Fancy videos and beautiful graphics don’t guarantee sales.
If anything, they could be a huge waste of time. I have invested millions of dollars in advertising: some campaigns looked bad but turned out to be winners. Others included sophisticated creatives that resulted in crickets.
No matter the product, creative, channel or platform, I found successful campaigns are always led by a simple principle.
First principle of selling: feed a starving crowd or sales will be zero
My friends and I used to wait in line for disgusting hot dogs at 3 AM outside the club. We were drunk off our arses, and starving as hell. Since that hot dog stand was the only food around, we ate it like good little boys. The funny thing was, we all agreed that food was crap.
That’s the power of feeding the right customer.
Copywriting, personal brand, marketing strategy, these things are valuable but secondary. The best copy on earth won’t sell a product nobody wants (at least not consistently). However, put the right product in front of the right people, explain what it does in simple words, and you’ll make sales. When you sell that way, there’s not much convincing or persuasion to be done.
People just want your product.
To successfully apply this principle, you must know your customer
You cannot sell to a customer you are not familiar with.
In the last 10 years I’ve marketed in dozens of industries and analyzed hundreds of ads. The cause for failed campaigns was always the same: the advertiser wasn’t familiar enough with the problem he solved for customers. Thus, the marketing material turned out to be vague (ads, posts, emails) and the product wasn’t positioned correctly.
Assuming the product has enough demand, we business owners should articulate the following in simple terms:
- Exactly who our customer is
- The specific problem we solve for that customer
- How the customer has tried to solve the problem before
- The reasons why the problem happens
- The negative consequences of not solving that problem
Once we are clear on all of those, we can design a product and a message that cater to our starving crowd
Conclusion
You don’t have to persuade people to buy something they already want. Our goal as businesses is to define our customer, position our product or service correctly, then put our message in front of them. If you already have proof people want to buy from you, and your price makes sense, selling becomes a smoother experience.