Overwhelm Eliminator: Small Business Marketing On Borrowed Time With Little Money by Matt Gordon

Author:Matt Gordon [Gordon, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Business & Personal Finance
Publisher: Rock Ridge Media
Published: 2012-09-07T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Be Customer-Centered

Want to know a secret about marketing? Here it is: Nobody cares about you. At all. Your next best customer doesn’t care about you right now, and neither do a lot of your current customers.

Since nobody cares about you, stop talking about yourself in your marketing. If you want customers, you need to talk to and about them with customer-centered marketing. When your marketing is all about you, it bores your prospects and they tune it out almost immediately. Prospects are the most self-centered people in the universe. And they ought to be - it’s their money, after all.

Networking

Has anyone ever asked what you do, and then it’s immediately obvious that they couldn’t care less about your answer? I’ve never seen people so obvious about impatiently waiting for me to shut up so they can sell me something than at these local business networking events. It’s like going to a party full of people that just can’t stop talking about themselves. The lesson isn’t that they’re rude people, but that they really didn’t want to know “what do you do?” What they’re really asking is, “what can you do for me?”

The principle is the same in marketing, which is another way of talking about your business. There is a train of thought that is chugging along a track in your prospect’s mind, and you need to hop on board.

When you’re networking and someone asks that dreaded question, never answer it unless they have already told you what they do. You want them to go first so you can relate what you do to their situation. In the rest of your marketing, you’ve done the work in Chapter Seven, so you already know a lot about the person you are marketing to.

Avoiding Self-Centered Marketing

The problem of self-centered marketing doesn’t just exist at networking events. The Internet, local newspapers, and the airwaves are full of it. The two most common pitfalls of advertising are when the advertising fails to address the customer and when business owners market to themselves.

Self-centered advertising is easy to spot because there is nothing in it for the unfortunate consumer. It’s all about the qualities or qualifications of the advertiser, as if that is compelling enough to make someone want to do business with them.

Good advertising always identifies the customer - sometimes, if only by where the advertising runs. It presents a pleasure or pain scenario (more on this later), and then presents a call to action for the target market to either avoid/end the pain or take hold of the pleasure by taking the next step in the buying process.

Focus on the benefits to the customer and not on the features of your product, service, or business that will deliver those benefits. This includes the information about you or your business that you think impresses your prospects. There will be plenty of time for that later on in the buying cycle.

A business owner who insists on marketing to themselves is a person I try to avoid as a marketing player/coach.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.