|
|
The Marketing Secret that is Widely Known but Rarely Practiced
|
A successful small business marketer is a cross
between an eternal optimist and a hard-nosed
realist. If you don't cultivate optimism, your
efforts will be sporadic, half-hearted, and
uncreative. On the other hand, if you look at the
world only through "rose-colored
glasses", you may develop a false sense of
confidence and plunge blindly into an expensive
media blitz, bypassing the necessary planning and
evaluation. While optimism is an essential state
of mind for pursuing any goal, it needs to be
tempered with a dose of realism.
Sometimes a company's worst enemy can be
self-defeating attitudes. You know it's time to
regroup and re-examine attitudes and your creative
process when you hear yourself or one of your
associates saying, "I didn't think that ad
would work, anyway!" Does that sound
familiar? If you ever have serious reservations
about an ad, a marketing campaign, or a sales
presentation, then it's time to step back,
re-evaluate it, and get some outside feedback
before launching it.
Second Opinions Don't Just Apply to Your Health
Run the concept, the graphics, or the sales
message by some associates, a couple friends, or
even family members who are willing to offer some
constructive criticism. Ask them what their
immediate reaction is and why the sales message is
or is not persuasive. Do they think it would
compel them to take action if they were
prospective customers, or does it just blend in
with the hundreds of other marketing messages
they're exposed to day after day? Finding a way to
stand out and be noticed is often the first hurdle
in a successful advertising or marketing campaign.
A more formal approach would be to assemble a
focus group, usually members of the public who are
paid a fee to view your commercial, evaluate your
product, or critique your marketing material. The
most effective way to conduct a focus group is
generally to hire an experienced advertising
agency or marketing research company to do it for
you. They should know how to guide discussions in
a productive direction and ask questions that
elicit unbiased, honest, and useful responses.
If you've invested a lot of your time and thought
into creating an ad, a sales presentation, or even
the packaging for a product, your closeness to the
campaign can make it difficult to put yourself
into the customers' shoes. By getting too caught
up in the creative process, the pressures of sales
quotas, or your own ego, it's easy to lose your
objectivity. That's when outside feedback can be
really helpful and necessary.
Get In Touch With Your Inner Customer
The easiest and most natural way to start thinking
like a customer is to get in the habit of paying
attention to and analyzing your own experiences as
a customer. Whether you're in a restaurant, a dry
cleaners, or a repair shop, make a mental note of
the things that rub you the wrong way or that make
you want to continue doing business there. The
same holds true of your reaction to print ads,
commercials, billboards, yellow pages ads, or
sales pitches. What is it about some of the
marketing messages you hear or see that motivate
you to pick up the phone, get in your car, write a
check, pull out your credit card, or choose one
business over another? Give some thought to why
you keep going back to the same coffee shop,
chiropractor, mechanic, bank, or hair stylist. If
you can figure out why they've earned your
loyalty, that might shed some light on how you can
improve your own company's ability to attract,
acquire, and retain customers.
But before you can build on your strengths, you
need to identify exactly what they are. You and
just about everyone in your organization needs to
know what your unique, distinctive customer
advantages are and why customers are better off
doing business with your company rather than your
competitors. Stop and write down all the strong
selling points that can be used in presentations,
brochures, ads, business cards, sales letters, and
web pages. Then figure out what changes,
improvements, and enhancements need to be made to
your service quality, your marketing strategy, and
that list of advantages to make it more
compelling.
Shift Your Focus to Improve Your Profitability
Now here comes the hard part! I'm no psychologist,
but it seems like the biggest obstacle that
business owners face in giving effective sales
presentations and creating response-producing ads
and letters is their own ego. Make one change in
your attitude and you're almost sure to increase
your sales closing ratio and your advertising
response rate. The secret, which you and just
about everyone else in business has heard of but
may not have acted on, is to focus your marketing
message on "benefits" rather than
"features". In other words, customers
are more strongly persuaded by knowing how a
product is going to benefit them, rather than what
it's made of. That doesn't mean you should leave
out the descriptive features of your product or
service; but, in most cases, the main thrust of
your presentation or ad should be the benefits
your customer will enjoy. More specifically, focus
on your ability to solve their problem, make their
lives easier, or help them feel happier, have more
fun, be more confident, enjoy better health, or
increase their family's safety. They may also be
in the market for a product or service that makes
them more financially secure, personally admired
or loved, more attractive, prosperous,
prestigious, comfortable, or pain free. People
have dozens of fundamental needs and emotional
triggers, and are motivated by everything from
fear and greed to love and vanity. If possible,
find out exactly what your prospects' "hot
buttons" are, and then tailor your
presentation, ad, or web page to those needs. If
you can reach them at an emotional level or
otherwise convince them that you can satisfy their
needs or solve their problem better than the
competition, then the probability of gaining their
business and winning them over as a loyal client
will increase tremendously. Do that consistently,
and you'll have a winning formula for small
business marketing success.
Joel Sussman, president of Optimal Marketing
Communications, has created a web site, called
"Marketing Survival Kit.com" http://www.marketingsurvivalkit.com
.The site features a variety of hand-picked
articles, small business marketing tools, and
downloadable manuals. A free subscription to his
marketing newsletter is available by sending a
blank email to marketingsurvivalkit@GO-Subscribe.com
|
|
|
|
Copyright ©
Reserved by the respective writers and copyright holders. We don't
pretend or states in any way that we re-invented the wheel and wrote all this
articles ourselves and all credit are given to the respective writer and
copyright holder at the bottom of each article.
|
 |
|
