selfish marketer Archive - This Moment Counts

Valuing my time

In a fast paced world like ours, attention is among the most precious resources of any audience.

Which makes the ability to find the words that glue your audience to your lips (or their screen) invaluable when you’re a content creator.

And yet, as a content consumer there’s one thing I value even more: Getting to the point.

I appreciate a good story and I admire your skills in creating tension with your story. But I don’t appreciate you wasting my time with tension that leads nowhere, tension that’s just there to keep me hooked … and hooked … and hooked … and … you get the idea.

The creators I keep coming back to are the ones who value my time. They grab my attention and get me in quick. But they let me get out just as quick – at the earliest possible time, not the latest.

They give me the context I need. They give me the info I want. And then they trust me with the decision to come back tomorrow for what else they have to say.

Which I will. (Unlike with time wasters.)

What selfish marketers overlook

Some marketers treat us as kind of dumb.

For example in the way they try to persuade us by hiding their cons and exaggerating their pros (if not downright inventing some).

Let’s call them the “selfish marketers”.

The fascinating part is how much effort selfish marketers invest into this. They spend huge resources on inventing promises that sound irresistible or stories that create buzz – not to mention all the money they throw towards marketing agencies who give them more of that.

By doing that, they try to decorate a product they don’t trust in themselves to be good enough if they told us the truth.

In my experience, your effort is better spent in telling a true story and making it work. That involves refining your product so that you can actually trust it to be good. It also involves listening closely to what your customers actually want (and need). It doesn’t stop with the quest for clarity to find the words that make your customers see what you see.

The selfish marketer starts from building something and puts all their effort in crafting a story on top of that something.

The honest marketer starts with empathy, uncovers what matters to the customers, builds a special thing that delivers exactly that … And then they tell a true story about it … using words they trust in and believe, themselves.

The best products are those that customers love even more when they know the complete truth. They are not irresistible because the promise sounds irresistible but because it is. And so, your customers support you in creating the buzz.

What’s a product where that’s the case for you?

What are sales pitches for?

“We are awesome!”

That, in essence, is the summary of 99% of all sales pitches.

Yet, that’s not what decision makers care for. At all.

Decision makers care for how awesome they are. And whether buying your product will make them even more awesome. To make them see how is the actual job of a sales pitch.

Make it about them, not you.

Stand out!

That’s what they tell us: Stand out! And so we see more and more people tell their story bigger, faster, and louder. Brighter colours. Fancier titles. Catchier graphics. Bigger. Faster. Louder.

And it works. It gets you attention. People click on clickbaity headlines. People cheer over your hilarious face shots.

Until they don’t. Because when everything stands out, nothing stands out. And attention fades.

That’s why, in the long run, rather than bigger, faster, and louder it’s so much more sustainable to focus on relevant, timely, and irresistible.

The selfish speaker

The selfish speaker is still the standard approach to speaking.

Selfish speakers want us to get them. As opposed to them getting us.

They speak so that we care for what they care about. As opposed to them caring for what we care about.

They care for applause. While we care about change. The irony being that when change happens we are happy to give credit and applause.

Your choice.

A true story

Many people have a strong distaste for selling. They neither like to be sold to nor to sell themselves.

To them, selling has the smell of dishonesty. Of tricking people into buying. Of using psychological hacks to your own advantage. Of putting on a show that isn’t true to who you are.

Yet, that’s not what selling needs to be. If your cause truly changes things for the better, then it doesn’t have to be about tricking or cheating.

If you truly care and your product truly changes your customers’ lives for the better, then selling is a service. The dishonesty is just in your head. You don’t have to be dishonest. You don’t have to put on a show. You don’t have to act as if you were someone else.

Quite the opposite.

Because if you genuinely care. If you let people see and feel that you do. And if you make them see how your product changes things for them, then why wouldn’t they want to hear from you? Why would they need to be cheated on?

They don’t.

I think that this approach works much better than tricking or cheating: Make a great product and then tell a true story about it.

Where your customers want to go

Part of being human is that there is a disconnect between what we want and what we need.

We want things that we don’t really need. And we don’t want things that we would actually need. We tell ourselves stories that are influenced by the people and things that surround us and that make us feel the strong desire to want or not want something.

The selfish marketer doesn’t care about any of these. He’s happy when he closes the deal. When you want something, he will think “great!” and happily sell it to you. In fact, he will try hard to make you want even more of the things that you don’t need.

Marketers who care for their customers act differently. They dig deeper and listen carefully. Because what counts for them is not just the deal but the people. What is it that my customers really want? What is it that they need? They strive for a long-lasting relationship built on trust. They strive for actually changing things for the better.

That’s what good communication helps us to achieve. By listening carefully to not only what they say that they want but sensing the underlying feelings and desires, great communicators are able to guide their customers to what they need without dismissing what they want.

Empathy is the key skill here. Great communicators use empathy not only in listening but to guide conversations to where their customers need to go while making them feel that that’s where they want to go.

Posts in Tag: selfish marketer