Imagine you are sitting at your kitchen table at 11:30 at night. The house is quiet, everyone else has gone to bed, and you have your laptop open because something has been bothering you.
Maybe your business had another disappointing month. Maybe retirement suddenly feels much closer than it did five years ago. Maybe you are staring at a stain spreading across the ceiling or wondering why your teenager’s teeth seem to be getting more crooked instead of less.
Whatever the problem is, you are thinking about your life.
Then an advertisement appears telling you that ABC Company has been the region’s premier provider of innovative solutions for more than 25 years.
Wonderful. I’m sure their mother is very proud, but you still have a problem.
Legendary direct-mail copywriter Robert Collier understood that successful marketing enters the conversation already taking place in the prospect’s mind. Businesses naturally begin with the conversation happening inside their own heads, while customers begin with the one happening inside theirs.
Great marketing finds the intersection.
Your Customer Was Thinking About Something Before You Arrived
Businesses spend enormous amounts of time thinking about products, services, pricing, features, competitors, operations, and positioning. When it is time to create marketing, those internal conversations naturally spill onto the page.
The customer arrives carrying a completely different conversation.
The homeowner staring at the ceiling is not thinking about your roofing company’s commitment to craftsmanship. She is wondering whether that little brown stain means she is about to spend $20,000.
The business owner approaching retirement is not thinking about your proprietary advisory process. He is wondering whether the company he spent 30 years building is worth enough to support the life he imagined.
The dental patient is not lying awake pondering state-of-the-art orthodontic technology. She is wondering whether she can straighten her teeth without looking like a teenager at Monday morning’s management meeting.
Those are the conversations we need to enter because once we demonstrate that we understand what matters to the customer, we earn the opportunity to talk about ourselves.
Listen Before You Write
The easiest way to understand what customers are thinking is surprisingly old-fashioned: listen to them.
Unfortunately, businesses have a strange habit of cleaning up customer language before using it.
A customer says, “I’m terrified I’m going to run out of money,” and marketing turns it into, “Achieve greater financial confidence in retirement.”
A business owner says, “I’m working 70 hours a week and this place falls apart every time I leave,” and marketing produces, “Optimize organizational efficiency through scalable systems.”
We took something human and made it sound like it escaped from a committee meeting.
Customers talk about frustration, fear, inconvenience, confusion, hope, and desire. When someone sees those thoughts reflected in your marketing, the message immediately feels more relevant because they recognize themselves in it.
Using “You” Is Not Enough
Marketers often tell writers to use the word “you” more frequently, and that is generally good advice. However, you-focused marketing requires more than sprinkling “you” throughout copy that is still fundamentally about the company.
“You can benefit from our 25 years of experience” is technically about you, but we are still thinking about us.
Compare that with, “You have spent 25 years building this business. Do you know what someone would actually pay you for it?”
Now we are beginning with the customer’s concern. Our experience and credentials can come later because they support the solution.
The order matters.
Features Matter After the Customer Cares
None of this means we should stop talking about products, processes, technology, credentials, or features. Those things become far more persuasive when connected to something the customer already wants.
Imagine a company selling commercial backup generators. The engineering specifications matter, but the business owner may not begin the buying process fascinated by kilowatts and transfer switches.
He may begin because the power went out for six hours last summer and his company lost $38,000.
Now those specifications have meaning because we can explain how quickly the generator activates, how much of the facility it can support, and what another outage could cost.
The features did not change. What changed was their relevance to the customer.
Stop Trying to Change the Subject
Imagine having lunch with a friend who tells you she is worried about losing her job, and you respond by telling her about your new car. She explains that her company has been laying people off, and you tell her the car has heated seats.
Eventually, she is going to wonder whether you are listening.
Businesses do this constantly. The prospect worries about price while we talk about awards. They worry about risk while we discuss features. They want to know what happens next, and we give them our mission statement.
Good marketing can absolutely change the conversation, but it needs to enter the customer’s conversation first.
Marketing Gets Easier When You Stop Guessing
Robert Collier worked long before online reviews, recorded sales calls, CRM systems, search data, and social media gave marketers extraordinary access to customer language.
Today, your customers are constantly telling you what matters to them. Listen to sales calls, read reviews, study objections, and pay attention to the questions people ask before they buy.
Then create marketing that sounds less like something your company wants to announce and more like a conversation your customer actually wants to have.
If your marketing spends too much time explaining who you are and not enough demonstrating that you understand your customer, visit www.meetparthiv.com to schedule a complimentary Strategic Growth Session.
We’ll look at your customers, the conversations already happening in their minds, and how your marketing can become part of those conversations.
The best way to get someone interested in what you have to say is to start with what they were already thinking about.
To your unstoppable success,
President
eLaunchers.Com