If you’re in charge of marketing for your business, you’ve probably faced this dilemma:
- Staring at your screen wondering what the hell else you can write about ‘customer service,’ ‘affordable pricing,’ or ‘great value.’
- Looking through a bunch of generic stock photos trying to find something inclusive that doesn’t offend anyone.
- Creating a drab seasonal promotion that you don’t even want to click on yourself.
*Sigh*
Trying to do content marketing for your business is tough. Trying to do it every week for several years on end can feel excruciating. That’s why so many people give up and resort to only running ads.
Why Business Marketing is Hard
It’s easy to post on Facebook about your weekend activities. It’s fun to share a new selfie on Instagram. Why? Because you’re swimming with the stream.
People are super interested in other people. But brands have it much tougher. Nobody cares about a product or service unless they need something it offers.
Marketing for your business can feel like you are completing a boring book report for school. You go through the motions and just try to make something meaningful without delving too deep.
There are reasons why it’s harder to market for a brand than for yourself. Here are three reasons why, and three ways to overcome it.
1) Brands have Less Personality than People
It doesn’t matter what business it is, there is no way a brand can compete with a person when it comes to personality.
When we’re in business mode, we’re all on our best behavior. We offer fake smiles, and we call everyone sir or madam.
Unfortunately, this makes us into generic drones. And it’s hard to do interesting marketing when we’re boring.
The key to adding personality to your brand is to focus on the people in your company. All the best brands do this. They have a figurehead person who represents the brand and is part of their marketing. Think Steve Jobs, Arianna Huffington, or Kylie Jenner. They all represent the brand, and that gives the brand a personality.
You can do the same by featuring your people in your marketing. Get them to write, pose for photos, record videos, and be a part of the promotions wherever possible.
Problem: Your company has less personality than the people in it.
Solution: Focus your marketing around the people in your company.
2) Brands Do The Same Things All The Time
In business, a key to success is consistency. You keep doing the same things in the same way, and people pay you for it. It’s a good idea to have systems in your business.
But when it comes to doing your marketing, the routines of everyday business make it hard to share anything exciting.
You can’t post on LinkedIn or Twitter that your company spent all day fielding phone orders and answering emails. You can’t set up special promotions for the same products month after month.
So what’s the answer? Simple: innovate.
Think about a company like Apple. How long do they stay the same? Within less than a year, all their current products are updated, renamed, and have new marketing campaigns.
It’s not a coincidence that they are one of the most valuable companies on earth.
Peter Drucker said it best over 50 years in The Practice of Management:
“The business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”
And if you aren’t innovating in some way, you are not only falling behind, you are missing out on prime marketing opportunities.
Problem: Most businesses do the same thing, year after year.
Solution: Keep evolving and innovating and sharing it with the world.
3) Brands Try To Stay Neutral
Everyone in the world today is hyper-sensitive about offending other people. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the business world.
We hide behind corporate speak and pretend to be interested in what people are saying in meetings. We create generic mission statements that mean nothing and pretend to stand behind them. Worst of all, we create marketing that speaks to everyone, and as a result, to no one.
The worst thing a brand can do is try to be neutral. It’s essentially the death knell of a company when it doesn’t stand for something.
Think about SpaceX – you immediately know what that company stands for. What about Greenpeace? Yep, you know what they’re trying to do.
Any business that has a Quest or a mission is not neutral. It’s willing to risk losing some people’s interest to gain the right people’s loyalty.
Of course, you don’t need to have a righteous mission to do great marketing. You can just be more honest or even cheeky. Look at companies like Dr. Squatch or Fiverr. They are doing deliberately edgy marketing that has humor and will scare off portions of the market. But they will also be remembered.
Problem: Your business is generic, just like everyone else’s.
Solution: Find your mission, or your edge, and show it to the world.
First They Gotta Feel You
Remember that people have to feel something about your business before they’ll buy from it.
You can’t bore people into buying your products. So if you’re already bored with your marketing, you can bet your life that your customers are as well.
Don’t be afraid to appeal to the same things in your marketing that humans like. After all, it’s those same humans who you want to make an impression on.