The most important word in marketing

Are you relevant?

When communicating with your market, are you focusing on what’s important to them? Are you trying to create an offering that makes sense to your customer? Are you interesting?

We all can lose focus and get bogged down with the running of our businesses. We can lose site of why were really doing all this. We’re running a business to find, serve and keep customers and most importantly, make a profit.

There have been numerous studies about how many messages each of us are exposed to everyday. I’ve heard numbers like 1,000 or 1,500 or even 2,500. I’m not sure of the exact number, and it probably changes everyday. The point is, we have way too many signals coming in than we can process so our brain blocks out most of it. The only stuff that gets in is what is relevant to our lives at that point in time.

Here’s an example. The last time you purchased a car, shortly after the purchase you probably noticed that there were a lot of cars like yours on the road. You never noticed it before, but once you started looking for a car and then made your purchase you started seeing more and more of them on the road.

That’s because it was relevant to your life so you let the information in.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss how to make your marketing more relevant.

Top 10 rules for Common Sense Marketing

I wrote my first eBook titled “Top 10 mistakes small businesses make and what to do about it” (which can be found here) two years ago. Since then it’s been downloaded about 300 times. I know it’s a small number but I’m amazed.

Since then I’ve been working on another eBook titled “Common Sense Marketing“. Below is a top 10 list (I’m a big Letterman fan), which is the essence of the new book.

I’m going to spend some time on each of these topics over the coming weeks on this blog. I hope you’ll find it of value. I’d also love to receive any stories, case studies, ideas or comments about your experiences with using common sense in your marketing.

The ten rules of Common Sense Marketing
1. Be relevant
2. Be consistent
3. Be simple
4. Be frequent
5. Have permission
6. Be interesting
7. Make it easy
8. Ask your customers
9. Listen to your customers
10. Know your moments of truth

Let’s get started

Hi.

I know that everyone starts their first post of their first blog with “This is my first post of my first blog”, so I won’t.

Poor attempt at humour, I know.

My blog will be focused on helping small businesses, specifically businesses with less that 30 employees, better understand their customers and how to communicate with them.

We’ll look at how to be relevant to your customers. The key to all successful marketing; being relevant.

So I hope you will join me and together we can find better ways to market our small companies.