But you need them to look, consider and purchase your product. Or you go out of business fast. So what’s the trick?
The average American is hit with over 3,000 marketing messages every day. We see so much of it, day in and day out, that we learn to tune it out. It’s a skill, and we all learn it by about age 4. By the time a person is of an age to become a consumer — a target for your business — they have become masters at ignoring advertising. And that is your challenge, that is the challenge of all entrepreneurs and the challenge of all businesses both new and old: How do I engage the consumer when they are completely uninterested in anything I have to say?
The trick is to reach into their hearts and touch them where they feel something. You can use whatever medium you want. Television works well, although the internet — and especially social media like Facebook — has the power to connect very directly with your consumers, to literally have a dialogue with them. Which is often what you want. A dialogue is good, but the dialogue is good only in that it allows you to connect your brand, your product, with them in a way that pulls at their emotions. The only thing that matters is emotional connections. Information is great to have, but no one buys against information. Emotion is required to make a sale. Think about Sally Strothers asking for money for starving African children. She could have spent her 30 seconds of TV advertising listing off all the many horrible statistics about the millions of poor children in Africa. The numbers and the facts are staggeringly tragic. But she’s a smart marketer, and so she didn’t do that. Instead she showed you a sad, little child. She told you her name. And then let you know that with just 29¢ per day you could feed the little girl and send her to school. I’ll ask you, because we’ve all seen the ads: Did that pull at you emotionally, to see that little girl’s hungry face, to know that the change in your pocket could save her?
There are many different marketing tricks you want to keep handy when you are trying to wrangle customers, but at the core you’re trying to do something rather simple. That’s not to say it’s easy, because it’s not. But it is simple. You are trying to capture the consumer’s attention, then you want to communicate to them why your product/services are different from others in your category, and then show how your product is the right product for them — and then if you want to make the sale, if you want to make the cash register ching-ching, you need to find a way to connect your particular brand, the choosing of your product over another, to something emotional. You need to reach into their chest and place some little mark on their heart that says, “This product is for people like me. I need that to make me complete.” That’s the magic right there. Nike, Apple computers, Coca-cola, my daughter’s American Girl Doll — they all have the magic. Find your magic. It’ll make all the difference. Ching-ching.
posted by Chad Germann 
2 Comments »
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 2:46 pm and is filed under marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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