Do "Feelings" Belong in Marketing?
I’m an emotionally driven person, and it helps me immensely as a marketer. I’ve spent a good few years trying to figure out how to explain the beneficial use of “feelings” in marketing.
Are you aware that you are influencing your prospects continually through every single touch, through every single piece of marketing, through every single word you choose to use?
Right from the very first Ad of yours they see, you are influencing them.
What do I mean by this?
Let’s take an example.
Let’s say you are a brand new self-employed sales consultant, and you want to bring in clients that need help with their sales team. The precise type of help you want to offer is consulting, as you don’t want to end up in “Done For You” where you have to jump in and do it for them. In fact, you’re fed up of offering “Done For You” as managing a sales team burnt you out, and that’s why you decided to go into consulting.
You excitedly jump into your new business, and decide to test a small marketing campaign to bring in leads.
You’ve heard good things about Google Ads, so you decide to set up a small campaign. You start off by picking a handful of keyword phrases such as:
“Sales Team Advice”, and
“Sales Team Consultant”
amongst other keyword phrases strongly related to what you offer.
But you also choose to add in other keywords that Google suggests, such as
“Manage Sales Team”, perhaps because you want more search volume, so it seems like an easier keyword phrase to bid upon.
Yet the latter keyword is a broad term and is far removed from the others above that match your talents closely. But Google suggested it, so you choose to happily accept it.
You word your ads to match the keywords, creating an ad that says
“Manage Sales Team
Get Help with Your Sales Team Today”
Of course – what YOU mean is that you will offer "to consult" and help THEM to manage their sales team. In fact, what happens instead is that when your ads go live, the traffic you attract in is mainly for those seeking help with hands-on sales management. Precisely what you didn’t want to offer.
Your phone rings and as you're a great salesperson, you happily sell the lead that “yes of course, I can manage your sales team for you”, ignoring the signs of unease within you that this lead may not, in fact, be a great one.
You continue the conversation and happily close the lead. When you do, things quickly go wrong because you’ve realised that they have unrealistic expectations and want something you do not want to offer.
In the meantime, this keyword is taking all your budget so you turn the ads off. (In this instance, it’s far better to get a handful of hits from highly focused keyword phrases than dozens of hits from poor keywords).
You’re also now convincing yourself that Google Ads does not, in fact, bring great leads. The lead you closed has by now become a headache to deal with so you tell yourself and everyone around you that Google Ads doesn’t work. You then go back to what you believe works – good old fashioned networking and/or cold calling.
Yet it doesn’t have to be this way.
It is essential to take a step back and think deeply about the type of lead you want to attract.
What type of keywords would they use to find someone like you or your business?
For example…
The difference between a coach, and a trainer is huge, yet we so often lump them together. A coach works alongside the client and will help influence the results.. whereas a trainer will teach a precise set of steps.
A consultant is NOT the same as an expert, or an agency.
A custom blind company is not the same as a blind installer.
And so on… (What other examples do you have? I’d love to hear them!)
Yet we bid upon them all with our Google Ads, and then wonder why we don’t get the results we are seeking and end up with the “wrong” type of leads and clients.
It’s human nature to sell people who want something similar to what we offer and customise our offer, yet by doing so we end up with a ton of clients who aren’t quite right for us, and we aren’t sure why.
If we took the time to instead identify the precise ways in which our ideal client would search for us, and match our advertising to this wording, we would attract the perfect clients.
In my opinion, this is one of the reasons that using the “Laws of Attraction” can work well in business, because we think and plan out who that ideal client is. We spend time thinking about who want to attract. This then influences the way we craft our adverts, our blogs, our emails, every single of marketing we create. We start to talk in the right way and bring in the right type of client that we can help in amazing ways.
I’ve discovered that questions are the key to uncovering who we want to help, and why we want to do so.
So let me ask you to answer these, so you can begin the process of uncovering your perfect clients, but more importantly how you can talk to them via your Ads:
- How would your ideal client search for what you offer? What questions would they ask? https://answerthepublic.com/ is an amazing tool that will show you a list of questions that are being asked right now about what you offer
- What transformation will you help to create for your perfect client? This question is answered superficially. This leads to poor quality marketing and the wrong type of lead coming into the business. Here are some examples. Aim to think of as many as you can, and come back daily for a few days to keep going deeper.
- If you sell custom-made blinds – perhaps you:
- Allow them to create the perfect atmosphere on an evening that means they can relax deeply and enjoy the evening with their partner. (This leads to lots of other benefits too in their life, can you name some?)
- Ensure that they can work properly on their laptop throughout the entire day, whereas previously in the afternoon the sun made it difficult to concentrate. This leads to them feeling more productive and reducing their stress levels as a result. (How does this affect other members of their family and other areas of their life? You can start to see how far you can do with an exercise such as this)
- If you sell sales coaching – perhaps you:
- Allow them to grow their sales (this is the obvious reason where most people would stop).. but also by ensuring you focus on bringing in the right type of client for their business, you help profit levels grow. Perhaps you also help ensure the sales team stop offer discounting, or focus on the low hanging fruit. Perhaps you’re also reducing refunds and bad feedback, meaning that the client’s reputation grows and advertising spend is not needed as much.
I’m going to leave it there for now and I’d love to hear your thoughts about what I’ve shared today.
By the way, if you’ve realised that you need help identifying the perfect client but most importantly; ensuring that every step of your marketing attracts them, I’d love to help.
Simply send me a LinkedIn message and we can explore if it makes sense to work together. As you'd expect, I know my perfect client well and I'll be able to establish quickly whether I can help.
Best wishes
Claire Jarrett