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All told, it’s a pretty gut-wrenching experience to dedicate a significant amount of your financial and human resources to a marketing strategy, only for it to fall flat, and for no one to apparently pay any attention to it, at all.
This can be especially hard to bear, when you consider the fact that for many people, marketing is the part of their job they least enjoy, not to mention the part of their job which they deem to be the most ethically suspect, due to the unfortunate and poor examples set by unethical salesmen past and present.
Yet marketing really is important. It’s certainly essential, if you want to have any hope of making a success of a startup.
So, here are some suggestions on how to get people to actually pay attention to your marketing.
Provide marketing materials that are actually useful in and of themselves
Most of the marketing materials that people send out are, unfortunately, spam — or little better than it.
If a prospective client or colleague gets an unsolicited email from you, saying something like “best company in town, years of experience, great products!” the only purpose of that email has been for you to signal your existence to the prospect.
For the prospect, there may well have been no benefit to receiving your email.
If, on the other hand, you’d send out an offer of a free ebook or free review product, they might actually be inclined to feel happy about the email, and to pay attention.
Likewise, if you were to send an important prospective client a couple of sturdy bags with your logo printed on them, they would likely actually use those bags and be better inclined to use your services down the line, than if they had to recycle yet another business card.
Accurately identify a problem that the client is facing, and offer a positive solution
A general marketing maxim states that people don’t buy products, they buy solutions. That is to say; no client thinks “I need a door supplier with 15.2 years of experience who specialises in the XYZ model of…”, they think “the doors in this building are flimsy, I’m worried about security.”
The more you’re able to step into your client’s shoes, so to speak, and to offer a positive solution to the issues they really are likely to be facing, the better the odds that they will use your services.
Remember, you’re selling solutions, not products.
Offer a product or service that is genuinely good, and as well-optimised as possible
If your marketing efforts are superb and industrious, but the product or service you’re selling is sub-par, then it goes without saying that you’re not likely to experience great success.
If, on the other hand, your product or service is as good and well-optimised as you could possibly make it be, the odds are much higher that the marketing strategy will “take”, and word of mouth will kick in.
Be sure that you’re not just advertising hard, but are also selling a product or service that you’re proud to put your name to.