“Marketing Does NOT Focus On YOU!”
In fact, it is about putting yourself in your leads, prospects, or customers’ shoes and thinking, feeling, and perhaps acting like THEY do.
Generally speaking, this is the marketing psychology any online entrepreneur should have.
When you first had a leap of faith into the online business, you want to know all sorts of online techniques such as article marketing, social bookmarking, SEO, keyword research, PPC, social media and whatever new term or concept that you hear from other online marketers.
Although it’s true that these things are quite significant, you would be surprised to know that when you know a little bit of everything without understanding the concept of marketing, you have nowhere to go.
You can be super genius about SEO, Google Adwords, Article Marketing and the rest but without a sound approach to marketing, people will think that you are just one of those self-proclaimed gurus, greatly pretending that they know everything.
Without the right approach to marketing, you are bound for disaster as people would turn away from you, thinking you are another egoistic fool who claims to help others when all you think about is profit.
I’ll give you a real-life experience I had with a professional kitchen builder. With this experience, I learned much about the right marketing psychology.
My wife and I attempted several times to butt in and show him what we wanted for our dream kitchen. After all, we are the customers. But the young salesman would not stop, he talked and talked and talked…, but he DID NOT LISTEN!. After an hour, we both got tired and just grabbed the piece of paper where he illustrated his plan for the kitchen. Honestly, we liked it but it was not what we wanted.
Days after we decided to look for another kitchen builder, we came into a kitchen store where a nice guy greeted us. He talked a bit about what services they offer; then the rest of the time he asked as questions and listened while we did the talking. From that conversation, he was able to come up with a kitchen design that is exactly what we want and need. So we ended up buying from the new guy.
You might be saying, “Well, Elmar what the guy did was nothing extraordinary.” Indeed, it’s something that you usually experience in a mall or a restaurant but still it is not practiced online. Online, people are only selling without asking and listening to what people need.
That’s not the way it works. Remember that although offline and online businesses demand different strategies and techniques, the bottom line is you are still dealing with people, who feel, think, and act like the ones you meet in real life. The same principles and the same marketing psychology run for any business, whether you are selling cars offline or you are selling a software online.
Take Care,
Elmar Sandyck
February 14th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Bravo Elmar for capturing what to me is the number one priority and skill for anyone and everyone in business (and in life in general). Yes, it does sound so obvious doesn’t it? How come so many people just don’t “get it”. Your article lends credence to my favorite quote: “We have one mouth and two ears so we can LISTEN twice as much as we TALK”. I am definitely going to be sharing this article
February 15th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Hi Julie,
Thanks for the compliment, I’m glad you like my article!
You are totally right, because the fact we have one mouth and two ears, we can listen twice as much as we talk, but so many people don’t get this at all.
I have a traditional business and old school mlm background where I learned the value of people skills. When I started in online marketing marketing I really was amazed by the number of people that confused good marketing with spamming other people with their affiliate links… That’s why I wrote this article
Thanks for stopping by.
June 9th, 2010 at 4:16 am
Although I would’ve preferred if you went into a little bit more detail, I still got the gist of what you meant. I agree with it. It might not be a popular idea, but it makes sense. Will definitely come back for more of this. Great work
June 18th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Hi Leila,
Glad you like it. Indeed I didn’t go into detail, I just wrote down my own experience.
Thanks for stopping by!
Elmar