Nowadays, people are suspicious of advertising, and they see too much of it to even remember or take in those carefully crafted message. So the clever business owner has to use some different methods to get noticed and encourage people to buy. One of these ways is to create a buzz about your business – to get people talking about what you’re doing.
The importance of trust
People are wary of marketing messages, and wary of business – and rightly so, given how easy it is to be taken for a ride. People will buy from you if they trust you and if they really believe that you have a good product which can help them.
You need to get this message across in your marketing material, explaining why this would be a good thing for people to buy.
You’d be amazed at how many people don’t bother to tell people how their product or service would help them and stop short by just describing what they sell. One of the simplest marketing tenets is that you need to sell the sizzle, not the steak, and although this is such a simple idea, it’s also very, very true.
Why should they believe you?
I could tell you that working with me will make you a millionaire in 3 months, but you’d be right to think that I was talking a load of old rubbish - it will take longer than that I’m afraid, and you’ll have to do a lot of work along the way. You need to find ways to make people trust you, believe you and like you.
There are several ways to do this, and you probably need to use a mixture of all of them.
People are more likely to believe you if they hear from you regularly. That’s why email newsletters, blogs and twitter work as marketing tools – because they are all ways in which you can catch someone’s attention repeatedly over time.
This is also why effective networkers follow up with the people they’ve met, and go to the same networking events regularly. You have a chance to make sure that people trust you, because they’ve heard from you more than a couple of times. You wouldn’t want someone you’ve met a couple of times to be the best man at your wedding, you’d want someone who you’ve known for a long time, because they’re the person who you know isn’t going to let you down.
If people regularly hear about you, this will have the same effect, as long as they’re hearing good things (and preferably similar things.) That’s why PR works – because people hear about a company and get to know it.
Making people believe in you.
People are much more likely to trust you and believe you when they have been recommended to you.
Last week, someone phoned me wanting some help with changing his career, and a couple of people had separately recommended that he talk to me. Now, I’m not sure why they had recommended me, because although they’d apparently said some lovely things about me, I wasn’t the right person to help him change career, as it wasn’t anything to do with running a business.
When I told him I couldn’t help him, he became quite upset for a moment. Think about that – he’s never met me, he’s not looked at my website, all he’s got to go is that a couple of people said I’d be able to help. Why wouldn’t he just google “career coach Brighton”?
Because he really wanted the person who his friends had suggested – the power of recommendation is that strong. Fortunately, I was able to in turn recommend some good people who would be much better at helping him than I would, so it was all alright, and he’ll be fine.
And the weirdest thing of all about this story is that I had no idea who the people who recommended me were. Someone out there had told their story of how I’d helped them, and this had been passed along a chain of other people.
That’s the reaction that you want to create - although I guess what’s wrong with this picture is that it would be good if they had recommended me to someone who I could actually help directly.
You want people to be talking about what you do, and buzzing about how good you are.
Creating buzz
To create buzz about your business you need to:
- Play a long game – the original sources of the buzz that this chap had heard turned out to be people I had worked with two or three years ago.
- Keep in touch with people, and keep giving out consistent messages about what you do.
- Create stories about what you do, and how you do it – I’ve overheard people repeating stories about my work that I’ve long forgotten ever telling, but they’ve stuck in people’s minds. I’ve just told you a story about the power of recommendation, and that will stick in your mind for longer than this list of actions you need to create a buzz.
- Be good at what you do. Even if a customer annoys you, even if you’re doing work for free, do the best job you possibly can. A bad story about you will spread faster and be more difficult to change than any tale of how good at your job you are
- Be lovely. Another simple (and true) marketing tenet is that people do business with people they like, and the extension of that is that people do business with the people who other people like.
Julia Chanteray
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