In today’s world, technology makes geography and size almost irrelevant, therefore, this gives us this unique opportunity to assert strong strategic leadership. Content marketing is not about choosing a keyword and writing an article to rank for it, it’s about having a deep understanding of your target audience and the information they’re looking for and being a credible and trustworthy source for that information. How do you know that is true?
“Strategy is a commodity, execution is art.”
Advertising has been around for millions of years old and nowadays people use advertising as a heuristic for knowing whom to trust. I think that innovation tends to happen around the edges as if you design for the middle market you’ll end up in an overcrowded field. We don’t get an endorphin rush from mid-market retail. The people who successfully innovate are the people who actually understand that there is a margin and there is an extravagant treat.
By modelling social science on physics, we think that being scientific means that there is a right answer and a wrong answer. In marketing, the rules of the game aren’t constant, and you can re-write them, for example, by changing the context you can change what good means. The first assumption of science is that magic is impossible, which is absolutely true in physics but not true in psychology. Magic is possible in psychology, for example, you can make something worth 10 times as much simply by tweaking with the brain and not the thing itself.
The way to solve a problem may be trivial and silly, and our attempts in business to make ourselves look serious and important by always talking about higher order may also make us look stupid. Sometimes all you have to do is implement a very small “butterfly effect change” and actually you can. Big inputs can have small effects and small inputs can have big effects, that’s why human behaviour, I mean complex behaviour is not like high-school science.
I want to encourage you to pay attention to the stories you tell about your brand, as they are the culture of your organisation and as such both create and limit your potential. Many companies position their marketing around benefits and features of their product or service, but how can they make the customer the hero of their story? And why communicating in this way will demonstrate empathy for the customer and is extremely powerful in the long run.
I think that it’s best to focus on strategic outcomes that your clients need, and not talking about yourself, services or offerings as it loses people because it makes you the star of the story and this, in turn, makes the client not the star of their story! We all wake up self-identifying as heroes in our stories, so if I am the hero and meet you at a dinner party and you tell me about yourself, my subconscious mind begins to process you as a hero as well. Sometimes we subconsciously believe that there is a scarcity of resources, so if you are the hero and I am a hero - who’s the best competition begins. In reality, I should be stepping aside as the client is looking for someone to help with their story. It’s OK that another character comes into the story and their purpose is to help the hero win type day. I don’t want to be the hero in your story, I just want your business to succeed and I want to be the character in your story that exists to help the hero win.
In sales, we always want to be the trusted advisor, and you only need two things to be a trusted advisor are trust and advice! And if you don’t have the advice part, then you are not going to be trusted. Every human being has the need for someone to show them the way. A Harvard Professor once told me that I made a great first impression because I showed trust and respect, I was humbled and replied that I was raised to show empathy and authority. In essence I believe that we are saying exactly the same thing.
via Banksy
We are selling solutions to external problems, but customers are buying solutions to internal problems. The story should always be about how the hero is feeling about their external problem, as customers want us to guide them on an internal journey, and they do not only have an external problem. But this external problem is causing them some frustration, unpleasantness and that is what they are trying to resolve. What makes customers buy your products? It’s always a fulfilment of an internal frustration, much more than an external problem. It’s always an internal problem that motivates a buying decision. The only thing that people want are things that make them survive or thrive.
What the customer has to sense is that we have stepped into their story and we care about their pain. We care about their frustrations that they are experiencing and we care about the problems they are facing. Just caring is not enough, we also have to know how to get them out of it:
"I feel your pain, and I know how to get you out of this!" In other words, show that you care and have the competence to get help solve their problem. When you communicate this, you will earn the heart and respect of the customer.
If you want to grow your business, increase your revenue streams and help more customers solve their problems, then I am the guy for you.
