Empathy
Empathy is a skill and it's incredibly useful in marketing.
Take this example:
I just learned that pantyhose were invented by a gentleman named Allen Gant in 1959. Gant was inspired to create them because of a practical issue his wife, Ethel Boone Gant, encountered during her pregnancy. At the time, women typically wore stockings, which required a garter belt or girdle to keep them in place, but this setup was uncomfortable and cumbersome, especially for pregnant women.
Ethel’s frustration with having to manage stockings and garters during her pregnancy led Gant to brainstorm a more convenient solution. He came up with the idea of combining stockings with underwear, creating a one-piece garment that would eliminate the need for garters, a design that would streamline getting dressed and be more comfortable, especially for women on the go.
Legos, which I love to this day, were not invented by a four year old (obviously).
Yes, this is me playing with giant legos 😁
Sure it's easy to do something for yourself and assume other people have the same problem, but you can also learn a lot by noticing other people; noticing what people do, what they choose and what their frustrations are. Reaching those people and showing how you can serve THEM and help them fix their problems or fulfill their dreams is the key to marketing.
Marketing is not promotion
This is something I see and hear all the time when I talk about what I do for a living. Depending on who I'm surrounded with, I'll word my elevator pitch a bit differently, for example, I'll sometimes say
I have a content marketing agency. We help businesses engage with their audience with high quality video and audio productions.
Many times, the answer I get is
Oh, so you do adverts.
Sure, advertising is a very small part of marketing, but it's not the definition of marketing and it's definitely not what I do for a living. You can use cheesy BUY NOW! ads on billboards and interrupt folks on web2 social media platforms all day, but getting more eyeballs for 5 seconds is not necessarily going to translate into more sales. It's not about putting more people into your sales funnel, it's about making that funnel more efficient.
Image source: martech.zone
People who are interacting with you in one way or another can become more likely to send you a message, and when they do, in whatever medium they choose, Telegram, X, WhatsApp, email... You will have received permission to interact with them and follow up the next with a question such as
Hey there, just wondering what you thought of that thing. What did you like? What did you dislike?
Instead of broadcasting it's relationship building.
Subscribers
This is one reason why I think the new INLEO subscription model is going to be huge. It's not about what comes up next on their feed, it's about what they enrolled in.
I want to read news from Khal himself. He wrote me a message, and I want to read it.
For those of you who remember the newspaper stands, that was sort of like shouting out of a megaphone in hopes of someone becoming aware of your existence and maybe taking interest, whereas if you subscribed to a monthly edition of The Economist, that was delivered to your doorstep, you would probably be eager to receive your monthly edition to learn about the topics you are interested in and discussing them with your peers.
There's an awesome and super entertaining keynote speech on the interwebs by Patron CEO Jack Conte at SXSW 2024 called "The Death of the follower & the future of creativity on the web"
I highly recommend you watch it and take notes, because this is what subscription models are all about.
Thank you for reading my blog post. The information shared here is part of my research and journey in further understanding marketing and the concepts that make it so powerful. I'm reading a lot of Seth Godin as well as listening to his podcast called Akimbo.
