Marketing

Marketing is about finding the right prospespects, keeping their attention and make them interested in what you have to offer. Every business needs to do it because no matter how good your product is, you won’t have profit until your customers can find you.

Direct-Marketing sometimes reduces the lines between itself and sales because it reduces amount of time to close the deal.

But overall, Marketing and Sales are completely different activities. Marketing is about keeping attention. Sales is about closing the deal.

The product that does not sell without advertising. Will not sell with advertising.

Attention

The number 1 rule of marketing is that attention is limited and every other company is trying to grab attention.

People are only interested in things they like and the things that are important to them. Therefore high quality attention is important. And high quality attention must be earned.

At the same time, the aim is not be popular. The aim is to increase profits. So if you can get yourself on TV, you’ll be popular but you’ll waste a lot of time not finding the right customer.

Receptivity

People ignore what they don’t care about.

Receptiveless is how open a person is to your message. There are three parts to this: message, timing and medium

Message: The person should be interested in the message you are offering. Timing: The person should recieve the message at the right time. Medium: The person should recieve message from the right medium. Example: A personlized message will likely be more effective than same commercial message to every person.

From a business perspective, you want your customers to be as receptive as possible.

Remarkability

Remarkability is being enough different to pique the interest of your customers. Being remarkable voiletes customer’s usual expectations and grabs their attention for free.

High remarkability generated word of mouth. Advertisement is what is done when you are not remarkable (or not remarkable enough).

Probable Purchaser

Assuming everyone will purchase your product is bad. There are only a set of people who would. So it makes no sense to try to appeal to everyone.

Appeal to the right customer at the right time. Every good marketing compain does this.

Preoccupation

Always assume that your prospect has preoccupied himself/herself with something. Your goal is to be interesting enough so that you can grab their attention.

The threshhold for this maybe low or high depending on your environment and type of product.

Level of Awareness

You need to be sensitive to how much your probable customer cares about your offer.

There are 5 levels to this:

1. Unaware
2. Problem Aware
3. Solution Aware: Knows solution but not aware of specific offer
4. Offer Aware
5. Full Aware

Your goal is to identiy the level the prospect is at the push them towards upper level -> The Funnel.

The best way to do it is to personalize your message for each prospect and level.

End Result

Humans don’t always do what the think they are doing. Eg: People who buy SUV don’t use it for it’s purpose. They use it to feed their status.

Find out what they really desire and appeal to it.

Ankush: Combine this with Education Based Selling. You cannot sell loads of crap just because it makes someone feel high status.

Demonstration

Demonstration is one of the oldest tricks which significantly increases probability of sale.

Demonstrate your product to the customer. Make them use it. Let them see the results themself. This removes a lot of doubts the prospect may have.

Qualification

It is better to screen prospects and find the right customers that to have bad customers. This has to happen before sale.

Ideally your funnel should remove bad customer. Bad onces will consume un-neccesary time, attention and resources.

After that you can focus on better serving the right once.

The prospect who is not right for you may be right for your competitors. You don’t have to be jumpy about not serving bad prospects, help them by refer them to competitors.

Point of Market Entry

Point of market entry is the point at which the random prospect becomes interested in finding the solution to the problem.

Certain markets have obvious entry point and exit point.

Having the attention of the prospect during point of entry is valuable because the prospect will set you as a standard while comparing with your competitors. This increases your likelihood of sale.

Point of entry is the reason why organic and paid-ad search are so valuable.

Addressability

There are certain problems and types of prospects that open up in public. These can be sensitive issues.

So you’re not going to find a TV Ad style boadcast to do much of a trick or expect a viral word of mouth recommendation.

But you can position yourself in places where they are more liekly to find you.

For example for sensitive health issues, doctors are an easy medium to get to your prospect compared to TV ad.

Nowadays people also Google the solution to their problem, therefore targetted ads are also useful.

Addressability is how easy it is to get in touch with your prospects. Ideally you wannt high addressibility.

If you choose an already addressable market, you’ll reduce your efforts significantly.

Desire

Desire is one of the part of marketing that get’s people off. If someone does not desire your product, no one will purchase it.

Scammy marketters are people who promise a product which is different for what they deliver. But it is almost impossible to sell someone something that they don’t desire.

Your goal is not to appeal to people who don’t desire, it is to find people who can convince themself of how your offer will benifit them.

The more core human drives your marketting offer connects to the more effective it will be.

Visualization

When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.

Test driving is one of the most effective tactics. The prospects stop rationlizing, the emotional part of their brain takes in and they start wanting. Once that is done, it is only a matter of time before sale is made.

Our minds are designed to visulize the consiquences of our actions. By making it easy (by putting as much sensory info as possible) for your prospects to visulize how purchasing the product solves the problem and makes them feel, they will conclude with “I want this”.

Framing

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.

Framing a natural form of communication. There is always some sort of compression when we tell the image. Therefore it pays attention to be concious about it.

Framing your communication to be persuasive and exact can get the point accross faster while honoring the listener.

Framing is not same as deciet, you are not lying.

While framing make sure that the listener know what they need to know because if not done it will harm your reputation.

Free

Getting attention is not the same as getting paid.

Offering free value is a quick way to attract potential customers. But the free value should be such that additional sales negate the amount of resources spent of free.

Done well, this will lead to sales you wouldn’t otherwise have made.

Permission

No one likes spam. So it is better to ask for people’s permission to send them more information in case of newletters, phonecalls, etc.

Do not abuse your privilage. if you keep you keep providing real value in those newsletters, etc. you’ll find more people interested in your paid offering and will create a deeper relationship with the prospect.

Before asking for permission, make it clear what they’ll be getting and how it will benifit them.

This is the next best thing since it reduces marketing cost and increase likelyhood of prospect purchase overtime.

Hook

The smaller your message, the less likely people are to forget it.

Hook is a small enough message that keeps people’s attention and conways to them what you are offereing and who you are. It also makes it easy for people to tell about you to their firends.

Examples:

• A million songs in your pocket -> IPod
• 4 hour work week

Hook can be title, subtitle, slowgan etc. Use it in as many places as possble.

Generate a lot of hooks and test which onces work.

The hook grabs attention and the remainder of your marketing sales activities close the deal.

Call To Action (CTA)

Your prospects won’t know what to do next, so tell them and make it obvious for them. CTA should be simple, single and obvious.

Best CTA ask for either sale or permission to follow up.

Ensure that every message you create has a clear CTA.

Narrative

A common format of a narrative is “Hero’s Journey”. The hero recieves call of adventure and overcomes obstacles to achieve his goals.

The customer wants to be a hero. Knowing that others are already walked on the path makes it easy for them to follow the path themself.

Therefore testomonials, case studies and other stories make it easy for customer to choose your call to adventure.

Controversy

If your position is to agree with everyone else, then you’ll become boring.

Controvery means taking a stand for something you care about even if people disagree with it. Controversy promote discussion and attract peopl’e attention.

Not all controversty is good. As logn as you are able to maintain a sense of bigger picture of how you’re trying to help, a bit of controvery can create useful awareness.

Reputation

Like it or not, the market’s perception becomes your perception.

Branding often means increasing and maintaining reputation.

People are willing to pay to premium for a good reputation.

Reputation is not under direct control you can only try to improve it overtime. It includes everything: products, advertisement, customer service, etc.

Building reputation takes time and effort but is one of the most important marketing out there.