Vanilla Marketing (yawn)

Definition of Vanilla from UrbanDictionary.com:
Unexciting, normal, conventional, boring.

by Rachel Karl


With a plethora (that means "a lot") of choices in the marketplace, and even more marketing messages to "Buy now while supplies last!", customers rarely feel obligated to support you.

Most products become boring. Most marketing messages are unexciting. Thus most customers have zero enticement to buy your product over someone else's.

You can tell yourself it's the opposite all the way to bankruptcy. You can spout how wonderful your company is if you want. But the harsh reality is that's just not true. Not in the eyes of the millions of consumers out there.

And telling people how great you are will just alienate them further from you.

Nobody cares about how you have the best widgets or how your widgets are built with the highest quality or how you've been around since 1927.

What people want to know is how can your widget solve their problems.

There are several things businesses should keep in mind before any marketing piece is ever crafted.

Here's a crash course on how to spice up your marketing.

Don't Sell Yourself Broke

With a tired (albeit gradually awakening) economy, the challenge of getting buyers to respond to your marketing is more difficult than ever before. And speaking of bankruptcy, the solution is not to lower your prices below those of all your competitors to try to draw people in.

To the contrary. Often, higher priced products and services are perceived as having more value, whereas the cheapest price is looked upon with suspicion and fear. Aka, "There must be something wrong with it if the price is so cheap."

So, what's the solution? And how do you get customers to turn to you instead of the competition?

Be Unique

The real solution is to offer something of value, which you probably do, and target exactly who will benefit from that value.

In order to be very clear about the value you're offering, you have to find a way to set yourself apart from all the other widget sellers out there and narrow the playing field.

Let's take dentists as an example...

Joe Dentist is trying to sell his teeth whitening services. He needs to find a niche within the teeth whitening consumers. Dr. Joe does a real-time search using Search.Twitter.com and discovers that brides-to-be are very interested in having beautiful, white teeth on their wedding day. Hmm.

Funnel The Traffic To You

Dr. Joe then crafts a targeted promotional offer and sends out a bunch of postcards to brides-to-be, or runs Facebook ads to any and all brides-to-be within a 30-mile radius of his office.

By tightly targeting his marketing, Joe may worry that he will miss all the other people who want whiter teeth. However, if he thought that, he'd be missing the boat on what makes marketing work.

Summary

• Figure out a specific group to target (a group within a group).
  
• Create a unique benefit to that group that addresses a specific need.
  
• Drive people to you and funnel them up the channel by always reminding them about the problem you can solve with your product or service.
  

Find ways to do this, and you will see your marketing results soar.

Need more help? Just ask me in the comment box below...