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Articles filed in: Marketing
Important
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
It isn’t just your mind that responds when you get an email with the subject line ‘urgent’ or ‘important’. Your heartbeat increases, your muscles tense and your breathing gets faster. You feel bad. Your day is thrown off course, if only for a moment. We hate these emails and resent people who fail to communicate with empathy. And yet our marketing is designed to create urgency. An online search for ‘how to create a sense of urgency’ yields 34 million results. In a commercial world, there is an appetite for knowing how to raise alarm.
How you convince and communicate, is just as important as the way your products are made or your services delivered. The measure of your company isn’t only your conversion rate, profit margin or some other conventional way of keeping score. The measure is how it felt to cross your path. Your goal is to be as proud of the way you’re building, as you are of what you’re building.
Knowing What You Don’t Know
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The most unhelpful assumption we make as marketers is that our customers know why they need our products or services. From there we think our job is to offer proof—to tell people why we are the best alternative. The first rule of innovation, sales and marketing is to understand the customer’s pain points (often before the customer knows them) and then to show her what life will be like in the presence of your product.
Your success is often determined by knowing what you don’t know about your customers, and by being aware of what they don’t grasp about their problems. Double down on understanding before offering proof.
Image by UN Women
What’s Beyond Reach?
When U2 perform a stadium concert, their reach is the entire audience of 60,000 eager fans. As he sings the first note, Bono understands his job is to create an emotional connection with every member of the audience. If the concert goer isn’t changed by the experience, then she might as well have stayed at home and listened to the album on her iPod.
In a commercial world, we spend the majority of our time trying to reach people—often measuring our success by counting the numbers of people who receive our fliers, browse our products or view our pages. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that ‘reach’ is never the end goal. It’s simply the starting point on the road to delivering value and creating an impact.
What’s the real marker of your influence or progress?
Are you investing resources in the things you want to change?
Image by U2 Start
The Forgotten Marketer
The best marketer I ever knew was a magician. Literally. John Knight was legendary, and not just amongst children. His act was the highlight of birthday parties and community events. He could keep a group of sugar high children transfixed. But he also knew a big part of his job wasn’t the magic tricks—it was his ability to reassure and take pressure off frazzled parents come party day.
John Knight’s magic tricks varied very little, and that didn’t matter. His real magic was empathy for his paying customer. Everything he did, from confirming the booking, to turning up early and herding kids to the table to sing happy birthday, said; ‘I see you,’ to his customer. The skill was in how he did it. The way he showed up—his way.
Of course, at the end of the party, John had six more bookings. No advertising required. His work was his message. In a world where we’ve become obsessed with followers and followings, likes and shares, simply doing a great job is underrated. Your work can be your message.
Image by Oliver Gouldthorpe
The Power Of Constraints
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
What’s the best thing about the place where you live?
What word describes your favourite book?
What’s the first thing you tell a friend when you recommend a special restaurant?
What standout experience made your last holiday memorable?
What’s the main reason you shop where you do?
What’s the biggest benefit of flying with this airline and not that one?
Why choose Apple over Android? Coffee instead of tea? Vanilla above chocolate?
If you could tell a prospective customer just one thing about your product or service—what would that one thing be? Constraints can be a powerful way to get to the heart or what’s important to both you and the people you hope to serve.
Image by Edwin Bachetti
What The Best Marketers Know
filed in Marketing
The call centre operator insists ‘this is not a cold call’. She knows time is running out, so she desperately accelerates her sales pitch—speaking without pausing to either breathe or listen. She was trained to believe it’s possible to close the sale if she can just impart all the information in her script. Sadly, she’s been misled.
The best marketers know permission is a requirement, not an option.
That people rarely make decisions based on the facts
And stories create value.
The best marketers know patience trumps pressure and trust takes time.
That generosity and empathy are underrated.
And there is no shortcut to mattering.
The best marketers know every day starts with a choice.
That we can choose to be the best or take the shortcut.
Which will you choose today?
Image by World Bank
Flipping The Focus Group
filed in Brand Naming, Marketing
We’ve been using focus groups for eighty years in an attempt to understand how to create things people want to buy and messages they want to hear. And while we question what our customers like and what demographic they fit into, we rarely think about who they are beyond the choices they make. What if we flipped our usual pattern of trying to understand to be understood on its head?
