Use Your Marketing Mirror
I’ve said so many times over the years that to be successful, marketers need to step out of their own shoes and take their customers’ perspective.
To be the voice of the customer, a marketer, and in fact a business owner, sales person (anyone in a crucial customer-facing role) needs to constantly see their offer from the customer’s perspective. If they only think and look from their own viewpoint, they will be biased, tuned by ego and focused on selling.
Take the customers’ perspective and you suddenly become highly focused on the good and the bad in your marketing and communications. You’ll see things in a totally different light and really begin to appreciate the nuances of the fine details that you could otherwise miss.
I’d like to call this process looking in your Marketing Mirror. Hold up that virtual mirror and take a long hard look at yourself, what you are saying and doing and how are you presenting yourself to your stakeholders, your customers and your peers. You may be surprised by what you find?
As soon as you take this different perspective you should intuitively find that you begin to focus on giving reasons to buy, in preference to the traditional selling and outbound marketing approaches that now feel obsolete.
In many ways, if you use your Marketing Mirror, it can benefit you in personal relationships as well and improve your communication style, tone of voice and timing, more generally. Imagine if, in time, you could automatically communicate with your target audience in mind, without even thinking about it. How much more relevant and attractive (in the professional sense of the word) would you be?
Looking in your Marketing Mirror will help you to become more self-aware and more adept at flowing with the needs of your audience.
What are your alternatives? A professional (and personal) life that is all about ‘me me me’, rather than truly understanding what’s in it for those you need in and around your life? The Marketing Mirror will open up a whole new world if you use it before your next campaign, your next blog and even your next tweet.
Hold it up now and what do you see? Please comment below and let me know…
