Sales & Marketing are Culture.
Know Your Market.
What we tend to forget to think about as creators is who we are creating for.
Exceptional Marketer Seth Godin asks, “Who’s it for?” It is a really important question to answer. The Who is vital, usually more so than the creative thing in question. Why? Because without the targeted Who in question to engage and to promote to, the creative thing withers on the vine or the App Store or on the Internet or out in the field.
The Best way to get to know your Who is to build a customer avatar. Break out their demographics and psychographics. Give them a human name. Market to this person only. Be specific. The more specific, the better. Specificity wins in sales & marketing. You don’t market to dog owners. You market to owners of French Bulldogs. You don’t market to car owners. You market to Tesla Model S owners. You don’t market to contractors. You market to resinous flooring contractors who specialize in urethane cement installations.
You market to people who, when they see your ad or headline, go, “Hey! That’s me!”
Attention is hard enough to capture. You best capture it through specificity.
Your Who is more important than your offer because who you are marketing to is over 50% of your success out of the gate. If you pick the wrong market, you’re up the creek. You need a list of proven buyers. In fact, there is nothing more powerful for you to acquire than a list of proven buyers. The easiest people to sell to are those who have already bought from you (or somebody else selling similar goods and services as you). This is why mean, old Dan Kennedy talks about your Who so often and with great elegance.
It feels like your market is everything because it is.
It is great advice to actually be /in/ your market. Buy the product that they buy. Go to the live events that they attend. Test out the services they test out. Find out who the creative ad pros are that write to this market and get to know them. By being in your market, you get to interact with the people in your market. You get to know and like and trust them. They get to know and like and trust you. You get to hear how they talk. You get to hear the language, the actual words they use to describe feelings and experiences and exclamations. Why is this valuable? It is valuable because when you know exactly how they talk to each other, you know which words to use in your sales copy. You know how to talk to them because you want to resemble them as much as you can when you’re selling to them. Why is that important?
That is important because we buy from people who we know, like and trust, and who act like us. We buy from people like us doing things like this. People like us. Just like Seth Godin says.
Sales & Marketing are Culture.
Your market is a culture, a culture of people doing things. They’re creating things for each other. They’re helping one another solve problems. They’re trying to make things better for their people. They’re prepping food and drink for one another. When someone in the culture is in a bind, they come together to help that person. That sounds a lot like a family, doesn’t it? It sounds a lot like a family because markets are a culture. A culture, as Seth says, of people like us doing things like this. This is your market. This is my market. These are my people. This is my family. I identify with these people. Culture.
We take care of our people.
And what do we do with our people? We take care of them! We take care of them — just like family. /This/ is family. This is why we write. This is why we teach. This is why we train. This is why we create. This is why we prep food and drink. This is why we get up early.
We create to build a legacy.
We create for our people. We create to build a legacy for these people. We care for these people. We want what’s best for these people. We want these people to have the guidance, confidence and tools to help them sell more. Why shouldn’t they have the guidance, confidence and tools!?
This is us. This is who we are.
