By: Mike Rosen
There was a time when marketing was like a strong, aggressive salesman in your face. In fact, it was all about how many faces you could get in front of and how aggressively could you get them into the tent. Push the product, promote the service, and push the deal.
Push now becomes Pull
In today’s environment we’ve moved past push and now it’s all about pull. What do we mean by pull? Think of an information magnet that draws the attention of thousands of particles. Pull optimizes branding and relationship building. How can my products and services help you? How can we partner with each other and achieve common goals? How can my brand fit and support your brand?
And, of course the ultimate driver of pull is the explosion of electronic and social media, whose parallel lines are merging with the needs of businesses to talk to whole communities of people and communicate their value proposition.
Look at Toyota, for example, and how they’re relying on new media to overcome their current branding problems. They’re still pushing sales with the usual bag of TV promotions and print advertising. However, at the same time Toyota is covering their trunks with a massive effort on the Internet and social media. They’re smartly creating a dialog to bond with existing customers and engage a new generation of prospects through pull.
Choosing your options when you’re not Toyota
So maybe your company is a bit smaller than Toyota. Obviously, you can’t afford to do it all and you’ll have to make some strategic choices. Fortunately, the principles of marketing you need to guide you in these choices are easy to grasp and have not changed in a hundred years. Once you gather the basic information, marketing direction becomes more obvious, focused and fruitful. Consider taking these steps:
1. Profile your existing customers and prospects! Group their commonalities i.e.: Industries, titles, age brackets, interests.
2. Find your audience. How do they get information? Do they live on the computer? Do they take the subway to work? Do they commute by car? Do they go to trade shows? Were they the first on the block to use a Blackberry or iPod?
3. Define your value proposition. Why should I do business with you? What makes you better, unique or qualified to do business with me?
4. Develop your messaging. Imagine you are opening the office door of a prospect for the first time. They’ll look at you for a second, so visually you have to look appropriate, but most importantly, your first few sentences have to peak their interest immediately, or you’ve lost them.
5. Keep in touch. The primary goal of networking is relationship-building and referrals – creating pull. Marketing is the same, only you are reaching out and bonding on a broader scale; branding to a wider audience. In marketing parlance this is called “top of mind awareness”.
6. Keep track. Knowing who is responding and where these responses are coming from is the key to making your program efficient, effective and productive. It circles back to the first step in successful marketing, profiling and knowing who your prospects and buying influences are, where they are and what their hot buttons are.
When push comes to shove, marketing is all about connecting with prospects and creating greater brand awareness.
Mike Rosen
President
Tackle Box Marketing Communications
www.tackleboxmarketing.com