Let’s Keep This Between Us…

I recently came up with a Billion-Dollar Idea. I am sharing it with you, so please don't share it with anyone else. It's going to make me rich, and I would not want anyone to copy or steal it.

I created an app that will stop delivering snail mail, emails, texts, radio, and TV commercials once you have voted in an election. The only problem I have not been able to work out is that it does not work if your spouse or partner has not voted yet.

You could see this as a joke, an embellishment, or a flat-out lie—kind of like what appears in snail mail, emails, texts, radio, and TV commercials this time of year. All of these are designed to get you to make a choice (who to vote for) and take action (vote).

First, I wish it was real (I voted two weeks early). Second, those ads mix jokes, half-truths, and flat-out lies. It becomes so mind-numbing that people tune out or turn off.

Suggestions and misinformation can create false memories. People may internalize it into an inaccurate recollection when given new (but false) information about a past event.

So, what does this have to do with marketing? EVERYTHING!

Programming Your Audience

Political marketing is about how a candidate or a party will affect you, your family, and your life. Yet, it has increasingly become divisive. It's not as much about supporting a candidate's ideas as it is about how the other will hurt YOU!

The days of Ronald Reagan's ad called “It’s Morning in America” are long gone. It has devolved into “Pro” this and “Anti” that. What used to be called an estate tax is now known as the “Death Tax.”

Business marketing is about getting attention and then getting people to make a choice (buy or vote for) and take action (buy or vote). What I mean by vote is to choose to interact with or at least not block or unfollow.

Basically, you are creating a social contract. The social contract of marketing can be seen as an implicit agreement between businesses and society regarding how marketing should be conducted ethically and responsibly. Marketers have an ethical obligation to society to provide truthful, non-deceptive information and avoid practices that could harm consumers or society.

There's an expectation for transparency in marketing practices, especially regarding data collection and usage in digital marketing. Beyond just selling products, marketing is expected to create value by providing helpful information and solutions to their needs.

You have to create messages where people continue to permit you to show up in their email and social feeds, even if they are not yet clients ready to buy.

Using Emotion

Clients generally have a problem in business, and we offer a solution. How do you present that solution, and how does it make your clients and prospects feel? Let me ask another way: How do you want your customers to think about you, your company, and your solutions?

We all must overcome the desire to market to metrics. Business is measured in quarters, quality, and quotas. Although we think that increasing sales and decreasing costs are the main motivating factors in business marketing, most of us want to improve our business lives. If you help people gain praise, you can create an emotional bond much more profound than money.

A study by Dan Ariely at Duke University found that pizza and praise were more effective motivators than cash bonuses for workers at a semiconductor factory.

Time: How do you add convenience? Can you fix a pain point that saves time? Think about how working with you helps people to work smarter, faster, and more efficiently. They become the hero by using your solutions.

Trend: Thought leadership is about seeing trends and teaching others about unconventional opinions that challenge the status quo. Although there is risk, data-driven, research-based content that provides verifiable insights and evaluations helps people implement your ideas.

Trust: Trust creates an emotional bond between businesses and customers. When customers emotionally trust a company, they are more likely to be loyal and make purchasing decisions based on feelings rather than just rational factors. Trust has to be earned, but you can use examples of time savings and thought leadership to build trust before a transaction occurs.

You can use your marketing to target individuals. This requires segmentation but it also develops a more personal and deeper relationship. It takes more time, but it has longer-lasting benefits.

This is where data-driven, research-based content provides more value.

Capturing Data

Automation and AI in marketing help collect, analyze, and utilize data faster, better, and maybe cheaper. This is the allure, but it lacks the emotion necessary to develop a relationship. That takes people.

Tracking who your clients are is the basic information most CRMs are great at. Tracking what business and vertical they are in is a fairly easy task. Even tracking their engagement with your messages (especially with AI) creates usable metrics. But tracking each individual and what they are feeling is much harder.

Tracking emotions requires documenting conversations including some interviewing and interpretive skills. Asking someone how they are doing is often replied to with “Fine.” Digging deeper without getting too personal takes some effort. Are they feeling positive or negative? Is it a person or business event that has them elated or concerned? Is there an underlying issue or event that is molding their mood?

You don't want to go in hard like a political pollster. You want to approach the interaction with curiosity and empathy.

Not every conversation requires deep analysis, but when you see or feel an opportunity, it helps to ask questions and capture interpretive answers. You may not always be right, but tracking emotion can disclose even better data about engagement trends. It captures user sentiment. What is exciting them or worrying them? Is this a trend across multiple customers, verticals, or your customer base at large?

Closing Thought

World, regional, or local events (like elections, the economy, or even sports teams) can affect people's moods and outlooks. Only person-to-person engagement will give you and your business a sense of sentiment.

Having your people engage with clients and prospects is only part of the equation. It would be best if you captured those conversations. Tools like Otter or Fathom allow you to do that with Zoom meetings, but recording everything and not adding your notes of observations could be just creating more data with less value.

Sometimes, your most powerful tool is pen and paper or a note-taker app. Capturing that information and transferring it to your CRM or ERP will give you data that will become useful for AI or even a word cloud app to gauge the pulse of business today.

It may help you create that billion-dollar product or service that could change your business. Or, it may help you create better messaging that will emotionally connect with your target audience in a way that gives you the competitive advantage you can only hope that all your AI data analysis might do.

Remember, people are voting for you with their business trust, and you constantly have to campaign to keep those votes in your camp.

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Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas, or questions about business-to-business sales and marketing today! Do you have a sales or marketing communications strategy that works for you? What tips or techniques can you share that work for you and your business?

To learn more about this and other topics on B2b Sales & Marketing, visit our podcast website at?The Bacon Podcast.