I hate long, verbose articles. Why can’t they just say what they promised to reveal?

So, I’ll cut to the chase. (By the way, I’ll explain the Vampire picture at the bottom of the article.)

THE SIMPLEST SECRET

The simplest secret of marketing is that you (your company or service or product) has to be what the target audience wants.

Skillful marketeers know what the target audience wants. Once that’s known (with really good survey research, not the blah blah you get in the canned marketing surveys) the marketers move to the real challenge, i.e.  how can we make your company or service or product look like what the target audience wants.

A TRUE STORY

We agreed to do a marketing campaign for an attorney who wanted to help people being abused by debt collectors.  A noble cause.  So we were aboard. But when we did our market research (actually calling people being abused by debt collectors) we found out they didn’t trust attorneys.  (Apparently some congressmen must have had some one of their friends or family abused by debt collectors because they passed the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act which gave  $3,500 automatically if they had evidence they were being abused by debt collectors.

So, we asked the people being abused by debt colletors a question (I’ll get to how we found them later on), “If you had a case that proved you were being abused by debt collectors, would you want an attorney to take the case and get you your automatic payment?”

Their answer?

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t trust attorneys.”

Another said, “They make you sign something you don’t understand and you end up owing them money.”

So this was a problem.  How could we get them to sign up??

We did a second round of calls.  Our question was, “Would you trust a Consumer Advocate Group to take your case?”

The answer?

A resounding “YES!”

So, we talked our client into changing the banner on the website pages we were building for him to say “Consumer Advocate” instead of “Attorney at Law.”  Now he was a trustworthy fellow. Now they would call him.

What happened?

We changed the target audience’s perception of who this man was.  He’s the same attorney.  They embrace his help because he’s what they want.

 

HOW WE GOT PEOPLE WHO NEVER PICK UP THE PHONE TO TALK TO US

You may be wondering how we figured out how to reach people who were being abused by debt collectors.  These are people who sit in their homes ignoring all phone calls coming to them because it might be a debt collector.  So how did we get them to talk to us?

Well, we designed the perfect bait to attract them.  Any ideas what we did?  Send your bright idea in.  Next Thursday, we’ll tell how we did it.

WHY THE VAMPIRE PICTURE?

You tell me.  Email in your best guess why I put the vampire picture in this article.  We’ll reveal that in next week’s blog.

 

- See more at: http://blog.theassociation.tv/blog/the-association/page/4#sthash.FEZaGm4n.dpuf