Marketing is often considered to be about “getting the word out” for your business or your product. Nothing could be further from the truth. To be fair, many ad salespeople and marketing companies will tell you exactly that. They’ll say you need to “get the word out”, or that your prospects need a certain number of “touches” or exposures before they’ll consider working with you.
This is all to sell more ads and marketing campaigns. Every business is about making more money, and in this case what that means is selling more ads or more marketing campaigns. When the ad buyers have the mentality of merely “getting the word out”, their ad campaigns need more money to generate sales and profitability suffers. You’ll also need more marketing campaigns to present your services yet again to prospects, which means more work for marketing agencies.
The reason this doesn’t work is because your prospects don’t care about your business. Your business is none of their business. What they care about is themselves.
There’s a saying that your prospects are tuned in to one channel all the time: WIIFM, or “What’s in it for me?”
This is why you need to focus on “you” marketing instead of “me” marketing. When you’re talking about yourself or your products, prospects tune you out because you’re expecting them to make the connection for themselves why your products will benefit them.
As a practitioner, the benefits of what you do seem obvious, but that’s because you’ve done this work for so long and have seen the benefits first-hand so many times. Your prospects have no such experience, so they’ll have to guess at what exactly life will be like after they’ve worked with you. Figuring that out is extra work that they’re not interested in doing. The world is noisy and it’s too much work for them to dissect every message they hear to understand what’s not being said.
Instead, you should make that connection for them. Tell them what benefits they’ll experience with working with you, and if those benefits fix the problems they’ve been having, they’ll come beat down your door to work with you. This is because your messaging will be relevant to them and they’ll understand the value immediately without guesswork. This is the power of “you” marketing. It’s more work for you as the business owner, because it’s a bit counter-intuitive at first, but it works amazingly well, and if you do it right the results will speak for themselves.
If your marketing is too “me” focused and you think it might need a revamp, schedule a call on the right and we’ll see if we’re a fit to work together.