Seven Customer-Focused Questions
1. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about your customer?
2. What three words would you use to describe him?
3. What do you like best about him?
4. What are his strengths and weaknesses?
5. How does working with or creating for him make you feel?
6. If you could change one thing about him what would that be?
7. What else can you say about him?
When we change how we think about our customers everything we do changes too.
Image by Carol P
Impression Vs. Intention
The ladies changing room at the gym first thing in the morning can feel like a mean environment. It’s every woman for herself as we each carve out a floor tile’s worth of space to change. Spots in front of mirrors are gold. Hairdryers and straighteners as tightly held as premium real estate. The amount of time we spend fussing over our appearance seems longer these days. Let’s blame it on ‘the Instagram factor’. We now prime our faces before applying makeup and iron our hair after drying. We stare, unseeing at our reflections. We are all sharp elbows and hard edges.
Beautiful and ugly at once.
We work on our appearance to make an impression, forgetting that lasting impressions are more than skin deep. People don’t only judge us by our appearance. They get a sense of who we are from the way we move through the world. And so it goes at work and in business too.
There was a little tasting table at our local organic shop. Every day there was something different and delicious to try. On Saturdays and Sundays, the table created a party atmosphere. It was laid out as if to welcome guests with dips and vegetables, olives and gluten-free bread, dark chocolate and raw slices. Then one weekend, without warning things changed. Cutbacks. Since there was no measurable return on investment, the generosity would have to be scaled back. When the table changed the energy in the shop changed too. There was a little less joy and community. People became shoppers, more business-like, quieter, efficient. They didn’t linger.
We get to choose how we show up every day. We can be all sharp elbows, jockeying for position in front of the mirror or we can intentionally bring the kind of energy that changes everything into the room. Things like clean shopfronts, great design and beautiful packaging can attract customers, enhance credibility and build trust. But they’re not the reason people keep coming back.
Image by Alex Naanou
How To Get Better At Pitching
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Every day we fail to convince people about the value we can deliver. For every yes, we get ten no’s. Why? We’re quick to blame the quality of our ideas or our storytelling when we fail. But sometimes we fail because we’re speaking to the wrong person at the wrong time. Rejections often happen because we haven’t qualified the buyer before trying to close the sale, so we need to get better at doing the groundwork.
Five Questions To Answer Before Pitching
1. Am I pitching to the right person?
Often you’re pitching to someone who doesn’t have the authority to make the decision. Check.
2. What’s the underlying need (read fear) of the person I’m speaking to?
You must understand the client’s primary pain point before explaining how you can solve their problem. Question.
3. Is the prospective client ready to buy?
Sometimes the person wants to have a conversation about their challenge. They may not be in the market for a solution. Query.
4. Does your prospective customer’s budget align with your fee?
Make sure the numbers stack up before you have a conversation. Ask.
5. Why you (in particular)?
It’s important to know how the prospective client heard about you and why they felt compelled to contact you. A recommendation is different from a Google search. A reputation that precedes you trumps stumbling on your LinkedIn profile. Enquire.
We spend a lot of time telling our story to people who have no intention of buying. As my friend James Victore says, your work is a gift. Make sure you’re devoting your energy to the people who do want your help.
Image by Steven Zwerink
The Value Of An Internal Brand Narrative
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
In a commercial world, we use stories tactically to convince and convert prospective customers. We work hard to change minds and capture hearts, with persuasive words and evocative images in an attempt to make an emotional connection with the people we want to reach. The stories we tell our customers form our external narrative.
We’re less aware of how the stories we tell ourselves shape our sense of meaning, purpose and agency about the journey we’re on. Our internal narrative creates value by helping us to make sense of the difference we’re here to create. It develops our brand’s identity, influences our behaviour and ultimately helps us to differentiate and realise our potential.
It’s easy to describe features and benefits and far harder to demonstrate what you stand for and why. Your goal should never be to invite a like-for-like comparison. It should always be to affirm the truth about what makes your brand incomparable and worthy of the customers you hope to serve.
Image by Arjun. V