Marketing Mutiny

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Today we hear from Douglass & Lisa-Marie Hatcher:

(3 mins 43 secs read)

Non-Smarmy Marketing that Wins, Using Humility, Empathy, and Generosity

What’s the Tip?

The secret to non-smarmy marketing that wins is deceptively simple: focus on your customer. In this piece, we'll show you how to convert that simple secret to non-smarmy marketing into a strategic advantage by adopting a customer-first mindset driven by Humility, Empathy, and Generosity.

All three traits are essential underpinnings of our day-to-day business which is storytelling training and coaching. All three also happen to be central parts of a book we wrote several years ago called, Win With Decency. 

How Do You Use It?

Focusing on your customer is one thing, but actually doing it is another. So, what has to happen or change in your business to make your customer the true focus of everything you do? How exactly do you make your customer the hero, while still attending to your day to day? Here's where Humility, Empathy, and Generosity come into play.

Humility

The humility part begins with the following mind shift: When it comes to marketing, it's not about you — it's about your customer.

Empathy

Empathy is how you put that mind shift into action. It begins with understanding the world from your customer's point of view, not your own. Empathy allows you to move from promoting just the features of your product and what it can do - to promoting the benefits of your product and what it can do for your customer. 

Generosity

You've got to give to get. It's not complicated. Giving away content or part of your product (or service) to prospects or customers is key to eliminating your customer's risk and removing friction from an eventual purchase. But whatever you're giving away must provide some genuine value for your customers.

What are Some Examples?

Enough with the abstract stuff, let's get to some action items that will help you right away!

Actionable Humility: Humility allows you to reorient your marketing from yourself to your customer. So, what does that look like? To put humility into action, make this one change in your copy and thank us later. Replace instances of “I/We/Us” with “You/Your/Yours” and adjust accordingly. 

When you make this change in pronouns, your copy and your conversations stop being about your brand and start being about your customer. It's inescapable. To be clear, there will be places where this change is a forced fit and won't work. The key is changing your mindset and making small improvements.

Actionable Empathy: Empathy allows you to dig deeper in your customer's world, so you can speak from your customer's pain points in your marketing through storytelling and copywriting. Doing this means moving from talking about product features to delving into its benefits. But even that will only get you so far. Go one step beyond the first benefit that comes to mind and challenge yourself to come up with what we call, “the benefit of the benefit”. We’ve created a PDF for you with 10 examples that will walk you through the benefit of the benefit approach. You can find it here. The deeper you delve into your customer's world, the richer your copy will be that will help sell your product. 

Actionable Generosity: Generosity means creating and then giving away content loaded with value - from LinkedIn posts and carousels to Twitter threads to eBooks. High-quality, free content helps you establish authority in your niche, fosters credibility and trust, and removes risk, not only in the short term but even as your customer moves along his or her customer journey and nears a first purchase.

Of course, the ultimate test of generosity in the form of risk removal is to make a strong money-back guarantee a central part of your offer. Something like this: in the first 7 days of buying our X, if you're not completely satisfied with your purchase, we'll give you a full refund, no questions asked. And you get to keep the product.

What's the Benefit to You?

The biggest benefit of focusing on your customer is better business that you can be proud of.

Our Top 3 Values and How We Bring Them into Our Marketing:

Our top three values are Humility, Empathy, and Generosity. We bring them into our marketing by tying each value back to focusing on the customer. We do it through the steps described above: Actionable Humility, Actionable Empathy and Actionable Generosity.

One Strategy We Have Used That Got Clients and Was Values-Driven

The one strategy that has made the biggest difference in getting more clients is our 2023 commitment to partner with people we like and whose work we respect and admire.

We've partnered with Dan Cooney, who has been an amazing partner in business storytelling, specifically in the area of sales communication. It's only Q1 and we've already done two successful workshops with Dan, one in person and the other online. 

We've partnered with Victor Lee on ways to leverage ChatGPT-3 and 4. Victor is like having a management consultant who's got the game plan for the next move already mapped out and ready to execute. He does playbooks in his sleep. 

We've partnered with Sophie Lechner who is the inspiration for this piece. 

Douglass & Lisa-Marie's question to you:

One Question for you to Have a Conversation Around: When it comes to your product or service, what’s the benefit of the benefit? Download our PDF (no email required) to learn how to do that step by step.

Join the conversation!

Find out what today's contribution has sparked and share your own experience, thoughts and questions by heading over here to join in the discussion.

Who are Douglass & Lisa-Marie? Douglass and Lisa-Marie Hatcher are co-founders of communicate4IMPACT (C4I), a communications firm that specializes in business storytelling training and coaching. Douglass previously led thought leadership and executive communications at Mastercard in Purchase, New York. Prior to Mastercard, Douglass spent two decades in Washington, DC, where he worked on Capitol Hill in senior positions in both the U.S. Senate and House.

Lisa-Marie’s background is in account development and sales. She has worked in the public sector at the U.S. Department of Defense as well as in the private sector in both pharmaceutical sales and global finance. The couple resides in Westchester County, New York, where they are raising their twins.

Douglass and Lisa-Marie's gifts to you

Find Douglass & Lisa-Marie Online: LinkedIn - Website - Twitter 

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