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Marketing & Advertising Strategies
It's An Issue Of Confidence
There Are Two Factors At Work in a prospect's subconscious mind when he's considering doing business with you: Confidence and Risk. Your job in advertising is to raise confidence and lower risk. If you successfully do that, you'll win all the business. So let's talk first about confidence. There's a problem in today's marketplace - people are more jaded, skeptical, and weary. Weary of getting ripped off. Jaded from bad service. Skeptical of offers that sound too good to be true. In short, people are generally in a defensive buying position. As a result, the tendency is to either do nothing or to stick with their current supplier, even if the relationship isn't all that great. People figure that it's safer to stay in a so-so relationship than test the waters of finding a new company with whom to do business.
You Can Probably Mentally Validate This in your own personal buying habits. Have you ever gotten fed up with a company you do business with, done an internet search or gone to the yellow pages and called around looking for someone better, then frustrated and exhausted, meekly returned to the original culprit because of a perceived lack of better options? We all have. The reason for this is the Confidence Gap. The customer doesn't have the ability to make any distinction whether any of the options are any different or any better than any of the others. There are a lot of different reasons for this, probably the biggest is the dramatically increased number of choices that people have.
Back In The Old Days, when you wanted to buy a Ford, you went to the Ford dealership. And where do you go now? To one of the 17 Ford dealerships within a 50 mile radius of your house. Or if you're like most car buyers, you go to 4 or 5 of them and then shop around online too. Let's take this a step further to show you how confidence gets eroded. If you've ever bought a car, you've experienced the hassle of finding the best deal. You look in the paper and see the model you want advertised for a really low price. When you get to the dealership you find out the car is a totally stripped down model, there's only one of them, and its painted avocado green. But hey, they've got the one you wanted for only $12,000 more than the one in the ad. So what happens the next time? If you're like most people, you notice the really small print in the ad that says "only one available at this price." Won't fall for that trick again, will you? Then you see a TV commercial for a Ford dealership, and they say they've got the largest inventory of Fords in the state. So you make a mental note to go check that place out. You flip the channel and there's another commercial for a different Ford dealership, and guess what? They're the largest volume Ford dealership in the city. Wow! How can that be true?
As you're driving over to settle the issue of who's actually the largest, you hear an ad on the radio for a leasing company that says you'd be a fool to buy a car when leasing is so much cheaper ... and that they can handle all the details right over the phone. Now, this may sound a little ridiculous, but isn't this a realistic scenario? Who do you have confidence in after trying to sort that mess out? The problem is that all the sellers are trying to trick buyers into coming into their showroom so they can pressure them into paying too much for something they didn't want. The buyer-seller relationship is totally adversarial - or at best, apathetic.
That's The Confidence Gap. The customer doesn't have the ability to make any distinction whether any of the options are any different or any better than any of the others. So the obvious big question is - how do you overcome this? How do you build confidence? There are three key concepts to building confidence; and you must do these if you want people to trust your business. Here they are stated in simple terms:
1) Find out what they want,
2) Find out how to give it to them,
3) Learn to communicate what you do in a believable and embraceable way.
First, Find Out What They Want. Simple enough, right? Here's how you find out: ASK. That's it - just Ask. Now the tricky part is how you ask and what you ask. Just to give you some basics, you want to ask your current customers, past customers, and prospects who haven't become customers yet what they want in your kind of business. But don't just go ask them, "What do you look for in a printing company ... or in a temporary personnel service ... or in a hair salon ... or whatever your business is."
Put some thought into it beforehand. You identify what some of the problems typically are when doing business in your industry. You figure out some things that you could do that customers might really like and appreciate. Then when you go to talk to your customers, in addition to just asking them what they're looking for when doing business in your industry, you can bounce your ideas off them and validate whether or not the things you've identified as important or innovative are actually important or innovative. But here's the important thing: Don't neglect to ask. Don't assume you already know. Hey, if you did know, you'd already have all the business, right? So just ASK!
Second, Give The Customers What They Want. Assuming you took the time to ask, and you've figured out what they want, now GIVE IT TO THEM. What you are doing is improving your Inside Reality. In today's competitive marketplace, you've got to innovate and make your business better by a big margin. You can't just make your business 5% better or 10% better than the competition. It's not enough to generate the confidence people need to give you a try. You've got to make your business 50% better or 100% better or 300% better than the other options. Here's why. If you don't, someone else will. But suffice it to say that you've got to have a good Inside Reality if you want to engender confidence with your prospects and customers.
Third, Say It In A Way That's Believable And Embraceable. This is the really tricky one, but extremely important becuase it's your Outside Perception. You've got to learn to take your Inside Reality and communicate it in a way that breaks through the clutter of noise in the marketplace, bridges the confidence gap, and gains the confidence of your prospects.
You can learn more about how to do this in our MONOPOLIZE Your MARKETPLACE events and programs.
See how this all works together? Have something good to say. Say it well. Say it Often. Find out what they want. Give them what they want. Say it in a way that's believable. The Inside Reality. The Outside Perception. These concepts are all very simple to understand. But as simple as they are, they're often overlooked.
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