You Are Never Not Marketing
Although we don’t typically think of ourselves this way, we are all marketers and constantly marketing. We market ourselves and our product or service with the aim to influence.
When we are the product, we influence others to like and trust us. When we offer a product or service, our marketing needs to influence customers to invest in what we believe is of value to them.
In fact, influence is the core component of absolutely every piece of quality marketing.
None of your marketing has much of an impact if it doesn’t convince your audience to pay attention to you, your content, your message, in the first place.
Marketing needs to be able to motivate to want to open up emails, read blogs and get them to engage with you and be excited about your message.
In short, your marketing has to be able to get inside the heads of your customers, to become a part of their inner dialogue, than encourage them to do something.
In fact, a piece of marketing without a clear objective is a mess of purposeless words and phrases. Without a message that influences, the message goes absolutely nowhere and remains hopelessly inactive and meaningless.
For this reason, if we are creating content that is worth reading, watching, or listening to, whether we like the idea or not, we are always marketing.
Five Easy to Follow Marketing Tips:
1.Know what is already important to your audience
A big part of being another person’s inner dialogue is to really understand who they are and what they are about. You have to fully step into their shoes, to see the world from their vantage point, and fully understand and respect their perspective.
Only then will you be able to move them to see the action you’d like them to take as.
2. Do ask for the action
According to research — the more choices we give people, the less happy they actually are. Too many options can actually create stress, confusion, overwhelm, and ultimately analysis paralysis.
So make it clear what you want people to do. It is absolutely appropriate to simply tell your audience what to do.
3. Use social proof
When people see that other people are getting results that they crave for themselves, they pay attention. So, look for ways to showcase your client’s success stories, and ask them for testimonials.
4. Be 1,000 percent trust-worthy
To build (and maintain) your audience’s trust:
- always have their best interest in mind.
- be transparent and open about what you are doing.
- when you say you will do something, do it.
5. Listen
Stop and listen to the challenges your customers have. People need to know that you relate to them and understand the challenges and obstacles and how you help them overcome them.
Finally – remember everything you do and say is marketing and should be designed to persuade to elicit an action however use marketing persuasion ethically and responsibly.
I am sure you would agree, your outcome should always be in your client’s best interest.
