Marketing To The Human Being

I'm sitting here with a great friend and we're talking about his latest exciting venture marketing one of my all time favorite writers/artists on the spiritual side of self-help- David Deida.

My friend will be launching a new monthly audio membership site at TheDeidaSource.com

Helping him with his marketing, launch, and social media strategy... first thing you should know is that we've got a couple of distinctions made. These are two important distinctions about his prospects and potential customers. They are:

1) Existing Fans- There are a lot of people who are already fans of Deida and love his work. How and what we'll do to attract and market to these people is radically different than how we'll handle "Newbies"

2) Newbies- If you've never heard of Deida, and more to the point you haven't really been doing this kind of "work" on yourself, then how and what we want to put in front of these people to attract them and get them to convert (sign up for newsletter, blog, membership) is not at all what the existing fans will receive.

Point being, we are actually going to create 2 seperate channels to connect with and market to both these general audiences.

I've literally seen people triple their business with simple insights and distinctions like this, or become 10-20x better at attracting new customers with less effort.

Insight: Your products/services won't sell themselves just because they are great, cool, or other people rave about them. What will sell them is how you connect the dots on how your stuff is valuable to your prospect.

So what if you're pretending that all your prospects think and act the same way, talk the same language, and respond to the same things for the same reasons.

Big mistake.

That's why I'm making sure my friend divides the camps in his marketing for his Deida audience and targets his marketing approach.

The point is simple-

When you think about who the actual recipient of your marketing is, and you stop pretending that they are all the same, you begin to dive into THEIR WORLD.

When you finally get past all your BS about what you know, and you start paying attention to them, you're going to recognize some important stuff. Like how they feel, what they've done before, what's worked for them, what hasn't, etc. Simply mentioning that you know all this about them can make for good marketing. Great marketing goes a step further.

Recognizing "important stuff" about people in their past, and foretelling their future is arguably the single most valuable activity you can do as a marketer. Why? Because it allows you to paint a window of their world and place it in front of them. And when you do this, people can't help but be amazed and need and ask for more.

At the end of the day- we all love being understood for our pain, our pleasure, our abilities and our weaknesses a whole lot more than we'd like to admit.

The internet is the ideal place to do all this with your customer, because they don't mind passively opening up in this way.

How much time do you spend making distinctions about the personal experiences of your prospects, readers, and customers?

I'm always amazed at how business people can listen to and study marketing, and then totally ignore what they've been told and jump to stupid conclusions about what their customers would be interested in.

I'll say it clearly-

If you're doing marketing of any kind- you are not your customer, and you do not get to choose or dictate who your customer is or how they think, feel, speak, etc.

The market you have chosen to be in, and the channel through which you are connecting with and putting your message in front of people is what dictates.

Action Step:

Put some time into how and when your message will appear in front of a real human being. Sit back and imagine this moment. Then stop to remember that no one wakes up and says, "I want to read some advertising and buy stuff I don't really need today."

Now, what will you say to them given the CONTEXT in which they will hear from you?

If you want raving repeat fans and customer, you've got to give them a reason that's already all their own.

How Outgoing Are You On The Social Web?

I'm down in sunny San Diego at the Graphing Social Patterns West program for the next couple of days.

Listening to a myriad of Social Networking sites pitch, tout, and discuss features and the future.

Highlights so far:

Self Service Advertising

Facebook Platform Product Manager Ben Ling talked about their future development tools and
their growing forms of advertising to reach users on their site.

Facebook will be announcing the ability for online advertisers to login and target their users
geographically or contextually (by profile related specifics) with a Self-Service ad function.

MySpace has the same plans in the works, which also includes what they call "Hyper-Targeting" where they've grouped users into types they will hope will make it easy for you, someone who wants to reach a specific type of user, to do so.

What's the big deal?

If they built a tool that was Pay Per Performance, then I'd really take notice. And spend money.
Facebook and MySpace- wow me. Please. I dare you.


Reaching 10 Million Users In 10 Weeks

BJ Fogg, a teacher at Stanford, created the first Facebook class for students. BJ's site is at here

Students were pushed to develop 3 Facebook Apps in the 8 weeks of the course. Here are some fascinating tidbits:

-Over $500,000 in revenue generated

-The simplest Apps tended to outperform and catch on with users better than more complex ones

-3 of the students are now starting companies with the success and attention their App has
attracted

-2 of the students already had their project acquired

-3 students dropped out of school to start a business together

-The TA for the class has also left to start a company

-6 of the 20+ Apps created by the students went on to become Top 100 Facebook Apps

Take aways from this short presentation:

-Build an App quickly, test it, re-iterate, test again. The best Apps in the class went through
several iterations to get it right and start getting referred/used

-Apps are a quick way to acquire exposure and get attention, but these are "game" type Apps
or social "toys"- hardly business tie ins

-There is a lot of traffic to be acquired if you jump in and create the right app that users will
want to use/pass along


Deepening Existing Relationships

Charlene Li from Forrester outlined some of the past, present and future of the Social Network
ecosphere. More than anyone I've heard so far, she's talking about not just interaction, tech, or traffic and eyeballs... but about deepening RELATIONSHIPS through the use of Social Networks.

Translation= adding value to our existing everyday activities through the extension of social services and features.

Charlene seems to understand that the recent social network activity, while spurring innovation and investment/acquisition value, still hasn't forced companies to take a long hard look in the mirror about how to keep these users and provide them with something they'd value enough to pay for.

Or maybe I'm just the one who's too stuck on the revenue game.

More on Social Networks, Web 2.0, and video to come in the future as I put some new strategies to work. Stay tuned...