Illuminative Marketing: Creating Business By Offering Benefits And Solutions
How do you respond to cold calls, ads, direct marketing pieces, email spam? Exactly. Now why would you expect your prospects to react differently? Generally people either run from or lash out at aggressive hard sell marketing.
Although they can work, traditional promotion efforts have a poor return on investment. Most prospects turn and run when they feel they’re being sold. Overt promotion is considered intrusive, overly aggressive, and unwelcome. Approaches such as cold calling generally induce reactions such as irritation, fear, impatience, annoyance and anger. Not the reactions you want to illicit in a prospect.
These approaches trigger people’s fight or flight responses. Your prospects either want to argue with you, or they want to slam the phone down in your ear. Not a good way to start to a business relationship. There is a reason why cold calling and direct marketing have such low rates of closing. These approaches set you up as the adversary, the enemy.
To market effectively, attraction should be your focus. You shine a light on your prospective client’s problems and offer solutions; which in turn draws prospects and clients to you. Illumination equals attraction. The trick is to shift from a traditional marketing approach to one that focuses on your value; the standard dynamics of marketing are upturned, as your focus moves from promotion to attraction. Doing business with you becomes appealing, desirable. You and your business are sought after.
This is where a combined approach that includes PR, media relations, blogging and social media can be so effective. For this to work make a firm connection with your message and your audience. Your approach needs to be in alignment with your core values and your true skill set. Focus on illumination and attraction rather than on selling; you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.
