Stop Marketing, Stop Selling and Start Connecting
Over at License to Roam, Rachel Clarke reports in her post Self-replicating Awesomeness at SXSW the following exchange:
Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, David Parmet
- DP: Brian Oberkirch put this together - he asked 2 questions. How to market into community without being too marketer like. And how do you build a community around what you are doing? What does ‘no marketing’ look like? How can we use social media?
- DS: None of this is about tools or technology, but is about the customers. Here to talk about some of the subtleties, not about the tactics. It’s about marketing, customer service, product development. the marketing silo needs to be changed, why are they afraid of the opps. This is not telling or selling, this is being in the trenches.
- CH: what is really bugging me right now is the number of people who are saying to me ‘build me a community’ but this does make a community, it is the interpersonal connections that make it. Social media is not new media, it changes how we relate to each other. You have to shift the way you think about participation. have to change mindset from stop trying to sell me to help make me buy.
stop trying to sell me to help make me buy
I’d rework that final phrase to…
stop trying to sell me and instead help me solve my problem/fill my want/ meet my need
Fifty years ago selling was push, push, push. Over the past half century the tide has turned and now selling is more of a pull, pull, pull.
Stop Marketing, Stop Selling and Start Connecting
The ENTIRE focus of my first book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results is to help the reader get out of his/her own head and into the head of his/her customers!!! To use the language above…jumping INTO THE TRENCHES and getting down and dirty connecting with your target customers.
When your focus is upon solving your customers problems…. when your focus is upon providing something they want…. when your product or service meets their need… you discover that marketing is merely presenting your solution… your answer to the people who not only want to hear it, but are EAGER to learn more.
Holy Grail of Marketing: Creating Viral Marketing Campaigns
Social Networking is all the buzz these days. Big corporations and small business owners are wading in and trying to leverage social networking sites to create viral marketing campaigns. Many mistakenly view “viral marketing” as merely another form of word of mouth advertising.
Seth Godin writes in “Is Viral Marketing the Same as Word of Mouth“:
Viral marketing [does not equal] word of mouth. Here’s why:
Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.
Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.)
So it’s easy to see why a viral marketing campaign would be the holy grail for most marketing professionals or business owners. Imagine… creating an ad campaign that you don’t have to pay to have delivered…instead it’s carried by your customers to their friends… and their friends carry the message to their friends. All this is done without any promise of renumeration.
Viral Marketing is indeed the pinnacle of marketing success…the problem is that most attempts at launching “viral marketing campaigns” land FLAT! For every successful one launched, there are hundreds that fail to engage and deliver.
In 7 tricks to Viral Web Marketing Thomas Baekdal writes for tip #3:
Do not try to make advertisements (that sucks)
One of the biggest mistake companies make is when they think viral marketing is just advertisements that people share - it is not. Traditional marketing is about promoting your product, showing how good it is, giving it center stage - and generally being incredibly selfish (and possibly using supermodels or movie stars). But guess what, nobody cares about you!
Viral marketing is all about a good story. When BMW put out BMW Films, the main ingredient was not the cars, but the story. Replace the car with another one, and it would still be great. When Sony made their Bravia TV ads, the product was not even seen - yet everyone remembers it.
So, in true paradoxical fashion… setting out to create a “viral” marketing campaign is the wrong approach. Instead, seek to engage and interact with your customer. CONNECT!!!!
