The #MarketingForHumans initiative
What is the initiative?
There is no doubt that a brand can be a powerful marketing tool and that the conversation that takes place between an organisational brand and the community that it has built can be very rewarding for all parties. From the small business viewpoint, however, the concept of a brand is problematical:
- a brand is a function of a business’ history, it’s values, it’s culture and many other things which accrete over time
- building a brand is both a long-term and expensive process (most of the worldwide brands that we know today e.g., Coca-Cola, MacDonald’s, Virgin are a product of the era of mass marketing and those that aren’t such as the social media giants spent millions before turning a profit – some still haven’t)
- brand marketing is an ongoing conversation between a business and it’s community and the budgets applied reflect this
- a brand’s audience is already aware of what is in it for them when they choose to interact
A key statistic here is that 59% of all businesses do not survive beyond their 5th birthday and the sort of business to whom this statistic applies are small businesses who do not have millions of pounds to spend building a brand.
From inception these small businesses have to fight to be heard, they have to work hard to get their first customers, they have to work around the clock to cover all bases, they have to ‘network’ as if their lives depend on it, and – assuming that they survive until their 5th birthday – they might just have built a great local reputation for themselves either geographically or within their industry or both.
In the face of all this then why is it that marketers spend a lot of their time talking about AND recommending brand building and brand maintenance techniques to small businesses who have limited budgets and want to see direct returns on their investments?
What small businesses want to see are LEADS. The only way that they will see an immediate and direct return on investment is by generating LEADS.
If you are a small business owner you will know how difficult it is to generate leads when you have no element of brand recognition. If you think about the way that you make discretionary purchases you will know that, most of the time, prospective customers do not care about your business except insofar as it can provide a solution to their problem.
The generation of leads, therefore, is, and always has been, a matter of human psychology. We all have problems and issues that we don’t want and we are looking for solutions that we don’t have.
A question for business owners
Can you, in the space of a single sentence for each, articulate the problem(s) that you solve for your customers?
If you are struggling to answer this question then the #marketingforhumans initiative is for you. Answering this question is the first step to unlocking the power of human psychology to help you to generate leads and build your business.
Want to know more? Get in touch with us to learn how to solve these problems.
