Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
How are we measuring success?
What value are we providing?
What emotion does the target want to feel when connecting with our product or service?
Why are we doing it this way?
How can we prove the target will respond how we want?
How will we scale?
It doesn’t really matter how you ask. As long as you are confirming you’re down the right path with every single move you make, you’re bound, destined, guaranteed to arrive at the success you seek.
Stay Positive & You Are Asking, Right?
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When using emotional connections to market a product or service, it’s often easy to leverage the inspiring mindset that you want to create more share.
It’s fair as a bow manufacturer brand to want to get more people into archery, and, by extension, buy their product. That would be creating share and there are many inspiring, connective, and legendary ways to create share.
However, it makes no sense for a peep manufacturer or archery bow release brand to worry about marketing in a way that creates share. Leave it up to the bow makers.
Another example? Does it make sense for an instrument mouth piece brand to try to get more people to buy saxophones in hopes they will buy their mouth pieces? No. It’s better for them to steal shares from competitors and to focus on those who already own an instrument.
Another example? What about a vehicle seat brand trying to get more people to buy cars in the hopes they will buy a car with their seats. No. It’s better for them to steal shares and leave the getting more people to buy cars up to the car makers.
Every marketing tactic you come up with files into one of these two categories. If your strategy is to steal shares, you need to stay with the tactics that accomplish it, rather than getting lost in the fun-ness and trap of working to create more shares.
Stay Positive & Know What You’re Marketing
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It’s quite natural for the lizard brain to ignite some crazy thoughts in our heads while receiving, waiting to receive, or after having received feedback.
Think about the email containing feedback and how it seemed so harsh when you read it. Think about all the things you’re thinking could be wrong. Think about how you’ve felt as if you’re not good enough. It all sucks.
I found two effective ways to get beyond the rush of blood one gets when feedback is imminent.
If you’re one that doesn’t handle feedback well, one who has a lot of self-doubt, consider working on your focus. When you focus (seeing what’s in it for you and being curious), it’s impossible for negative thoughts to occur because there is no mental space for them.
Stay Positive & Put Your Mental Energy Toward What’s Important
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Most relationships don’t work to their fullest potential when all you think about is what you can get out of them.
Relationships, marketing, selling is all about giving.
Focus isn’t in that category, though.
As written in part 1, focus requires there to be curiosity. If you’re finding a reason to ask why and to dig deeper into something, it’s impossible not to focus. However, to carry it further, focus requires both curiosity and intention.
There needs to be a gentle motivation to stay with the object. What will you get out of it? What’s in it for you? It’s this intention that makes fishing such a focus-sport. The fishermen is curious if anything will bite, if this particular bate will work, if the weather is right as well as he’s thinking of having what he catches for dinner, that’s what’s in it for him.
For complete focus, be curious, but also maintain intention.
Stay Positive & What’s In It For You?
The more substantial the product, the harder it is to give away because it means accepting a change of perception or worldview or lifestyle.
However, it’s that change, which people care most about.
Products that don’t make profit fail to do so, not quite because of the functionality, but because it wasn’t communicated to the consumer exactly how it would alter their life and why they would want it altered in that way.
Arguably, the best products are the ones that fill a need already there, but I think marketing practices deserve to be challenged more than that.
So, yes. Please. Go make something so incredibly remarkable and substantial and life-changing.
Stay Positive & We Need More Of It
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On this episode of In The Box Podcast, we talked about creating multiple projects versus one solid quality project every now and then. We also dove into what it means to turn from a freelancer to an entrepreneur, the mindset to have when loaning money, what to do when you simply can’t get a read on someone, and Michael shared one word to grow by (and why) Enjoy.
Episode 24: Serial Project Creator, Getting A Read Of Someone, One Word To Grow By And More
To be successful – Generally speaking, to be successful do you always need to be serially creating projects?
Freelancer to entrepreneur – What’s one way you can go from a freelancer to an entrepreneur?
Pay back – At what point (how much money) do you ask someone to pay you back?
Get a read – What’s the first thing you do when you can’t get a read on someone?
Grow – What is one word to grow by?
Stay Positive & What’s Your One Word To Grow By?
As marketers, it’s easy to get lost in social platforms, lost in creative ideas, lost in all the PR efforts you could be implementing. It’s all attention-worthy work. Shiny. New. Fun.
Yesterday I got asked to prove why social was a place we wanted to do work in for a particular client. I pulled an answer out of my ass because I hadn’t been working on supporting that case. Instead, I was busy working on slides that showed all we could do in social and less on why we should do it.
Why is the guy in the photo above where he is? What is he feeling? Thinking? What are his motivations? What’s the point of being there?
These are all questions we’ve got to ask when we work in the social and PR world.
Even harder to answer and prove: how do we know our audience is there? On Instagram? On FB? How do we know the target cares about the PR stunt we’re planning?
Yesterday was a great reminder that the work we do isn’t about just doing great work, it’s about showing people it’s great work that is in need of being done.
Stay Positive & Answering Tough Questions Leads To Better Results
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