Letting someone else speak for you
If you’re in business or if you’ve chosen something as a career it’s probably a path that you’re passionate about and an area where you have knowledge and experience. Naturally you want to tell the whole world about it and share that passion and knowledge.
The problem is you don’t want to appear to be biased and self promoting and risk potential customers disliking you and worse not believing you.
A good way round this is to find someone who can speak on your behalf, at least as an introduction. This could be a work colleague or someone who knows you well or even a paid professional who can present the case. The key is to have someone who your audience will see as being a qualified witness to your expertise in the subject and evidence suggests that people will not be influenced by whether this person is paid or otherwise.
Authors Noah J.Goldenstein and Steve J. Martin carried out a psychological experiment to prove this. Participants were asked to imagine themselves in the role of senior editor for a book publisher, facing the task of dealing with an experienced and successful author. They were asked to read excerpts from a negotiation for a sizeable book advance. One group read excerpts talking about the author’s accomplishments spoken by the author’s agent and the second group read the same identical comments made by the author himself. The resulting data confirmed that : “Participants rated the author more favourably on nearly every scale – especially likeability – when the author’s agent sang his praises as compared to when the author tooted his own horn.”
This is a technique we’ve recommended to clients at Recorded Devilery, where we’ve made short video clips using comments from experts and satisfied customers in a documentary format, rather than in house glossy self-promoting videos.
Get into the mind of your customer.
Users of the internet have high expectations of the type of content that they want and you have to deliver it to them quickly. Marketing on the internet is no longer about telling people how good your product or service is with glossy terms and corporate jargon…. It’s about providing them with useful content that’s relevant to them and by association, positioning yourself as an expert in your product or service. Try and identify with your customers needs or with a problem that they want to solve and provide the answer or provide them with useful content that will keep them visiting your site or subscribing to your mailing list.
Try to answer the following:
- Who are my potential customers?
- What do they enjoy about my product or service or what problem does it solve?
- What content can I deliver to them that will be useful, entertaining or informative?
- What is the most effective way that I can deliver that content?
Thinking about these questions and answering them to yourself might just trigger a new way of approaching your customers in a way that will be enjoyable to you at the same time.
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Welcome to Successful Web Marketing
Thank you for visiting my blog. Having spent most of my professional career in media production of one sort or another, I am relieved to see that at last businesses are recognising that successful marketing on line is all about content and providing information that is useful. It's time to forget the old fashioned methods of selling and adopt a whole new strategy where small businesses can compete with massive corporations and reach targetted niche markets very effectively. I hope by reading this blog you will pick up some useful information and tips and please feel free to comment and join in.









