How to get people to notice your product or service
Before I go on, let me point out a couple assumptions I am making here:
a. You know EXACTLY who your target audience is.
b. You are good at what you do.
No matter what product or service you’re selling, continually improving the way you present it is an essential ingredient to growing your business. “Which promotional tactic will work the best in our situation?” I hear this often. Is it really possible to predict which tactic will work the best? Can people predict the future? You already know the answer to that one. So what can you do?
I could be wrong, but my guess is that you are not looking for a complex marketing plan here. Since I don’t know the particulars of your current situation, instead of how-to-do-guide I’d like to present to you with a how-to-think-guide. To do just that, I’d like to with you a short excerpt from an insightful book I just finished reading titled Selling the Invisible – A Field Guide to Modern Marketing, by Harry Beckwith. By the way, I highly recommend this book. It’s one of the top five business books I’ve read this month, April 2011, and one of the easiest to read. Here’s Mr. Beckwith:
Fallacy: Failure Is Failure
Few phobias are more widespread than the fear of failure.
But what is failure?
Robert Townsend, who helped mastermind Avis’ dramatic turnaround in the 1960, said two of every three decisions he made were wrong. America’s best pro basketball teams lose the basketball every three minutes without even getting up a shot. The legendary golfer Ben Hogan said that in eighteen holes, he usually hit only two or three balls exactly as he had planned. Fred Smith got a C on the graduate business school paper in which he described the concept of Federal Express. The world champion in baseball has to win only 57 percent of its championships games…
…There’s little point in killing an idea by saying it might fail. Any idea might fail. If you’re doing anything worthwhile at all, you’ll suffer a dozen failures. Start failing so you can start succeeding.
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My 2¢: We humans love theories. This article is about practice.
When in doubt, communicate. Reach out. Make an offer.