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Articles filed in: Marketing
There’s Only One Way To Get A Different Outcome
We should have known as soon as we walked in. The place was empty, not a soul in sight apart from two lone waiters who pounced. Every other breakfast place in the city was teeming with life and overflowing with plates of over easy eggs. This place was dead.
We stayed because we didn’t have the heart to back out, but instantly regretted the decision when the food and the bill arrived. The waiters having fewer customers to keep the place afloat upsold and charged handsomely for sides of fruit and freshly squeezed juices (which weren’t).
We left feeling sorry for them (it must be soul destroying to work there), and more than a little ripped off.
It might be easy to nab a one-off table of rookie tourists but that’s hardly a brilliant marketing strategy.
If nobody shows up or something is not working then there’s a reason. It’s your job to find out what that reason is and fix it. If you keep doing the same thing you did yesterday and expecting a different result, or even a miracle tomorrow you’re going to be both disappointing and disappointed.
Image by Tom Ellefsen.
Buy Versus Buy Into
Don’t be the brand that people buy.
Be the one they ‘buy into’.
Image by Peter Morgan.
What Don’t You Do?
It’s easy to rattle off the features of your product or benefits of your service.
Which means it’s not hard for the competition to do that too.
Far more difficult to stand for something and be willing to stand out because of what you don’t do.
It turns out that time and again telling the story of what’s missing and how you are least like the competition is a far better marketing strategy.
Image by Eric Konon.
Anticipation Is Your Point Of Differentiation
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Brand new guest rooms, sleek kitchenettes, minibars and bright, new bathrooms were only the start of the boutique hotel’s story. The ‘dream pillow menu’ gave me six choices from buckwheat to hypo-allergenic, duck down to Swedish memory foam.
And yet…..there was no chance of an early check in after a 30 hour journey. No mechanism to anticipate or to care in a way that the competition doesn’t.
Anyone can take instructions. Every business can get customer to tick boxes and say exactly what they want. The thing that’s scarce is what the customer didn’t know they needed or wanted in the first place.
The brands that succeed understand that the ability to anticipate, and act upon what isn’t already known is what makes them stand head and shoulders above all the rest.
Image by Amanda Tipton.
What Your Clients Need Now
They need you to ask the right questions, not to have all the answers.
They need your generosity, not jargon.
They need the truth.
They need what works for them, not what makes you look good.
They need faith in you and your intention.
They need to be empowered more than they need to be helped.
Image by Skinnyde.
Petrol Station Flowers
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
‘Petrol station flowers’ never quite hit the mark.
It’s obvious to both the giver and the receiver that they were unplanned….an afterthought.
That the giving of them lacked the thing that’s more important than the blooms themselves.
The intention.
We care about the intention as much as the gift, often more.
Your intention matters in business as it does in life. It costs nothing to care more than the competition. And the flip side of course is that if you care more, you not only have the opportunity to change how your customers feel, you also get to do work that matters to you too.
Image by scorpians and centaurs.
Confusing Price With Value
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
There’s a company here in Perth charging $70 an hour to weed gardens. Just weeding, and perhaps a light trim of garden shrubs. Nothing more. They don’t mow lawns (there are already thousands of guys doing that).
They do the job that nobody else wants to take on. The job that plenty of time poor professionals with a particular worldview need to get done. $70 is a bargain to these people. It’s worth every cent for the feeling they get when they pull into the driveway after a twelve hour day.
The price you charge has little to do with how much it costs to make the product or provide the service.
It has everything to do with the value your deliver to the people who need you enough to care.
Image by Billy Liar.
The Rocket Artist
We went to a new cafe by accident today. We were late and didn’t feel like queuing for a table at our regular place. Donny, they guy wearing the apron who came to clear the table recognised we were new and asked how we’d enjoyed the coffee. We struck up a conversation about where they sourced the coffee, the quality of their grinders….four times that of grinders at a normal cafe.
It turned out that Donny was the owner. Unlike other owners who were working in back offices on their automation, online booking system and honing their business model, Donny was focused on two things. Producing a great product and making people feel like they belonged. Donny understands that his business and his art is about making people feel, not just making people do. He knows what’s scarce.
Business should be more art than science. More about people than balance sheets.
The job of every business owner is to be rocket artist, to work out what’s scarce and then to do that. If you deliver on what’s scarce the money will follow.
Image by Photographer23.
Marketing Is….
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
mar-ket-ing
noun
1. the act of buying or selling in a market.
2. the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing and selling.
Actually marketing is…..
finding ways to tell the story of what you do so that the people who want and need it will care.
Image by Brett Davis.
Crafting Your Intention
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing
I met a really passionate financial planner recently who was a bit stuck about how to craft a 30 second pitch to deliver to the people he met at networking events. The problem was that while he was agonising over finding the right words he lost the ability to communicate his intention.
If you have only one goal in mind when you meet someone new and that goal is to leverage that interaction into business then your pitch won’t work.
People don’t just buy the words you say. They buy into your intention. The people you’d kill to do business with don’t want to hear a polished thirty second pitch. They want to know about the real you.
Having a perfect pitch…the perfect words all set to go might make you feel better, but that’s not the point.
Think about how your pitch makes the person you’re talking to feel.
People want the conversation and the connection, not scripts and dialogue. They want you to earn their trust.
More than anything what they want to hear is your story. Not just another forgettable pitch.
Image by ruminatrix.