Marketing advice for non-marketers
When people ask me for marketing advice — for how to market their business or sell a couch on Craigslist — the first thing I tell them is that they’d get better advice asking their pets.
After I’m done with the self-deprecation, I boil down marketing to one principle: put yourself in their shoes, with their being your customers or your audience. Everything else is just window dressing.
- What does your customer want? (What are the features?)
- How does your product improve their lives? (What are the benefits?)
- What risk do buyers have? Is it real risk or perceived? How can you remove the risk? (Can you offer a risk-free trial or money back guarantee?)
- How would they find out about your products? (How will you promote your product?)
- Would they prefer to buy it from you or a reseller? (Is there someone else that would do a better job of selling your product for you?)
- Who else are they going to have to convince about buying your product or service? (Do you have to sell to their boss as well?)
- What are their expectations? (How will I fulfill my side of the agreement?)
A couple book recommendations:
Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, Jay Abraham, is an okay book, a decent intro to marketing. He focuses mostly on removing all risks for the buyer — money back guarantees, 60-day free trials. There’s other stuff in there about making your business different, creating a niche for yourself.
Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard, is by far my favorite book about all things for running a company, creating great products, differentiating your business from the competition, and marketing. I blogged about it quite some time ago.
Comments are closed.
HI ,
We are a taxi company Hummingbird Cars in London. We provide Airport Transfer service from all london airports.
We have recently started our new business and we want our business to grow and make more revenue. Can anyone suggest which is the best form of marketing which we can use. What are also the best medium of advertising where we can do effective and cost control advertsing
http://www.hummingbirdcars.com
Thank you
Offhand, I don’t know. But I do know some questions you should be asking yourselves to help answer the question.
1. Where do you personally look when you need to find a taxi service?
2. How do your competitors advertise?
3. Do you have a niche or are you targeting everyone that needs taxi service?
4. How much are you willing to spend to advertise?
5. How will you track the success of your ads?
My comments on the above questions:
1. Personally, I look online these days. I’ll be sitting in front of my laptop at home or at work and will search for “airport taxi service.” If it were me, I would investigate the costs for running ads online.
2. Your competitors may do a good job, or not. But it’s worth looking to see what kinds of online and offline ads they run.
3. The demographic you’re targeting is important because it will tell you where to advertise. High tech workers tend to use Google, but grandma and grandpa may use Yahoo or MSN. If you run online ads, you may need to try the different major services and then decide where your money is best spent.
4. Budget will drive a lot of decisions.
5. If you can, think about tracking before you spend your first dime on advertising. You can use special promo codes to help determine the source of the ads. Or, if you do online ads, you can also use special landing pages.
Bonus suggestion: I really like some of the iPhone taxi apps! http://www.taxiapp.com and http://taximagic.com.