Immediacy In Marketing by Paul Grimsley
I don’t want to suggest that you don’t get an immediate response to any marketing piece that you create … but you may not get the response that you really want in that first hit.
They’re going to react either way — what you want is something that at least makes them open to further communication about doing business, not them dropping the security shutter between you and them.
Not everyone needs to be persuaded that you have the right product or service for them — sometimes a person will come through your door, sit down and sell themselves … they want you to work with them, or they want your product.
For those who don’t recognize what a golden opportunity it is to work with you or buy from you, some persuasion is in order. People will often refer to these steps involved in getting to know a customer, or the free services you make available to them, as loss leaders, necessary evils, or some other term that casts them in a less than favorable light.
What are these things really though? They are the first steps in building a relationship with your customer, and doing it right is the difference between engaging with someone who is just trying you out, and someone who wants to really work with you.
Daily life requires you to work at relationships, and sometimes people in marketing/advertising/salesmanship think they can shortcut this, but it really does work just the same.
First you are generating interest, then you are working to build that by telling your prospective client a little about yourself — at this early stage in the game you should not be assuming that you are BFFs, or exaggerating in your own mind how strong that connection is.
Building relationships is where it is at
A film starts off with teaser trailers or sometimes a motion poster, then it has a series of trailers, the interviews hit the magazines and the showbiz shows, and by the time the opening night is a go, everyone knows about the movie. Very rarely does a movie just drop out of the sky with no promo. There is a lot of time spent educating a potential audience on what they are about to see. Movies that flop? There has been bad education on what the film is about, and it feels like a broken promise. Marketing that fails suffers from the same problem.
Immediacy might be something that only comes with reputation — you put your Nike swoosh up and everyone recognizes the brand. You talk about Jobs and Wozniak and people are tracking with what the tech will do for them. You take someone for a test drive in a Jaguar, and they have a whole set of expectations on what is going to get checked off their checklist.
Easy sells happen, but aren’t the norm. Overnight successes? Well, it’s a nice story. Building relationships is where it is at — you are dealing with other people here, and they like to have someone they can trust doing their marketing. Why? Because you are going to be marketing something they are invested in; something they care about — and to a degree you are going to be marketing them. And if you don’t care? It’s going to be pretty obvious.
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