If you have been marketing your business but not getting the type of results you want, it may be because your marketing actually deters prospects from contacting you. Yes, that’s right. Deters.
I don’t just mean cheap quality print-jobs, hard-to-read text, or other design flaws. Even the most beautiful brochures or cutting-edge websites can turn people away.
How can that be?
Why Ego-Centric Marketing Fails
Think about how most people market themselves. What are they trying to get? Their prospect’s attention. So what do they advertise? Their expertise, product features, and service processes and procedures. What’s the end goal? To get clients to work with them.
That sounds like common sense, right? How else would you market yourself?
The problem with this approach is that it is primarily focused on you. Most people don’t think about marketing until they are short of business. When they realize they have nothing coming down the pipeline, they become desperate and wonder how they will pay their bills. And when you become desperate, the focus is on selling who you are, what you know and what you can do. It’s “ego-centric.”
Now, put yourself in your prospects’ shoes for a moment. Like you, their top concern is themselves and whatever problems they worry about. When they hear you talk about you and your services, they filter it out. They don’t make the connection between what you do and how it can solve their problem. That takes too much time. Everyone seems to want to sell them something, so why should they pay more attention to you? Your product or service doesn’t seem any different from everything else out there.
At this point, you become worried. You aren’t getting much (or any) business from prospects, so you start to feel rejected. The phone isn’t ringing. Your website isn’t getting much traffic. No one is returning your calls.
In fact, the more you use “ego-centric” marketing, the further you downward spiral. You become discouraged and start believing marketing is a waste of time. You may even wonder why you started your own business in the first place because no one gets what you do.
Why Prospect-Centric Marketing Works
If you want your marketing to work, you must change your beliefs about how to attract clients. This can be challenging because we have so many preconceived notions about how marketing and selling work.
We see advertising all around us and assume we are all experts. We have a bad experience with a salesman and vow never to become like him. We think networking events are a waste of time. We think email marketing is spammy. We think if we just put up a website, we should automatically be found on page one of Google search results.
What does work? When you put yourself into your prospects’ minds and really understand them. When you take the time to understand how they view their current problem, how it affects their life/family/job, and what emotions and irrational fears it triggers. When you really “get” how this one problem is holding them back from living their ideal life and if they could only solve it, they would be happy.
And then, you focus on “giving” them a solution to that problem. As you see the world through their eyes and realize where they are stuck, you give them useful, valuable information and resources to help them take baby steps towards the solution. You don’t talk about what you do or know. You learn where they want to go; what they need to be told or shown to get there; and then offer them the next step forward.
When your marketing is “prospect-centric,” you pull people to you rather than push them away. They want to hear more because what you are giving them has an immediate benefit to their life – and that is what they care about most.
Again, good article but it ends too soon. Your articles need to give readers real world examples of strategies that have been used by people or organizations to catch prospective clients’ attention. In other words, explain what marketing strategies have been successful in catching “suspect” clients’ attention to warrant responses to the people or companies markketing their products and/or services. The key is being able to convert “suspects” into “prospects.”