No B.S. Trust Based Marketing by Matt Zagula & Dan S. Kennedy

Author:Matt Zagula & Dan S. Kennedy [Zagula, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
Published: 2012-07-11T14:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 11.1: Basic vs. Trust-Based Marketing

When somebody decides to buy home furnishings or appliances, get home repairs done, hire a lawn service, or hire a babysitter, they may very well ask their neighbor who they buy from or use. It′s a shortcut, but is it really a trustworthy one? After all, what research did the neighbor do? Did the neighbor aggressively shop around, have a background check done, check other customer references? The neighbor likely did none of those things. She either took the same shortcut and got a referral from another neighbor or randomly responded to a flyer in her mailbox. Again, people trust for the wrong reasons. But the neighbor or co-worker is familiar.

A smart home services company—say, a carpet cleaning business operator—can manufacture familiarity in a neighborhood in advance of soliciting its homeowners simply by having a billboard-style van emblazoned with its name and slogan driven around the neighborhood at different times of day for several Saturdays in a row, and parked on the street in different places from 4:00 to 6:00 P.M. when people are coming home from work on week nights. Then, when they send sales letters into that neighborhood, they get appreciably better response than they would without the shenanigans with the van. This is not theory. It′s well tested. Why does it work? Familiarity. A certain comfort and trust level is created simply because the company′s van has become a familiar presence in the neighborhood. Sure, there′s also assumption that neighbors are using the company, but be careful not to over-think this; what makes the strategy effective, more than anything else, is familiarity.

Another bought-and-paid-for place strategy that often works fabulously, although it′s costly, is advertising constantly on one popular and trusted host′s radio program. Broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have been full-on market makers for a number of fledgling products and companies. These hosts have an extremely high trust level with their audiences—the same core audience tunes in every day—so being there two or three times every day as an advertiser has a similar effect to parking the carpet cleaning van in the neighborhood day after day, week after week. Most of these radio ads are also direct-response ads, and the response to them may start out small but build over weeks as the audience′s familiarity with the advertiser grows. But what only a tiny number of especially astute marketers utilize is that familiarity′s power transferred from the radio advertising to other media, notably, direct mail to the lists of that same host′s newsletter subscribers, ads at the host′s or show′s or affiliated local stations′ online media, ad buys at Amazon adjacent to the listings for that host′s books, and so forth. That′s the equivalent of the direct solicitation of the homeowners after the carpet cleaning van has become a familiar presence in the neighborhood. If you are, for example, a regular listener of one of these hosts and begin getting direct mail from one of the regular advertisers on the show, it′s probably not random coincidence.

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