Session 6: Entrepreneurial Marketing
What is marketing anyway? Is it advertising? Direct mail? The Internet? Marketing
essentially is the way you communicate your product to your customer. How it solves
problems... brings relief... and gives your customers outcomes they want. It's about
promising to fulfill the selfish need of the customer, and then building a reputation that can
make good on that promise. In this session we'll dive into approaching marketing in a way
that makes maximum impact to your business's bottom line.
Here's an example:
When I got started marketing online, I had come from the world of offline marketing. When I made the switched, I loved the automation the Internet offered. I learned there were tools that will do a lot of the work for you. For example, we started an Internet newsletter that was very popular. People would visit our site and we could follow up with them, give them great content and pitch our products. Technology allowed us to do this automatically. This was a HUGE improvement over direct mail. But the game of marketing is always changing. The techniques that were innovative to me when I started are now "old school."
Many people think marketing is about bragging about yourself or "convincing" someone to buy your product. It's not. Your marketing is about communicating that you can meet your customer's needs. It's vitally important than you understand your customers needs - you'll need to communicate very clearly that you understand their needs and that your product can meet them. What I like to do when I start out is to make a list of all the fears and frustrations, wants and aspirations, of my customers. Then I ask myself how my product fulfills those needs. Once I do this, then I can go to work on my marketing, create an advertisement, write a follow-up piece, or what have you. Until I do, my marketing will fall short. The understanding just isn't there.
There are several main approaches to marketing. We can roughly break them into 2 types: 1) Response Marketing: getting people to respond and buy our product. 2) Reputation Marketing: getting customers to remember our brand and think of us. Most people start with Reputation Marketing - getting a great logo, taking fancy pictures, etc. This is a mistake. I suggest you start off with learning Response Marketing - getting people to respond to your messages and take action immediately. It's not about getting them to think you're cool or remember your name. It's about getting them to BUY.
To do this, we need to understand a little psychology. Paul Maclean came up with a psychological theory called the triune brain theory. According to this theory, we actually have 3 brains in one. We have our reptilian brain that's all about survival, we have our mammalian brain that's all about emotion, and we have our logical brain. Each brain evolved on top of each other, and added to the ones before. Each of us have the part of brain that we prefer. Some of us are physical types, some are emotional types, and some are logical types. Appeal to each in your marketing. Include physical details, like exactly what's physically in your product, how it was physically built, etc.
If you're going to create an emotional product for emotional type people, then tune into the emotional needs of your customer. If you're selling an intellectual product to intellectual people, talk about he science, the theory of how it works, etc. But also remember that we all have all 3 brains, so communicate with all 3 of the brains in your marketing. Talk about the logical reasons, the emotional reasons, and the physical reasons they should buy your product.
It turns out us humans aren't primarily motivated by logic (even the logical ones). We're highly influenced by emotions, often that we're not even aware of. These are irrational drives - like fear, guilt, status, security, sex, etc. Learning how to speak to these drives will make your marketing much more powerful, and make you a much more powerful marketer.
