Teaching and Word of mouth waaay more important
A couple of years back the world was going through this phase where everything was either being advertised or sold to you. You land on a page, and you have an ad banner next to it. You land on a social media site and you have a “targeted” must-see video on it. You open your email and boom — flash sales.
Stuff you never bought, stuff you never will. I agree some of the ads are very relevant to me. Some of the stuff mentioned above still exists. It’s a devil you can’t do without.
What has changed though is that more and more users, either online of off line have developed a blind eye towards anything that is pushed to them. Anything that resembles an ad faces a threat of being completely ignored…by everyone who sees it.
So what’s happening now? What’s working for companies?
A story from Jason Fried (CEO, Basecamp) addresses this pretty well.
In it he talks about an incident where he wanted to learn to cook. So as it goes, he went out to buy a bunch of kitchen equipment. He found that there were literally hundreds of things out there that he wasn’t really aware of! As it goes, he picked a few things up and then headed over to purchase some cookbooks. It was the same thing over there — hundreds of books ranging from Italian, Chinese, etc, and he had no clue what to pick. Again, he made a few choices and then headed back.
Once home, curious as he is, he decided to really check “why” he had picked few things over others. What made him buy those instead of the hundred others out there. That’s when he noticed a pattern in his purchase decision.
Every single item that he had bought had a person’s name on it. But the key was, that at some point or the other, he had learned something from that person , either by reading about him/her online or watching a video about that person. So when the time came to make a purchase decision, Jason went about and bought the ones where he had already been learning from! All the content made by those chefs contained their ingredients, their tips and tricks of cooking — everything that they had learnt , they had shared in some type of content or other. True, you did need to purchase books or maybe videos, but ultimately they were teaching you something instead of simply selling you something. This ultimately pushed him to make the purchase decision when it mattered the most!
Teaching your potential customers is the best way to market yourself.
So how do you go about doing this?
- Teach people about how you go about building your product. Every product has a story. With each story there is an opportunity for others to learn. If you have a certain process or a unique approach in the way you build your product or run a service, share it with others. Small learnings, and any advice that accompanies it will be a problem solved for some other company.
- Share how you run your company. Each company has a unique DNA. It has it’s own processes, it’s own culture and stories about the people in it. Share these processes and stories with a “why” along with it.
- Share how you hire in your organization. Hiring is one of the most important things an organization can do. And it’s also once of the most challenging ones. If you have a certain way of hiring, or certain methods , approaches, then share them. There will be others who are facing the same problems that you have and your solutions might apply to them as well.
- Share any specific quirks that you or your company inherently has. Every company has a unit approach or a “point of view” to it. For eg: Google has a “Do no evil” approach. Facebook has a “Move fast and break things” approach. What’s yours? And why is it that way?
- Share your opinions on your industry. You started a business because you had some knowledge about the industry you are in. Share your knowledge about the industry. Or better yet, share your opinions about it. Having an opinion about your industry is the best way to gather similar-thinking people and build a community!
- Share your skill sets with your audience. It can be as specific as coding a language, or how you approach sales, or even how you run your social media marketing. These can be your own skills or company employees can share their knowledge.
- Share how working at your place is different, and why.
Anything that you share, adds value to someone else. It doesn’t matter what it is. If it adds value, you create a follower and a possible evangelist.
