Marketing is the next in our business journey. If you have a product and no one knows about it, it doesn’t exist. Marketing is the art and science of making your offer known. I’ve always been drawn to marketing because it requires you to use both your creative and analytical skills as we will see later on.
The heart and soul of marketing lies in catching the attention of the right people in the right way and then presenting your product in a compelling way to them and guiding them to where to go next to purchase it.
Marketing can be broken down into three main elements: the attention – the people you’re trying to attract – The message you use to attract them.
THE ATTENTION ITSELF :
ATTENTION
In the context of marketing, it should be called useful attention. The purpose of grabbing attention is to make sales not to just to get popular. The inherent truth about people’s attention is that it is limited and you need to use it wisely.
PERMISSION
Don’t you hate it when you’re so focused watching a movie or a football game and suddenly an ad appears just right when we get to finally know what will happen to the hero. This spamming marketing tactic existed heavily when people’s attention wasn’t easily available and people were not easily distracted. People would watch anything that is shown. Nowadays, they can easily turn to their phones and make a story about how your ad ruined their day. Asking for your potential customer’s permission is noble and makes him feel important and respected. When you get the email addresses of your prospective clients, ask them for permission to follow up first before sending anything and make it clear what you will be sending them. This also helps narrow your marketing effort to people who want to buy from you.
PREOCCUPATION
As I’ve just said, people’s attention nowadays is easily available and as a consequence, you’ll always find it preoccupied. Drifting the attention of the prospect to notice you has become a real challenge. This is why marketing has become harder when everyone is competing for the prospect’s attention. To win the “NOTICE ME!” contest, your message needs to be attractive and compelling enough that they choose to pay attention to you instead of what they were preoccupied with. But do not take it too far, no one likes an annoying loud ad even if it attracts our attention.
KEY TAKEAWAY: “If zombies are hunting for your brain, marketers are chasing your attention. To get that attention, you need to first ask permission to follow up after getting their emails or phone numbers and make it clear what you will be sending them. When you’re trying to think of how to attract your clients’ attention, always assume they are already preoccupied. This way your message will be more compelling.”
THE PEOPLE YOU TRY TO REACH
PROBABLE PURCHASERS
As Josh perfectly describes it, a probable purchaser is the type of person who is perfectly suited to what you are offering. And this is who you are trying to go for. If you are selling baby shampoo, chasing the attention of a 20-year-old bachelor isn’t the wisest idea. Targeting however soon-to-be moms or moms who have just had babies or even close family or friends of these moms is where you should mostly be looking. Trying to appeal to everyone is a game you can never win. As the old saying goes “you cannot please everybody”
QUALIFICATIONS
Qualifications go even further in filtering the people you target. It is studying your prospects and seeing if you want to sell them your offer or not. Contrary to popular belief, not every customer is a good customer. If the customer leads you to waste more energy, time and resources in trying to satisfy them, they are not worth it.
POINTS OF MARKET ENTRY
This goes hand in hand with choosing your prospects. Point of market entry is that exact moment when your prospects are becoming receptive to your offer. Companies are competing for the POME to leverage the power of being the “FIRST” product they see or use when they reach the point of market entry. FMCG companies are one of the biggest adopters of market entries, they try to give free baby diapers to soon-to-be moms and moms in hospitals. They also target teenagers with razors and sanitary pads. The first product to be part of a new experience for people will carry a lot of emotional value that may influence people’s buying decisions.
RECEPTIVITY & ADRESSABILITY
Addressability is simply how easy it is to reach your prospects. It is important to keep in mind that when you’re first crafting your value offer how addressable your audience is. Your marketing can work efficiently only if you have access to that audience. A non-addressable audience can either be hard to reach or they just don’t care at all which is what we refer to as receptivity.
Receptivity is a “measure of how open your prospect is to your message”. It includes both the “what”, the “when” and the “how”. Some people can be open to receiving some ads at certain times of the day or year and are more likely to consume them. The form in which you market your value offer matters and this is the “how” element. If most of my audience isn’t the reader type, I wouldn’t market in any written form and would choose something more visual.
