There is an art gallery close to my office here in Port Moody called the Lone Cypress Gallery and Bistro. I will often walk down to get a sandwich for lunch. While the food is very good, probably the real reason I go there, is that they know me when I go in. Stephanie makes the sandwiches there, she knows how I like my lunch, and I am a recognized patron at this point. The Cheers’ theme song encapsulates this quite well.
In your marketing, the features and benefits of your product is often a secondary consideration. How is your customer getting to know You? How are you introducing yourself to the world, and getting your customer a little closer to being a recognized patron? How are you going to give your customer the feeling that everyone knows their name?
Here’s an interesting new site that I’ve been recommending to people.
Alltop.com is a site that makes pages devoted to a particular topic, such as celebrities, news, politics, or my favourite, Oddities. When you go to the page, a list of many top websites devoted to that particular topic, along with their latest headlines, come up. When you put your mouse over a particular headline, the first part of the article pops up, It’s a great way to quickly scan what is going on in a particular topic from some of the web’s best information sources.
We are inundated with marketing messages, so much so that for the most part they don’t work. In order for a television commercial to get the intended result, they have to be repeated, over and over, until they are lodged in the audience’s brain. In the era of 12 TV channels, you could do that. There wasn’t that much on, so it would only take buying on a few networks before you would reach that level of saturation.
Today, there are too many choices, too many things competing for our attention. The thing that still works, and has worked since people gathered around the campfire, is a good story.
One of those great marketing stories is the one about the guy who lost 245 pounds eating Subway subs. It’s hard to believe that story has been working for Subway for the past 10 years. Here’s the story from this morning’s National Post.
This is a video we did for Desneige Memory Castings. They do personalized sculptures called “lifecasts” that are a really cool way to preserve memories.
This video is an example of our new product called “Your Business on Youtube”. We will come out and do a half-day shoot at your location, put together a story about your business, and post it on Youtube. You can then email the link or easily post the video on your website. Contact us anytime to ask us how a video like this could really help get the word out about your business.
Everybody and everything has a story to tell. You may think that what you do isn’t remarkable, but when properly told, even the everyday can become extraordinary.
Check out what Hitachi has done to tell the story of one of their medical machines. It’s a piece of marketing, but the story had me hooked, and made me want to see more, even though I’m not in the market for a cancer-fighting machine. That is no small feat.
