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Hub Mentality for Commodities Versus Educational Sales
In our last newsletter we spoke of how marketing is much more than a message; it’s a process.
Traditional ad agencies can write you ads, but you need a marketing infrastructure (hub) to support those ads.
If you’re selling a commodity with immediately-recognizable relevance (shoes, insurance, mortgages, food), short, impactful messages are critical.
Traditional advertising can still make a lot of sense for such business models.
In this case, database-driven Hub Mentality is used more for customer retention and repeat business than it is for initial sales.
For example, a restaurant or clothing store can invite customers to subscribe to their mailing list to receive special discounts and/or other benefits.
Some businesses, however, are more complicated, they take time to educate potential clients, and/or what they sell is much more expensive than basic commodities. Our own business is such a model.
In that case, you can’t depend primarily on 30-second sound bites, print ads, etc. You need processes in place for people to be educated over time. Yes, short ads can certainly be part of that process, but such ads must be supported by a larger marketing infrastructure.
You engage people in a community who give you permission to deliver content to them on an ongoing basis. If you get them in your database, you don’t have to sell them in the first email they receive from you.
They may not buy from you for six months or even a year, but the low cost of Hub Mentality technology (email marketing or CRM software, blogging, social media, et al) makes it a viable model.
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Stephen Palmer is a marketing consultant and persuasive writer with KGaps Consulting, a co-founder of The Center for Social Leadership, and the New York Times best-selling co-author of Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths that are Destroying Your Prosperity.
He is a liberal-arts graduate of George Wythe University and a graduate of the “non-traditional business school” Wizard Academy.
Stephen resides in Round Rock, Texas with his gorgeous wife Karina, awesome son Alex, and princess daughters Libby, Avery, and Laela. Stephen and Karina blog about their magical life on Palmer Journeys.
Connect With Stephen:
Email: spalmer [at] kgaps [dot] com
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