First, let me share with you a definition of marketing I found on Wikipedia: “Marketing is a societal process which discerns consumers' wants, focusing on a product or service to fulfill those wants, attempting to move the consumers toward the products or services offered.” (aka selling)
That sounds about right. Let me follow that with a brilliant observation from Donald Cooper, one of America’s top professional speaker and corporate trainer: “We are all human beings selling something to other human beings. How damn complicated should that actually be?”
Apparently, complicated enough. The facts are: businesspeople are selling all the time, and consumers are buying all the time. The question is: are they buying YOUR products, services, subscription, business opportunity, expertise, concepts or ideas? If not, WHY NOT? Well, I don’t have ALL the answers to that last question, but I have some.
My signature says I’m a “BizzBooster” and an Internet Marketing Advisor. That’s true. My wife (the other BizzBooster) and I teach businesspeople how to boost their business, particularly on the Internet. We are teachers.
To be effective teachers, we need to be good students. We are. We study marketing 24/7 (pretty much) and we make good notes of the harmful mistakes people make in their marketing strategies for the purpose of teaching our customers and clients how to avoid those mistakes in order to boost their business.
By “boosting their business”, we mean making things easier, saving time, saving money, beating the competition, generating more leads, prospects and customers, making more sales, more money, and ultimately, more profit!
If those are results you aspire to in your business, read on because the 2 marketing tips (we call them TIPPPS™) I will talk about here will help you avoid two of the god-awful mistakes we observe all the time that cause businesspeople to fail—or at least underachieve. I promise you that marketing any business successfully will be a lot easier when you apply those 2 expert TIPPPS™ Thoughts Ideas Principles & Practices for Professional Success).
Here’s the first TIPPPS™: “Everything people do, they do either out of their need to avoid/reduce pain, and/or their desire to gain/increase pleasure.”
Or as Jeremy Bentham once wrote, “Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure; they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.”
It is crucial for the success of your marketing endeavors that you understand the pain and pleasure motivators, and how to use that knowledge when designing marketing material, of any kind.
Most people in marketing and psychology agree that the first motivator – pain – is more powerful than the second. For example: Joe will be quite willing to work 50 or even 60 hours a week in his business so he can buy the BMW he’s been dreaming about (aka pleasure).
Now, imagine that Joe needs to make a lot of money in order to keep the IRS from seizing his store and his house and throwing him and his family out on the street (pain). Joe will be willing to work a LOT harder (80 hours a week?) to avoid that pain than he would be to gain the pleasure of owning a fancy car.
People will do things to avoid pain they would not even consider if it were merely to gain some pleasure. What that means to you is that to get the maximum results from your marketing materials, you should use what is known as the AIDA formula: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action – where the word Interest features pain and problems.
With that in mind, “most” of your marketing should follow along the easy path of answering these questions:
1-Are you getting ATTENTION with your opening?
2-Are you stating a problem (pain) your prospect is INTERESTED in?
3-Are you offering a solution your prospect DESIRES?
4-Are you asking your prospect to take ACTION?
Of course, I had to use the word “most” above because there are instances where it’s all about pleasure; dance classes, cooking courses and piano lessons are 3 examples.
Back to AIDA: If you sell products that help people who suffer from sore feet (for example), the best opening to get attention would probably be “Sore Feet?” (pain) as opposed to “Want foot relief?” (pleasure).
Bottom line, walk in your customers’ shoes for a while (pun intended), find out what his “pain” is, what his problems are, use that to get his attention, and then present your product or service as THE solution that will rid him of that pain and you will do exceedingly well. For Internet marketers, remember that the vast majority of people go online to find a solution to a problem. Focus on solving that problem and you’ll smile all the way to the (virtual) bank.
In other words (and this is the second TIPPPS™): “To have success, it is necessary that you bait the hook to suit the fish.”
I don’t mean any disrespect to shoppers, leads, prospects and customers by using the word “fish” This is actually a recommendation from Dale Carnegie in his famous book How To Win Friends And Influence People.
Here’s what he said: “I often went fishing up in Maine during the summer. Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found out that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I didn’t bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm in front of the fish and said: ‘Wouldn’t you like to have that?’
Why not use the same common sense approach when fishing for people? When someone asked Lloyd George, then Great Britain’s Prime Minister how he managed to stay in power, he replied that if his staying on top might be attributed to any one thing, it would be to his having learned that it was necessary to bait the hook to suit the fish.
The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.”
And as was pointed out earlier, what people want more than pleasure are ways, methods, strategies, tools, products and services that will help them avoid pain or at least reduce it. Bait your marketing “hook” with a solution, and the “fish” will bite.
I hope the “knowledge” you gleaned from this article will be helpful. Remember though that knowledge is power ONLY when it’s combined with ACTION! If you think the TIPPPS™ above are valuable, DO something with them, and seek out more of them.
Daniel G. St-Jean, BB, IMA, AMA
(BizzBooster, Internet Marketing Advisor, Article Marketing Alchemist)
P.S.: This article was inspired by a very informative and enlightening 5,500-word article which you can read by following the link listed in the Resource Box.
About the Author:
Daniel G. St-Jean and Laurel R. Simmons are better known as The BizzBoosters. With 50 years of business experience between them, they are fully equipped to help anyone who runs a business from home market themselves and their business more effectively. Visit their user-friendly website at http://www.the-best-help-for-home-business-success.com
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