“KEY TAKEAWAY: Don’t be an all people pleaser, it’ll never happen! Focus your precious marketing efforts on prospects who are really interested in your product (receptive), that you can reach easily (addressable), and who will be an easy customer once they purchase from you (qualified). The best way to meet these prospects is when they first start becoming interested in whatever you are selling which is what we call point of market entry”
THE MESSAGE:
FRAMING
This is where marketing gets its “manipulation” label. Framing is the act of highlighting certain details of your offer and de-emphasizing others. While this sounds manipulative, it is fair to see that we all as humans use framing in our daily communication. We need to compress what we say to not lose the attention of the other person. Hence, we chose to say the most important things and leave out some other unimportant details. In marketing, this is even more important, since competing for the prospect’s attention is your game. You just cannot sit there and recite every good and every bad thing this product has. You simply choose to highlight the most important ones to make your message more persuasive. This doesn’t imply that you have to lie about some critical problem your value offer has. Even if you may sell by doing so it will most likely backfire on you. People will find out how you misinformed them and will never trust you.
END RESULTS & VISUALIZATION
This is another harsh truth in business. “People don’t care about your product, they care about what that product gives them”. This is a crucial element in marketing ! Most people find it boring to hear about your product’s technical details. What they find more interesting is showing them how that product will improve some aspects of their lives and make them feel better. A good example Josh gives is about car shopping. Yes, you can go to a dealer and hear all the technical details from the agent which are important to note. But once you drive-test it, feel its newness, and start imagining yourself driving everywhere with it and impressing the neighbours, is when the real product impact happens. Making your prospects visualize themselves using the product and getting all the end results from it is where marketing magic happens.
THE HOOK
This is where the most creative effort of marketing lies. A hook is a short and succinct sentence or couple of sentences that describe your value offer. It’s called a hook because it is supposed to be the element that brings the active attention of your customer to you.
Coming up with a hood sounds like this:
- Find your the most valuable benefit your product offers (usually named as unique selling points)
- Use unusual words that best describe it
- Put them in a fun and an unusual way
Once you create the hook, put it everywhere so it can stick into your prospects’ minds.
Some good examples Josh sites in his book:
- Apple’s ipod: 1000 songs in your pocket
- Time Ferris’s book: 4 hour work week
THE NARRATIVE
Most people remember stories better than they remember data. Our brains are just wired like that. I remember using this technique in engineering school and has saved my life.
Stories are not complicated; they contain few elements to respect and the rest is freestyle.
- Hero: which should be your customer. We all love some ego boost.
- Challenge: the difficulty the hero has to overcome which is usually the problem your product helps solve
- Guide: This is where you come for the rescue to help the hero overcome his challenge
- Transformation: how did the hero transform after overcoming this challenge
You can use this technique for real testimonials and case studies or for creative stories you want to tell to describe your value offer. People often relate to people, especially those who are going through something they both have in common.
FREE
Who doesn’t like free stuff? No one I believe.
In my opinion, free is the fairest attention-grabbing strategy. I believe that people’s attention is important and should be rewarded. And the best way to do that is by giving away something valuable for free. The personal MBA is a great example of this strategy. You can literally find all of the details of all the chapters of his book on his website. It’s like he’s giving you the book for free. Yet, his book still remains an international world best seller after all these years ! It is important to know the limit between giving too little and too much for free. After all, businesses are not charities. So focus on giving something for free not only to attract attention and become viral, but to get the attention of the right people who are willing to buy from you and stick with you.
THE CTA
People are not mind readers.. After telling your stories and talking passionately about your product, you have to tell your prospects what to do next. This is what we mean by CTA or “Call To Action”. It can be: visit my website – subscribe to my newsletter – Share this – Purchase this …. The key to a CTA is that it needs to be simple, clear and visible. This is why you’ll find most CTA buttons on websites in a different colour that pops to differentiate it from the other content.
KEY TAKEAWAY: An effective marketing message is simple in its concept. You first throw your hook to catch the attention of the customer and then tell them inspiring stories about your value offer to finally guide them to take the action you want. It is important to frame and focus on the end results in your communication with customers to leverage the short attention span they have.
