Technology has changed the world almost beyond recognition. As a result of these changes, people are connected now more than ever. It is therefore surprising to see business owners and marketers using the same marketing strategies of the last century, which according to YouGov.com has become ineffective. The research and consulting firm found in a 2014 research study that 50% of US consumers do not trust what they see, read, and hear in advertisements.
Traditional marketing often relied on brand awareness. It was a given that if you place information before consumers often enough they would eventually choose your product when it was time to buy. That ship has since sailed. The modern consumer, “assaulted with a barrage of 577 new marketing messages per week,” has become more sceptical than ever according to Marketing Experiments, a research laboratory dedicated to discovering “what really works” in marketing.
What really works is Trust-Based eMarketing, aka, TRUE Marketing Strategy that utilizes a strategic marketing approach to address this scepticism in consumers towards advertisements. If businesses want to become successful in the modern age, they need a new way to reliably reach their customers. And since digital media is not going away, business owners would do well to make technology a part of the solution to address this modern-day marketing problem.
As a serial entrepreneur, I’ve seen my fair share of business failures. After going through a period of blame followed by self-pity, I finally asked the million dollar question, “What is the secret formula for business success?” I spent over a decade researching fields including economics, investing in seminars and expensive courses to answer this and other questions like, “How do customers make purchasing decisions?”
It was during this research period that I found “common threads” among the many successful business models to tie-in principles of success into a single coherent strategy known today as Trust-Based eMarketing Strategy that anyone can use to create his or her own marketing success.
Unlike conventional marketing, Trust-Based eMarketing Strategy starts by answering every customer’s number one concern, “What About Me?” (WAM). The WAM strategy takes the “customer centric” approach asking questions like, “What are their pain points?”
Some techniques that TRUE marketing strategy use to better understand the customer are the Customer Experience Map or Avatars. These are designed to make it easier to attract your ideal customer and improve the quality of your client base.
The customer avatar should have information such as customers’ dreams and desires; their values; their fears and frustrations, basically everything that makes customers tick. Knowing customers’ pain and pleasure allows the business owner to fit his / her service around the customer. This single technique will open the minds of business owners and marketers as to what customers really want.
