Visionary
Working with business owners is a significant responsibility. After all, it is your job to help them boost sales, increase engagement of their brand, locate new customers, grow their followers & overall, elevate their image. It is your task to be their eyes and ears; a true resource.
You are akin to the initiator, the catalyst between the consumer’s earnings & their contribution to the local economy. You must make it your duty to become knowledgeable of current events, water cooler news & information that is affecting your community. You must pledge to know about recent business launches and how the competition could affect the business of your customer. What niche are they filling and how can you be innovative, yet offer practical suggestions for your buyer?
Dedicate yourself & locate the pulse of the demographic you’re trying to reach. You must tap into their needs & wants. Being able to use your imagination is a must as a marketing professional.
Being a savvy marketer is one part creativity, one part business mind, one part curiosity & one chunk risk tasker. You must have the ability to ask great questions & uncover specific needs to integrate a solid marketing message.
It is essential for the end product to be a polished package: strong sales strategy; simple; uncluttered; call to action (in most cases) high production quality & memorable. In whole, a message that resonates with the primary customer.
So, again, you must task yourself with ‘knowing’ the customer you’re targeting. Uncover their needs, when they’re most likely to buy, promotions & strategic messages that are timely & move the needle for your buyer. Simply summarized, once you’ve uncovered the business needs of your client, you then have to develop a selling message that is succinct & compelling, package it neatly, then deliver it to the people who will want what you’re attempting to sell. My GenX & Boomer friends will appreciate this one….
https://youtu.be/1VM2eLhvsSM (click link to play)
Ability to Take the Temperature of Your Community/World
The coronavirus pandemic is a perfect (yet extreme) example of taking the temperature of your community and your world. However, unless you live under a rock, you can see clearly for yourself how the advertising landscape has shifted in the wake of the new environment of which we are learning to adapt.
The tone of the collective is less about wants, but more about needs. This is a rush! If you’re a shrewd and optimistic marketer, you can see the abundance of newly formed opportunities. You have to sell ‘on purpose’ or ‘for purpose.’ My sales career began AFTER I read “The One Minute Sales Person,” by Dr. Spencer Johnson (“Who Moved My Cheese”) & Larry Wilson.
It was the thinnest, shortest book I’ve ever read, but it clarified the nagging inside me that a sales person was not professional, or, atleast, not what I wanted to be. BUT, after reading it, I realized what an asset I could be to business people & how if I “sell on purpose”, I am assisting them in growing. If they make money, so do I!
The money was a perk…. I enjoyed witnessing success for my clients. You must stay awake for your customer. Look at yourself as an extension of their business. You should make it a discipline to stake out community shifts and trends in order to support your client seize new opportunities & prospects.
Trends in media shift constantly. My degree / major was Broadcast Communications. Through broadcast news training & development, I learned critical guidelines of delivering a message quickly & grabbing the attention of the consumer. This was excellent training for advertising & being a communicator for businesses. Through writing, you must have an active voice; capture attention with a provoking headline, gather loads of information with the ability to hone in on the most critical parts of the message that is the ‘news to use & deliver.’
News breaks daily, all day long. News shifts quickly, just like trends. Through advertising consulting and sales, you’re the mediator between business owners & the masses. Marketing is about people; how to talk to them, persuade or convince them to get motivated; maybe it’s their habits, their wants, their dreams, their pains, their irritations, their obstacles, etc., etc. You must have an innate ability to navigate what is happening around you in the collective & take the message to an individual platform. You must be able to see all sides of the marketing engine.
Capture Timely Moments
You blink & the opportunity is gone. If you are not reading (in advance) about your neighborhood, your county, community, the stock market, a political debate, a new entrepreneur in your area, a big musician coming to town, chances are, you’re too late. You must be on the forefront & look-out for big headlines, mass discussions on social media, trends in your industry & talking directly to your customers and asking them what they’re hearing.
You see, there are multitudes of businesses that spend thousands of dollars on advertising each year. However, as I watch my local TV stations, the auto dealers & the ‘big buck’ businesses that typically swarm my air waves have been replaced. They’ve been replaced with alternate small business owners who are capturing the moment… now. Currently, advertising dollars are nowhere near the levels they were a year ago. Many standard advertisers are holding onto their money, waiting for the market to “make a comeback.’ But, while they sit back, alternate businesses are taking advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity. On the consumer side, more people are at home, watching TV more often, so there is a built in audience.
On the commerce side, advertising rates are much lower because there is a high volume of unsold inventory- across the board; TV, radio, outdoor, magazines, all of it! The biggest perk to advertising in this climate? These businesses really STAND OUT right now. During the Great Depression, the companies that thrived & survived afterward were the companies that remained unwavered, strong & steady.
People are scared, nervous, have anxiety about the future, mounting debt, unknowns for their families, their occupations & their finances. Businesses that can give us hope, a sense of security, stability & normalcy give us reassurance & optimism for the future. A chance that the tide may turn and everything will be ok. These businesses could thrive for years to come, long after the weird dream is over.
