How attractive is your marketing, to ‘them’?

How attractive and interesting does your marketing look, from the perspective of your marketplace?

For example.

• That interesting newsletter you’re going to send. Is it interesting to you or the people you’re sending it to?
• That special offer you’re about to launch. Is it special to you or the people you’re offering it to?
• That important email you’re planning to send. Is it important to you or the person you’re sending it to?
• That exciting announcement you’re about to make. Is it exciting to you or the people you’re announcing it to?
• And that amazing opportunity you keep talking about. Is it amazing to you or the people you’re talking to?

Think for a moment about how many special offers, exciting announcements and marketing messages you encounter each week, which you totally ignore. It’s more than 99 percent of them.

You only buy (attend, purchase, subscribe to, etc), the things marketed to you, which do the following.

1. Grab your attention. Otherwise you wouldn’t notice them or the message they have.
2. Are clearly of so much value that you attend, make a purchase, join or subscribe.

And that’s also what your prospective clients or customers need from your marketing!

Here’s the thing: The vast majority of small business marketing fails on both fronts. Why? Because it’s written from the perspective of the sender (the marketer), NOT from the perspective of their marketplace.

I’m not saying the offer isn’t directed to the prospective client, or that it doesn’t offer benefits, or that it lacks a call-to-action. It usually does all those things.

I’m saying that the way this is done, is based on a toxic assumption. An assumption that the marketplace is as motivated about whatever the marketer is offering, as the marketer is.

3 ways toxic assumptions can hurt a business

These are probably the 3 most common examples. Though there are many, many more.

1. Too little time is spent pumping MASSIVE, real-world value into our offering.

This happens because we think the benefits of our services are already compelling enough. The truth is, no matter what we think, our offering is never compelling enough! If we’re not adding a measurable lift in the value of our product or service very, very regularly, we quickly get surpassed by competitors or become irrelevant.

Check out the competition. Look for holes in the provision of whatever you do, which a little creativity can be transformed into a huge marketing win.

2. Too little time is spent listening to what prospective clients want.

Even before the pandemic, the pace of change was accelerating. Now, as we plot our way out of the pandemic, the rate of change is hugely accelerated. Thankfully, social media gives us access to what our marketplace wants, in real-time.

The social media platform we choose to ‘listen’ to should be based on where our marketplace is. With a little time spent learning how to find the core information we require, we can better match our offering to the ACTUAL, current wants and needs of our prospective clients.

3. Too little time is spent learning how to create compelling marketing.

When we assume that our marketing is already compelling enough, there’s little incentive to radically improve it. Sure, we might make some adjustments. But we tend not to invest the time, effort and hard work on improving something, if we believe it’s already great.