When it comes to small business development marketing has a major role.
The largest marketing error made in the world is caused by not knowing a simple fact …
Consumers like to purchase from people they like .
That means people want to buy from a person, not a business . Ponder this yourself. You remember a company when you had a rapport the business owner there and want to You don’t care about the name of the business , what’s that got to do with a benefit to you?
Let’s face it. We’re all selfish. We think about ourselves 10,000 times more than another person, let alone a company. So what we decide on are emotional benefits… to ourselves.
With that ‘filter’ in place, we look at how we want to spend our money.
We like to trust the company we purchase from, but as companies don’t have a personality, we look at the person who represents the company in the advertisements.
If a business is brave enough to have the owner or CEO with their marketing, and reveal their name, then we decide whether that person is similar to us. If they are, we think, ‘that company might be worth buying from… I relate to that person’. ‘And as I relate to that person, the company must be okay too’.
There are two fantastic examples of this to demonstrate this concept . There is a large retailer in Australia that promotes their company name and brand themselves as a big retailer of electrical appliances. They say this promote this with their advertising. But they don’t have a person you can relate to in their ads, just products with voice overs.
Another major retailer entered the market place over 20 years ago and a man told his story of how he got started and then over the years he kept doing the ads with himself in them. Even though it was a chain store he personalised the company because he was the person you related to in the ads and bought from him or his shops .
This second company today totally monopolises their segment of the retail industry and left the big retailer of goods (who had been there 60+ years prior) miles behind .
A few years ago this same company decided to branch out with a new chain of stores that competed with its existing chain, but there was no owner promoting the new stores, in fact there was no person at all in the ads that you could relate to, only products. That’s when I realised the CEO didn’t understand why his first major chain was so successful in the market place.
Then I saw another example with an insurance company. One company had the major share in the country but then another insurance company came along and ‘personalised’ their company by using a pretty lady to represent their company on all their advertising.
Then they put a catchy jingle on the end of the ad with the pretty lady smiling with the jingle and bingo, they took over the market share in very quick time . The existing major company lost huge market share because there was no personalisation.
If this principle of personalising a company business works for billion dollar companies it will work for you with your small business development.
How are you representing your company with all your marketing to consumers?
Are you giving them a person in your marketing they can relate to, or do you expect people to just like your business on its own?
People don’t trust companies, they trust the people they see and talk to that represent the company.
So how can you use this principle? Simple.
Always use a photo of a person in your marketing, preferable yourself the business owner. It makes a massive impact on sales based proven results over more than 15 years of advertising testing by my own company and hundreds of its small business clients.
And remember this law of advertising …
There are always two sales you have to make in business; firstly there is the person representing the business then next comes the company or product. Every business has to make the two sales, not just one, the product. Trust is the operative word.
If you skip the first part your sales will never be fantastic . If you do this well, your company may just become the next billion dollar company that takes over from some other company’s monopoly of the industry!
Think about this for your small business development and one day you could own a billion dollar turnover company too.