As I have discussed in many past blogs, we are seeing a major shift in how people access technology as more people move toward Smartphones. I see a world where business will be driven by the connectivity we all have with one another based on that little device that acts as an extended appendage for most of us.
We all have an internal desire to be connected.
As business owners, customers, and people, when we buy something, we like to think we are getting the same amount of value for the money we are spending. This is true if we spend $50, $500, or $5,000. We don’t care as much about the dollar amount as we care about the value. If we were only concerned about the price, we would all stay at $59 per night hotels, and obviously that doesn’t always happen. In fact, we will spend $100, $150, or $250 for a hotel to have a high-quality experience. After all, we don’t just want to sleep anywhere, right?
The same can be said for just about everything we buy. As a business, we must provide value relative to the cost of our product or service. This value is what would incentivize people to purchase from our business rather than another.
One of the benefits of being an Entrepreneur and being in EO is that you get to hang out with interesting people that are creating new and better ways of doing things that make the world a better place. I am in Grand Cayman with internet guru Ridgely Goldsborough who is doing some super cutting edge stuff online. Take a look as I pick his brain on the special sauce that makes it all work:
In the world of marketing, everyone wants exposure, and everyone wants us to see the uniqueness of what they offer. They come at us every way and any way possible to get us to notice them, until we’re blinded by the commotion and no longer pay attention to most of what they say.
So as someone with something to offer, how do you get people to notice you? What if you took another approach and shared information that helped them find you, and want to hear what you have to say?
What if you wrote an e-book that provided valuable content for people, and gave it away for free, without even requesting an email address? What if you started blogging and sharing your valuable experiences on your product or service knowledge in a completely open and forthcoming way, so as to give people the knowledge that they crave as well as find useful?
There are times when you have to make business decisions that are painful. Those decisions are often accompanied by the feeling that your work, effort, worry, and money have all been a waste.
For 4 years now, my partner Rich and I have owned a franchise of 1-800-GOT-JUNK. These franchises have been successful all over North America, and we wanted to bring it to Knoxville. The founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK is a fellow EO member that I met in 2001. For 4 years I watched the business grow and become successful before we bought the rights to the Knoxville market.
I previously wrote about our efforts to improve our marketing material, to stop talking so much about ourselves and start talking about how to solve our clients’ pains. A company called Square2Marketing (writers of Reality Marketing Revolution)has been helping us make these changes, and that over time I would update on the progress. The time has come for an update…
Our website is the first major change we’ve made. It is still a work in progress, but we’ve taken some huge strides towards where we want to be. We’ve defined the most common pains of our clients and have really focused on addressing those pains on the website, starting right on the home page.
Does your marketing material talk about you? Does it emphasize what you offer, why you are so great, and what sets you apart from competition? Do you notice a trend here? It’s all about YOU. I know our website is all about us. I also know that, if we want to truly relate to our clients, then it can’t be all about you. Why? Because as impolite as it might sound….potential clients don’t care about you! They care about themselves, their pains, and how to fix them.
Are you going to be the one that helps them? Probably not, unless you can show them that you understand their pains and you know how to fix them. Can you really define the pain that your clients experience when they seek you out, and talk about it as if you’ve been in their shoes? Can you talk to them about what would alleviate those pains, without it being a sales pitch? When you are seeking a product or service and you’re browsing the web, aren’t you more inclined to stop and read about something you can identify with? Something that relates to you and your experiences…
I’d heard similar theories time and time again, but didn’t take it into account when we designed and wrote the content for our website. Had I read Reality Marketing Revolution just a few short years ago, it may have been a different story. We’re now in the process of revamping our website, based off what we’ve learned from this intuitive book written by Michael Lieberman and Eric Keiles (a fellow EO Member). These guys put this into a process for approaching your marketing plan that resonated with me. It’s clear, it makes sense, and it’s obvious. We know the pains our clients’ experience, and we know how to help them. Now Eric is going to help us demonstrate that in a better way.