Simple, affordable marketing tools & services that will take your business to the next level.
Do people know about the amazing value that your business offers?
Unfortunately, for most small to medium-sized businesses, marketing strategy is either non-existent or it simply follows what everyone else is doing. Is that any way to differentiate your business and make it stand out? Not really. If anything, it just shows that what you offer is really no different than what everyone else sells; a commodity. Commodities lack pricing power and loyalty. People will simply go where the lowest price is. Commodity businesses are terrible businesses.
The real key to building a successful business, with real pricing power, is to build a business based on tangible benefits and emotional benefits. The tangible benefits include the usual suspects: Price, features, quality, good customer service, etc. Emotional benefits are the key. This is where great businesses truly make their mark. Emotional benefits leave a mark with people that goes beyond features and price. Happiness, coolness, fun, relief of stress or anxiety, basically any positive emotion that your product or service delivers can have a major impact on the way customers interact with you.
Why are the iPhone and iPad so popular? They have fewer features than the competition, they are closed systems that don’t allow for as much personalization and customization but they are insanely popular. Apple makes their products cool and desireable. It’s been a conscious effort on the part of their marketing for many years. When was the last time that you heard people waiting in line for hours to buy the new Microsoft Zune? Probably not and it will never happen. Why? Because Microsoft markets its products based on features and purely tangible benefits. Apple ignores detailing product features and show people how stylish, cool and fun their products are. They instil an emotional response in people. People love and crave their products.
Now, you may feel that your particular business does not lend itself to instilling an emotional response in people. After all, a widget is just a widget. How can you make people crave a particular type of widget? Take the example of The Pampered Chef. It sells kitchen tools, cookbooks and other items for people to use in preparing food. It was started in the 1980’s by Doris Christopher when she decided to go to her local department store, buy some food preparation tools, and then called her friends over to her house to demonstrate the tools and made a pitch to sell them, much like Tupperware or Mary Kay cosmetics. Her business has grown to be global, with a workforce of over 60,000. What made her so successful? It was in her marketing. Had she simply put ads in her local paper advertising the same products that people could get at their local Sears or Walmart, but for slightly cheaper, she may have made some money but her business would almost assuredly remained small.
She made the conscious decision to market her products on a personal level; to showcase them in a personal setting (her home) and do things differently than others.
Today, getting noticed means doing something different and better; to appeal to people on a deeper level than merely price. Traditional advertising and promotion relies upon interruption (distracting someone from their daily thoughts, in some way) to get them to notice you. Marketing, in the future, will be more about relationships and connecting with people on a deeper level so that they experience your offering on an emotional level.
Going to Starbucks is about more than getting a good cup of coffee. Starbucks promotes itself a place that lies between you house and your office. Going there means enjoying a welcoming and tranquil place, where the hip employees put visitors at ease immediately upon arriving. They remember your names as well as your favourite drink. You feel like you are amongst friends.
Coffee is normally a commodity business. Competition is hard and people pay attention to price, for the most part. But Starbucks has defined their own place within this crowded field and been able to charge more than normal for a cup of coffee by this approach.
Your business can differentiate itself as well, and resonate with customers on a deeper level than price and features. With help from Starstruck Marketing, we can work to define a marketing strategy that will set your company apart from your competitors and define a new and better way for your clients to do business with you.
Contact us for a free evaluation and we can begin to show you how best to position your products and services and make sure that they are targeted towards the right kind of customer for you. Beginning with the basics, we can help you set up a custom marketing plan specifically geared for your industry. Then we can help reveal who you should be trying to reach by defining your ideal customer. Next, we will set up a system where your marketing activities will be planned and automated so that you can be free to take care of the day-to-day operations of you company.
Starstruck Marketing tries to create a marketing system that will bring you the biggest return, while being affordable and flexible.
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