Life during the Coronavirus lockdown has been incredibly… enlightening. I’ve learned how to give my Dad a haircut without clipping his ear off, how to successfully grow a watermelon in our backyard, and most importantly, how my Mom is secretly a marketing super-ninja when it comes to real-world scenarios.
Today, let’s focus on that last part.
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Truth be told, I find that marketing is about understanding human psychology more than anything else. And my Mom is a wickedly skillful manipulator when it comes to getting things done from people (I love you, Mom!).
Seriously though, I mean this in the best possible way, but if you closely observe the people in your surroundings, you gradually start seeing psychological tactics coming into play on a daily basis, most of the time on a subconscious level.
So, after observing my mother for the last two months, here are a few pointers I’ve picked up about marketing from her.
Marketing Lessons I’ve Learned from My Mom
#1 Give your customers all the tools they need to make a decision, then take a step back
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As marketers, we have a tendency to constantly speak up about our products on every single platform we can find. That’s the digital equivalent of pushing our products and services down the customers’ throats at every single social party.
Besides, in our hurry to sell them the product as quickly as possible, we hardly stop to think and reflect, do they even have all the tools they need to take that decision towards conversion??
I asked myself this question one day, which I refer to as ‘The Day I learned to quit being a baby and cut vegetables’.
This is what happened.
That day, Mom needed my help chopping up some veggies for an elaborate dish she was preparing. She asked, told, and scolded me in turn but nothing made a difference. I, I’m ashamed to say, sat glued to my laptop screen watching episode after episode of Modern Family.
Well, after a while, I realized I’d started tearing up and sniffling. At first, I thought it was because of Mitch and Cam’s amazingly sweet wedding, but looking down, I realized the truth.
I had a plateful of vegetables in my lap and I’d worked my way through cutting three onions already!
“What just happened here?”, I asked myself. “When did I start chopping up these vegetables?”
The answer was — some time ago my mother had quietly come in and put the dish of veggies and a cutting knife beside me, with a soft instruction to get them done as soon as possible. And now that I had everything I needed for the task on hand, I did so without even realizing it!
!!!
So, what do we take away from this?
Well, first of all, customers are lazy. They are not going to come running no matter how beautifully, powerfully, persuasively you call.
You have to reach out to them and provide them with everything they need to come to a decision. And then, take a step back and let them make their own choice.
In most cases, they will subconsciously take the decision you want them to because they have realized the value of your product by now!
2. Create amazing content that invites readers in
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The most common advice I’ve read about content promotion is that it is no longer the era of write-and-they-will-come. They always say you need to spend half your time writing the content piece and half your time promoting it. Only then will it reach your target audience.
While that is true to an extent, I often see mediocre content pieces being promoted aggressively left and right, without even a proper strategy tying all of them together. This never, never works.
So, if you are thinking of driving traffic to your sites through content the first and most important thing to do is — write a great piece of content.
Even if you pick up a subject that been beaten to death before, you have to have something unique in your content. It can be original research, it can be your opinion, it can even be your individualistic style of writing.
The point is to write a piece that’s unique, not your run-of-the-mill fare that feels like a boring news update.
Armed with this and a killer marketing strategy, you will be unstoppable.
Let me justify with a short example.
The other day, it was almost lunchtime, and Mom was calling for us all to come and have food soon. I was finishing up a blog I had to send out that day, so I ignored the first two or three times that she called out. I assume that the rest of the family too was caught up in their own stuff and nobody responded.
A couple of minutes later though, there was an ominous silence.
Then, silently wafting along with the air came a succession of such delectable smells that my mouth literally started watering. Nose twitching like a rabbit, I dashed off the last sentence in the article, jumped up, and bounded off to the kitchen.
As I sped along, I was joined by the rest of my similarly entranced family, all making our way to the source of that enticing aroma.
On reaching the kitchen, we saw my Mom standing there, with a satisfied smile on her face, holding the lids of the food containers like twin shields of victory!
Later, as we were seated around the table having lunch, it struck me how effective silence could be sometimes.
It’s simple. If your content is delicious, that scent will spread and get your readers in. You don’t have to scream, you don’t need to shout.
The audience today easily recognizes the difference between virtual crap and gold.
And when you create digital gold, write and they will come.
3. Be generous — Offer value-generating content without a catch
Sometimes, I think we marketers are misers. We hoard the best bits of our content, holding them hostage and using them as bait to get visitors to make a purchase on our websites.
What if, instead, we offered some of this knowledge for free?
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Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand the importance of building an email list and creating a following of your subscribers. But, I think there needs to be a better reason for them to part with their email addresses than say, a case study, or a checklist.
Forget one-time rewards.
What is the long-term value you offer that will make them look at this as a win-win situation?
My Mom often uses what I call ‘The Long-term Strategy of Mutual Give and Take’ to create a loyal fan base.
This is how it works.
We have a small home-grown garden in our backyard, where there are fruit and vegetable plants galore — jackfruit, mango, watermelon, tomatoes, basil, coriander, Colocasia, and many others.
Now, in India, since the whole ‘sharing is caring’ principle is taken very seriously, my mother loves to distribute the fruit of our labors (couldn’t resist the pun :P) to our neighbors.
And this is a mutually profitable endeavor.
Spurred by this act of goodwill, our neighbors, too, share a plateful of any delicacies they might prepare in their homes.
And so the give-and-take continues, building trust and love, and loyalty.
What I, as a marketer, take away from this is — when we expect people to give up their email address or contact details, we need to ensure that our content is worth it.
Not just the one they are downloading, but also the one that they will be getting in the future.
Yes, we exist to sell our products, but it is also our responsibility to ensure that we do not lure in our customers with the promise of peaches and then bombard them with lemons.
Wrapping up,
These were my three biggest takeaways when I looked at my Mom’s people-management skills from a marketing perspective. In fact, the more you look around, the more such examples we see popping up in real life!
I’m sure there are many I might have missed though. Have you any such experiences to share? Drop a comment to let me know!
