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What does successful marketing look like?
Josiah Martin • May 7, 2020
Discovering and leveraging the power of effective marketing.
You might have heard it said, “If you do everything everyone else does, you will get what everyone else gets.” As business owners and marketers, we want to stand out from the crowd to get our message across. The problem, however, is the marketplace is flooded with screaming vendors begging for attention. Converting the masses takes more than the usual shout, and pitch anymore. Yet, an ever-increasing mob of businesses use the exact same failed strategy. This begs the question, what does successful marketing look like?
To answer that we must first define the word, marketing. Merriam Webster defines marketing as: “The act or process of selling in a market; the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service.” This is what everyone thinks, but we are after something different. Regis McKenna defines it this way: “Marketing is everything!” This is more in keeping with what we are after, but too broad to be useful. Here is a definition I’ve come to like the best. “Marketing is getting someone who has a need, to know, like and trust you.” — Jon Jantsch (of Duct Tape Marketing fame).
From this final definition we see 4 components for making yourself heard…
• Identifying Your Customers (and their needs)
• Personal Connection
• Trust
• Likability
1. Identifying Your Customers
No marketing strategy can begin without the customer. After all, what good is your product or service if there is no one who will use said product or service? First step, is to engage with people, conduct your own market research. Talk to your sales team have them report what they have experienced in the field. What do their customers say about your products and what they would like to see different. Even if you are a startup or new business go out there and ask! Pretend you are a customer see what struggles they have in obtaining or using your product or service. How many steps does a customer have to take, until they can make a purchase?
There are several demographic indicators you can learn about your customers and use that information to better target them in future marketing material. For starters what is your target age group? Are your customers primarily male or female? What is your customer’s average annual income? You can learn a lot about your customers, including these questions, with a well-oiled social media presence.
Using social media effectively includes getting as many of your customers as possible to like your pages, share your posts, and leave good reviews. Employing an effective social media presence will help you generate leads, maintain the coveted “Top of Mind Awareness” status of successful companies and help you make multiple sales with your current customer base.
2. Personal Connection
Whether it’s junk mail in your mailbox or spam in your inbox, we have been conditioned to ignore form letters and sales flyers if there is nothing personal about them. It is human nature, that makes us tear open a letter from a friend and read it start to finish, while simply toss the cookie cutter sales flyers. Why? We do this because we crave connection and community, people who care about us and are interested and invested in our lives. Marketing materials that come across as pushy and canned will likely do little to create a connection and may turn potential companies off.
Very successful companies do not operate with cliché sales material that lacks a personal connection and fails to invite their potential customer into a group of people that care for them. They have found that making their customers feel cared for and respected leads to greater numbers of customers and higher dollar amounts per transaction.
Building on the knowledge of your customers your marketing material should be geared towards creating this personal connection. Whether it is mailer, sales slick, brochure, chat function on your site, a custom sales funnel or simply reaching out and talking one on one with sales leads using information you already possess; personal connections are the bridge that creates brand loyalty and keeps customers coming back again and again. They will also trust you with their family, friends and neighbors. Each personal connection you forge is a walking, talking ambassador for your brand.
3. Trust
Effective marketing can only begin with trust. This is one of the most difficult things to earn and the easiest thing to lose. Blazing ahead in the pursuit of the almighty dollar as fast as you can will alienate your clientele. According to Forbes.com, there are many startups redefining customer service in ways that larger businesses might be unable or unwilling to do and are thus taking large swaths of market share.
The fact is, people do not do business with companies they do not trust. Trust is not simply telling the truth; engaging with only facts does not engender trust all by itself. Trust is not just about objective facts it is also a feeling. By their very nature feelings are not quantifiable; however, they will inform how your customers view the facts you present. People need to feel that the facts they are hearing aren’t being presented in a deceptive way.
Creating a feeling of trust is easier said than done, but when you add the elements of identifying your customers and creating a personal connection with them. Your brand messaging also must be consistent and pervasive. What we mean by that, is having all your marketing line up with similar designs and similar messaging. This also means you need people to see your marketing efforts more than once. Ideally, the same person will see and review the same marketing advertisement no less than eight times. Research indicates eight is the magic number for a conversion. Trust both the feeling and the objective truth is found at this point and allows you to build a bridge to your customer.
4. Likeability
We buy from people we like. That is just a fact of life and the sooner your business understands that, the better. You know the type, there’s always that one guy (or gal) who can talk the birds out of the trees. They don’t seem to have trouble getting the yes from any client. Unfortunately, not every organization has someone like this, and your salesforce is considered lucky to even have one. The good news is, you don’t have to have someone like this working for you to grow likeability.
As mentioned before, creating a social media presence that is both effective and well managed can increase likeability. First, you get instant connections with your customers, if you share their good reviews and tag them in the responses, suddenly, you have a connection with their entire network. Many companies have used this strategy extremely well, catapulting their sales well past targets.
Personal touches will take your company to the next level. On average a happy customer or even a dissatisfied one will talk about their experience around 90 times over the course of a week*. The majority of people believe reviews from their friends and will be much more likely to buy from a company they recommend. Therefore, it is a necessity to get those positive reviews flowing into your site and social media. Rewarding loyal customers for their reviews should be high on your priority list. Another idea is providing or selling wearables, like hats, shirts, pens, keychains, mugs anything with your company logo.
Setting Yourself Apart
Using these components should inform your marketing efforts to be different than your competition. You can get a cookie cutter website and advertisements and still make profits. However, to be truly successful, your approach should be unique, custom and customer focused. When you choose a marketing strategy or a marketing company who will do it for you, make sure they know how to set you apart. There needs to be follow through and a concerted effort to make those connections.
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