Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Surprising and delighting works, but only when it’s done randomly.
The moment you attempt to exceed every expectation, that’s when you enter a spiral toward disappointment.
At some point, you won’t be able to blow someone away with your not-so-random acts of kindness.
The beauty of it all is that keeping your promise, that’s usually enough. No need to focus on exceeding every expectation.
Stay Positive & A Special HT To Seth Godin For This Realization
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Facebook has a few ad objectives marketers can choose from.
There’s engagement – get people interacting with and reacting to your post.
There’s awareness – get as many people to see your post as possible.
There’s conversion – get people to buy what you’re selling in your post.
Whether you believe Facebook is the social messiah of the digital world or not, it’s worth noting that even the media giant sets advertisers up to have three separate conversations about success.
Contrary to what you may have been told (or told yourself), every post, word, image, share, statement you put out in the world is not just to sell, to make money, to get people to buy.
Too often conversations swing that way (and the worldview that most people have ulterior motives when they perform an act of kindness doesn’t help either). The truth is that sometimes all we want is to engage with someone, to connect with them, to feel something.
The truth is that sometimes we just want to share that there’s a sale or that there’s a special release happening Tuesday because we would have wanted someone else to share it with us. The motivation is to contribute, not to collect.
When we try to talk about engagement and awareness with how many conversions we collected; that’s when trouble arises, expectations go unmet, and future marketing messages lose their meaning and become a blur.
Stay Positive & So Tell Me Again, What’s Your Objective
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What the world needs is more fools.
More people who push a project so close to the edge that they’re guaranteed to make a mistake somehow.
More people who subject themselves to the long haul, that don’t expect instant gratification, that do what looks stupid now for the greater good of later.
More people who dance at the edge, who play both roles of insider and outsider.
More people who label things as they are, who call it as they see it, who are purveyors of truth.
More people who find courage in discomfort.
Like I said, more fools.
Stay Positive & More People Like You?
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Thoroughly consider if you’re making a mistake by going to the head-honcho to learn how to make an impact.
Head-honchos, prom queens, recent Amazon best-seller authors are all in positions where they have a lot to lose. So they button up. They hold their tongue. They work to keep things in check and insanely measurable.
While you can still learn a thing or two from them, the grand insights are more easily found around those who have less to lose and more to gain: Those willing to try something different, who are talking about what’s wrong with a system and how they plan to solve it, who don’t hold their tongue (or their imagination) back from saying (or thinking) the ridiculous.
If you think about it most ideas that we take for granted now were once thought of as being ridiculous.
Stay Positive & Make Sure You’re Hanging Around The Edges
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“Just as I expected.”
That’s the goal for a response when a customer is asked how the interaction went.
Get there first. Then you can work on the surprising and delighting.
Stay Positive & Run Before You Leap
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Consider the number of interactions you’ll have over your lifetime.
Not the number of times you’ll interact, total, but the number of times you’ll interact with the same person.
Now consider these facts:
And let’s not even get started on love and how important those consistent interactions with one person are.
When you thoroughly consider the number of times you’ll meet each person again… Burning bridges looks less appealing. Complaining to whoever is to your left doesn’t seem so smart. Not waking up to give a damn about those you saw yesterday and will see again today (or maybe tomorrow or the next day or a year from now), well, that’s just a waste of a morning.
Stay Positive & Set Yourself Up For Success Now
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The root of any marketing flop is in the lack of understanding about the target.
So how does one go about getting to know the target better?
1) Go where they shop and watch how they do it. Who are they with? What do they pick up and then put down? Why? Even if you’re not selling grocery products, you’ll learn more about the target there than in any other space.
2) Talk to them. Ask how their closest friend would describe them. Ask them what they wake up giving a damn about in the morning.
3) Talk to the target’s friends. Confirm what the target thinks they would say is actually what the friends say.
4) Invest the four or five hours to learn how to use online forums and use them. It’s incredible how open people are online and what they’re willing to say about themselves.
5) Break out the colored pencils and start drawing exactly how you think the target looks. Is she wearing flashy jewellery? Why? Is her hair curled? Why? Is she wearing wedges instead of high-heels? Why did you draw those on her?
Turns out you know more about the target than you think you do… if only you’d take the time to think about them instead of how to get in front of them.
6) Get outside. Not at your computer. Outside. It doesn’t matter where.
7) Don’t simply ask what the target thinks about your product. Let them use it, feel it, be with it and watch. Most don’t know what they really think about something until they make it part of their life.
It’s not a clean process. Nor is it easy. But it’s a starting action-list for learning, understanding and selling to the target. Who would have guessed that all you needed to do is take a proactive approach to listen to the target?
Stay Positive & Now You Know
