In Your Marketing Sucks, and You Know It – Part 1, we introduced the first two basic principles of marketing we recommend all CapitalQ Community Members embrace, and apply, to their businesses every single day.
So here are principles three, four and five…
Principle Three – Marketing (and selling for that matter) are not dirty words, they are not immoral, they are not bad, so long as… you believe what you are selling provides real value to your customers.
You produce a good product or service, don’t you? You do the best you can, don’t you? You feel the recipients of your product or service are better off because of you and your product or service, right? You feel you are providing value and enhancing their lives, even if just in a modest way, right?
Then why on earth would you feel guilty about telling the world about what you have to offer? Why would you do anything other than shout it from the roof tops? Here is another, even better way to look at it…
If you truly believe you provide a good product or service, if you truly believe your customers are better off because of you and your product or service, then you owe it to your customers, you owe it to the world, to make sure they know it and to make sure they buy it from you.
We have discussed before, in reference to Naval Ravikant’s ideas, wealth is a positive sum game. If you create value for your customers (improve their health, improve their happiness, improve their finances, save them time, save them stress, whatever it is) and they willingly, gladly pay you for doing so, you have created new wealth that didn’t exist before.
You haven’t taken anything from anyone. There is not a finite amount of wealth and value in the world. It is not a game of takers and losers. It is a game of never ending creation and abundance for all.
To this point, Zig Ziglar says…
“To get everything you want… help enough people get what they want.”
Principle Four – Your customers only have a system for NOT-BUYING. So you must have a system for selling that overcomes it.
What is the first thing you say to a store attendant when asked “Can I help you?”. You tell them “No, I’m just browsing thanks”.
That is your innate system for not buying kicking in. And we all have it. It is a defensive mechanism designed to protect us from being taken advantage of. And it has been honed over time by every occasion where we have been let down in life.
Therefore, you must not only overcome their initial (often misplaced) self-preservation instinct, you must also overcome the pain and suffering (sometimes literal, usually metaphorical) endured over years and years of bad customer experiences.
The only way you can do that reliably and consistently and efficiently, is to have a system for selling, which starts with your marketing. A repeatable system that can be employed regardless of variables such as who is doing it (ie. you or a staff member), the time of year, the weather, whether the Eagles are winning, what have you.
Principle Five – Same is lame!
Your marketing message must stand out.
We hear estimates that suggests it takes between 5 and as many as 11 times for a potential customer to see or hear about you before they take action. This is more than ever, and it is because today we are all continually bombarded with attempts to capture our attention.
Still not sure what your next step should be… consider Earl Nightingale’s advice (we introduced you to Earl when we recommended his book, The Strangest Secret, in the 2019 Autumn Edition of The Q Review).
Earl says …
“If you don’t have a good model for success, just look at what everybody else is doing and do the opposite.”
Want to take your business marketing to the next level?
Register for our upcoming event, part of the CapitalQ Business Success Workshop Series.