing customers for granted is the fastest way to see sales declines. Assume you come into your work and have to earn every customer’s confidence each morning. Consider that you only rent your customers each day and then you must earn their trust tomorrow with the next shipment.
- Don’t talk about being trustworthy, prove it. In every interaction within your business, you must demonstrate trust. You can talk about it in an ad or write brilliant copy for your website or social media posts. Prove it through actions on the small and big decisions you make.
- No one wants to read a lot of copy. Be succinct, simple and to the point in fewer words. Attention spans are short. My rule of thumb is to assume that the majority of your engagements with customers is fifteen seconds.
- Marketing is the art of communicating how you can solve someone’s need, problem or pain. Until a customer asks, don’t describe all the features. They need to know how you will make their job, their work, their day or their life easier.
- Entertain before you educate. No matter what the marketing tactic, you need to be pleasantly disruptive not boring. Customers don’t give you permission to talk to them unless you capture their imagination or demonstrate that you get their pain. If you gain their attention, then you can begin to give them more information. By starting with something fun that grabs attention, you then get to educate your prospect about how you can be helpful to them. Start with the fun.
- Buying isn’t rationale. Customers can tell you lots of reasons why they buy from you, but the truth is, no one knows or understands what moves someone to act. If you pretend its rationale, you’ll spend too much time being logical. Focus on grabbing attention through emotions.
- Brands are promises. No one is loyal to a brand. We buy out of habits. But to become a habit, you must make a powerful promise and then live up to it. The all women’s car repair shop has made a promise that they will treat their customers with compassion and patience. If you like the experience, you will hold them to that promise on every visit. If your bank says in its ads that it wants you to be happy, the moment they annoy you, the brand is tarnished. Promises matter.
Here is a bonus tip that is a powerful lesson to learn:
- You need a permission slip. Attention from a prospect or a new customer is a form of permission that allows you to share information with them. Seth Godin wrote brilliantly about permission marketing more than twenty years ago, yet so much marketing is still an interruption. A phone call during dinner is an interruption. An appointment to speak to someone is permission. When you are interrupting someone, it is unlikely anyone will listen.
I hope these tips are helpful. They only work if you put them into action.
Need help getting your marketing efforts to produce results? I work with businesses of all sizes to help them grow. Let’s connect. 919 720 0995 or jeffreylynnslater@gmail.com
Photo Credit: Fanny Elizabeth Slater, Food Network Host, Cookbook author, my daughter.
