As a small business owner, you know that in order to be successful, you need to stand out from the competition.
“Content is KING” is a phrase and philosophy that’s consistently advocated by business and marketing experts, and it used to be enough on its own to stand out.
The idea was that by simply offering free information and resources to potential prospects before they became a client, they were more likely to trust you over someone else because they would think “wow, if they’re giving me this for free, they must have a lot more to offer!”
It established a position of authority over everybody else that didn’t do the same. And it worked like magic.
But in today’s world where anyone can be a content creator, prospects are spoilt for choice, and it’s become harder than ever to truly stand out.
The services being offered by businesses are now perceived as commodities on equal footing with everyone else.
Don’t get me wrong. Content is still important. But it’s no longer enough on its own.
Genuine Connection in Marketing is Key
To stand out from your competition, you have to be different. That’s marketing 101.
But what a lot of people don’t realize is that in order to be different, you have to form genuine connections and relationships with your prospects.
The best way to explain this is by explaining how we as humans and consumers, make decisions. Essentially, there are 2 main ways we make decisions – logically and emotionally.Back in the day when offering free information and content was enough to stand out, that generated an emotional reaction from your audience and made deciding to go with you over someone else much, much easier.
But in today’s modern age, information is a commodity. With endless amounts of information at your fingertips, the decision to make a purchase now goes through a tonne more research online and has reverted to being a much more logical one.
In a battle between logic and emotions, emotions always win. If you’ve ever chosen not to exercise on a rainy day, or to not eat a healthier option when presented the choice– that’s a clear demonstration of that happening.
Even decisions that are seemingly logical are really just small emotional decisions that we’ve rationalised and justified. As an over-simplified example, when you buy hammer, you don’t actually want the hammer – what you actually want is a nail in the wall so you can hang up a picture frame of something important to you.
Emotions drive more than 80% of our decision-making, so it makes sense that we want to bring that back into the mix in order to stand out.
And the best way to drive and elicit emotions in our marketing and sales today, is to integrate more genuine connection back into the marketing mix.
Ways You Can Integrate More Genuine Connection into your Marketing
So how do we integrate more genuine connection into our marketing?
Some examples of how you can do that are:
- Telling personal stories that prospects can relate to in order to build trust and rapport
- Asking questions to get to know your prospects better so you can address their specific pain points
- Taking any opportunity to initiate a personal touch-point to show you really care for their success (much like a friend reaching out to check up on you)
By humanizing your brand and making it relatable, you will be able to form deeper connections with your audience which will make it much easier for them to do business with you.
Having said that, you can’t just pretend to be something you’re not. It’s too easy for people to see through that.
Your prospects can smell a fake from a mile away, and if they think you’re being inauthentic, they’ll leave faster than you can say “but wait, I’m not like the others!“.
People don’t buy products or services. They buy the people behind them.
If you want to stand out from your competition, focus on telling your story in a way that resonates with your ideal client. Be authentic, be real, and be vulnerable.
When you do that, you’ll start to build relationships instead of just acquiring customers. And those relationships will last a lot longer than any transaction ever could.
Alan