When It Comes to Marketing your Business, Make Sure to Check Your Ego at the Door!

Posted by editors on April 27, 2009 – 10:44 am

The most important thing to remember when developing a marketing plan is to always keep your customer at the forefront. All the time and effort put into creating a solid blueprint won’t mean a thing if you have the wrong subject in mind ― in other words, check your ego at the door!

Worry less about what’s good for your company and more about what’s good for your
customer. Chances are, the former will take care of itself when more attention is paid to the latter.

Marketing strategist and best-selling author David Meerman Scott (www.davidmeermanscott.com) suggests using a simple test offered by MarketingSherpa.com to determine if your company is using an egoless approach, or more of an egocentric one. The test can be telling and it will help you ascertain how well your marketing and sales approach is working ― or, in many cases, not working.

Meerman Scott suggests examining your Web site text or a piece of direct mail by adding the number of times you see the words “we,” “us,” “our” or your company’s name in the literature, then count the number of times you see the words “you,” “your” or the job title of your prospects. If the former is a higher number, you have a copywriting problem and your focus needs to be drastically altered.

Focusing on you is also a common pitfall when discussing press releases. Don’t tell readers how great you are. Instead of tooting your own horn, take time to sit down with your marketing team and analyze what your customers want. They don’t care about your problems or the state of your business; they just want you to focus on them and their needs.

Your marketing is meant to be the beginning of a relationship that makes it easier to sell your products or services. To do that effectively, you need to work at understanding your target audience.

You can never overdo it when it comes to focusing on your customer. They are your lifeline; treat them as such.

James Diehl, who lives in Seaford, Del., is a chief writer for Hook PR Group.

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To Gain Your Clients’ Trust, Forgo Advertising for Useful Content

Posted by editors on April 14, 2009 – 11:39 am

Savvy companies are on a new mission to send quality messages that cut through the noise of a busy and crowded marketplace. Their quest: to deliver custom communications to targeted clients.

The concept is described as content marketing. It involves researching customers’ challenges and learning how to help them be more productive. It means if you want to sell a product, you need to identify the target markets – and grasp people who need your product.

“Content marketing is all the marketing that’s left,” says Seth Godin, marketing guru and author of Seth’s Meatball Sundae Book Tour. During a 2008 teleseminar with Joe Pulizzi (founder and chief content officer of blog.Junta42), Godin said that the new marketing is about giving your customers the resources to trust you. “They [your customers] become a
fan of yours because you teach them something that makes them feel better about the world.”

Today’s new marketing is an even bigger revolution than the industrial revolution because people only need access to ideas, not access to large amounts of capital.

Here are five key points about content marketing from the seminar, as summarized by Pulizzi:

  • Understand that the old way of marketing is talking consistently at customers. New marketing is about connecting with customers.
  • Attract the chosen few. Traditional marketing was about the number of hits, calls, etc. you could generate; new marketing is about who’s doing the calling or visiting your Web site. If 12 people are coming to your blog, but they are the right 12 people with large amounts of buying power, that’s what matters.
  • Develop great content for your audience. If your product solves their problems, they’ll talk about it and tell others.
  • Figure out what information your audience desperately needs (e-books, blog, surveys, white papers, etc.) This is the heart of new marketing.
  • Tell an authentic story by living an authentic life (i.e., Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ CEO, really does love coffee). In the new marketing world, you can’t fake it. You have to share your passion.

Pulizzi says the future of marketing is not about tempting customers or conning them into buying more; it’s about communicating a message that says, “Regardless of whether you buy from me or not, you need this information. Enjoy!”

Annette C. Silva, who lives in Seaford, Del., is Hook PR Group’s business development coordinator.

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Beat the Recession with Content Marketing

Posted by editors on February 10, 2009 – 6:38 pm

It’s official. We’re in a recession and your profits are beginning to show it. Though your marketing budget may be smaller this year, you should use new and better marketing strategies that draw in customers and grow your business.

Newt Barrett, founder of the marketing consulting firm Succeeding Today. Succeeding Today (www.succeedingtoday.com), is a lead thinker in this new way of communicating with customers.

The idea is simple. If your service is of value to people, and you’re an authority on that service, then use your knowledge to inform and add value to your customers. Rather than shouting, bragging and trying to drill information into your customers’ heads, build a relationship with them that creates trust and establishes you as a leader.

Barrett offers six tips for this refreshing, cost-effective means of reaching your customers:

1. Become customer-centric. Find out just who needs your services most; then learn what their problems are and what would solve them. This knowledge will become the base of all your customer communications.

2. Focus on the customer by creating a Web site filled with valuable content your customers use. You, as the authority of the service you provide, become a trusted source of information. Barrett considers your Web site to be the most important sales tool you have, so position yourself as the expert, not the salesman.

3. Start a blog. Blogging allows you to engage in two-way dialogues, shows that you are authentic and is another venue in which you can establish your knowledge.

4. Refocus the tone of your newsletter (or begin publishing one) to be informative and helpful, offering advice and solutions.

5. Always direct your customers to your Web site because that’s where the meat of your message lies. The amount of information available to your customers is infinite on the Web, so use it effectively.

6. Rely on a content marketing professional to convert your message into the
relevant, value-loaded information you want to pass on to your customers. Well-written copy that flows nicely and keeps your customers reading, free of grammatical, stylistic or punctuation snares, instills even more confidence in you, the authority and source of the message.

Marlene Taylor, who lives in Knoxville, Tenn., is a business writer and a regular editorial
contributor to Hook PR Group.

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