Effectively Marketing Your Small Business – The 7 Marketing Personalities
What is your natural marketing personality? What is your company’s natural marketing personality?
Today’s post is based on the book “How to Make Your Business a Magnet for Inbound Prospects” (Amazon Books)
Inspire a Nation Business Mentoring (www.inspireanation.org) puts 110% of its focus, energy, and resources into mentoring small businesses on how to effectively operate and grow, but our job is often made much more difficult because of the natural marketing personality of the business leader and/or the person responsible for marketing the business.
Each person has a dominant marketing personality. That’s not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t be good at multiple types of marketing, but there are always one or two types that you naturally prefer.
Each business has a dominant marketing personality as well. Often the marketing in a business is influenced by factors and resources (abundant or limited) such as the marketing personality of the leadership, the technical skill set of the person or people responsible for marketing, and of course resources such as money, technology, and time.
Each of the 7 marketing personalities has its own strengths and weaknesses, which means that relying on just one personality type or marketing campaign type will limit the overall success of marketing and advertising in your company.
The main weaknesses that I see in marketing is using the wrong keywords (What people use to search online for your product or service) and weak calls-to-action (What you want people to do next after they come in contact with your marketing or advertising campaign). If a prospect is ready to buy right now they will look for a keyword or key phrase like: “Purchase product X in minutes with no hassle,” but instead marketers will say things like “download our free brochure for more information”, and while there is nothing wrong with giving away a free brochure, you just made a “read-to-buy” prospect into a shopper.
My point is by using a variety of marketing and advertising campaigns and marketing personalities you will have enough variety in your marketing to catch the attention of the 3 main types of prospects:
- · ready-to-buy prospects,
- · prospects looking for more information, and
- · impulse shoppers (prospects that had no interest in your product or service till they saw your marketing or advertising campaign or content)
I am going to write an entire article on this topic in January 2017, so register for our newsletter (www.inspireanation.org) and be on the lookout.
Let’s look at the 7 Marketing Personalities:
1.
Mailers:
postal mail and email
Mailers like to consistently send postal mail and/or email to their customers and prospects. They prefer for the customer or prospect to react to the marketing and advertising campaign. They like low-hanging fruit (The customer contacts them)
Positives: Both postal mail and email can be creative, automated, and easily tracked for response rates and ROI (Return on investment). The collection of email addresses and following up with a customer or prospect by email should be a part of every marketing campaign. Email is generally low cost.
Negatives: Postal mail can be very expensive when the right keywords, key phrases, and calls-to-action elements are not added to the mailings. The response rates usually stay around the norm of 3% or less. Email generally has a low response rate and like postal mail, if effective keywords, key phrases and calls-to-action are not used, the email can feel spammy to the receiver.
2. Writers: marketing letters, emails, articles, blogs, social networking posts, books, etc.
Writing is one of my co-dominant marketing personalities, so I intimately understand its strengths and weaknesses. Writers love to share experiences and wisdom and will willingly share their words with anyone that will take the time to read them
Positives: Writers are great providers of information, they generally understand a topic, product, or service at depths that the average person does not. A good writer will pull you into the message and keep you engaged.
Negatives: Writers tend to take a long time to put out a marketing or prospecting campaign, because they have to brainstorm, create, write, and proofread the message. Usually writers are perfectionist, so what would take one of the other personality types a day to create, it will take a writer a week or two. Writers tend to go overboard with the amount of information they put out, so something that should be short and sweet like a postcard, becomes a full blown tri-fold brochure. The main negative is that writers tend to turn “ready-to-buy” prospects into shoppers; (“You gave me so much information, I need to think about and get back to you”)
3. Talkers: telemarketing, face-to-face meetings, vendor booths, in-office visits, live presentations, conference calls, webinars, etc.
Talking is my co-dominant marketing personality. I say “co” because I truly love both writing and talking. At the end of the day the ability to properly explain your product and/or service and how it will improve the quality of life of your customer or prospect is what being in business is all about.
Positives: Same positives as writing with additional positives of timeliness, (a talker will talk to anyone, at any time, pretty much about anything), and a talker doesn’t need a long marketing campaign set-up window (Give them a target prospect, a marketing list, or a geographic area and they will make it happen)
Negatives: Talkers tend to be more focused on delivering what we want to say than in actually listening to our customers and prospects. A talkers marketing materials can be so self-focused and self-promotional that it only attracts prospects that are looking for “superman/superwoman” to save them which means you can easily find yourself dealing with clients and customers that need constant hand-holding through the entire relationship. Talkers have to control their ego or they will over-promise and under-deliver. My grandfather use to say “You can’t talk that much without some of it being pure bull**********.
4. Techies: SEO, internet driven traffic, marketing gadgets and tools, mobile traffic, social networking, etc.
Techies are dominating the marketing and advertising space and are poised to do so for a long time. Listen to the following words carefully “If you don’t have a techie marketing personality, you need to make sure that someone on your team has a techie marketing personality, or that you outsource part of your marketing and advertising to a person or company that can add and manage technology to your marketing and advertising mix.”
Positives: By using SEO, online search results, and tools such as apps and widgets, techies can generate prospects that have an active interest in your products, services, and information; marketing results are trackable, the ROI of marketing and advertising campaigns can be easily calculated, a campaign can be easily implemented, most campaigns run on auto-pilot which means lower time commitment from everyone involved.
Negatives: When something screws up, it really screws up! Keep your techies close by, don’t let them set up something and just walk away. Without good follow-up by talkers or writers, ready-to-buy- prospects can be easily overlooked or ignored. Often, online prospects tend to be more price focused than quality focused, your marketing campaigns MUST make the entire process easy and seamless. Often this is a big issue when a non-techie business hires a techie to generate leads, the prospect is expecting everything to be as quick and easy like their online search, but the business hasn’t updated their back end operations.
5.
Networkers: networking events, multiple referral partners, customer referral campaigns and conversations, etc.
Building referral networks is an awesome way to grow your business . . . as long as you put effort and energy into maintaining your referral relationships and referral campaigns.
Positives: Referrals tend to absorb up to 30% more price or rate with hesitation, a good group of referral partners can keep your prospect funnel humming along like a finely tuned machine, generally a referral is less stressful to deal with than a purchased or generated lead.
Negatives: Business can easily ebb and flow if the referral networks are not maintained and contacted on a regular basis, Referrals require more hand-holding than other prospect types, referrals tend to only want to deal with the person they were referred to, if the referral relationship is built on compensation for referrals, weak cash flow can disrupt your referral funnel.
6. Traditional Media: television, radio, billboards, magazines, etc.
Remember I am writing this article for small business owners, so while the use of traditional media is still an option, the cost and return on investment could far out way the benefits.
Positives: You and your brand are put in front of a large audience of potential prospects, you can tailor your message to a specific niche or demographic, increased brand recognition is a major benefit and can lead to other branding opportunities such as newspaper interviews, guest speaking opportunities, and an increased professional network.
Negatives: Traditional media can be very expensive, difficult to measure an immediate return on investment, difficult to track reach and results, could produce immediate results or could be a total waste of money. Small business leaders should perform a lot of research and ask a lot of questions before committing to a traditional media marketing contract, especially local or national television.
7.
Non Marketers: They don’t perform any type of marketing, they mainly rely on current customer referrals.
Positives: Low cost, prospects are generally pre-sold before they ever talk to you, easy to track, high ROI.
Negatives: unpredictable, it’s difficult to predict cash flow when you don’t know when and where your next prospect is coming from.
Often a business can get so hooked on one type of marketing that they lose focus of the various types of marketing and advertising campaigns that are available to them.
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