Everything is marketing.
This is one of those things that I say and repeat often because it’s easy to remember and it’s so true.
Everything is marketing—and when I say everything, I mean literally everything. One of the things that people often don’t think about and yet is one of the most crucial pieces of marketing for any business is to market through your processes.
So let’s not get caught up in thinking that only what we do on social media is marketing. Let’s not get caught up in thinking that only what we put on our website is marketing. Let’s not get caught up in thinking that only what we send in emails is marketing. The fact is that everything that we do, every interaction that we have is marketing.
Now, sometimes you’re marketing to more people, sometimes you’re not. If your interaction is public, then you are marketing in a way that is more public, but it’s still a “marketing” reflection of your business even when you’re having that one-on-one conversation.
So here are three processes that I have identified that will help you understand what it might look like to market through your processes.
Product Delivery
Another way that I like to think about the idea that “everything is marketing” is that everything you do will either help you or hurt you.
It’s another way of saying the same thing, but it might help you to see how it fits these categories a little better.
So with product delivery, everything that you do will either help you or hurt you.
Take packaging, for example. When you see things come in the mail, why is it that packaging makes such a big deal? I subscribe to Michael Hyatt’s Full Focus Planner. I get it just before the new quarter begins so I can make sure to have the next quarter’s information filled out and ready to go. Now, this thing could have just come in a plain cardboard box.
It could even be sized right to fit the planner and be a plain Jane cardboard box. No problem whatsoever. And I wouldn’t have any bad taste in my mouth about that.
However, it doesn’t come that way.
It comes packaged in a beautiful custom cardboard box that very nicely represents the Michael Hyatt and Full Focus brand.
And then when you open it up, it is in another layer of packaging that again is beautifully representative. It’s another box that just looks so nice. For a while, I was keeping these boxes around! They’re so nice I didn’t even want to throw them away.
Everything—including the packaging on the Full Focus Planner—is marketing, and is, in this case, helping Michael’s brand.
How do I know that? Because of what I’m doing right now! I’m sharing this with you. Apple is another great example. Apple pays attention to its packaging.
How are you packaging your products? Are you packaging? Are you delivering your products/services in such a way that makes people say, wow, there was really some time and thought put into that? Are you able to react quickly because you have processes in place for delivering your product?
Customer Service
Many business owners really, really miss the mark on this.
It can be hard when, especially if you’re a solo operation, you’re responsible for everything.
You are the client satisfaction department, you are the product delivery department, you are the quality assurance department, you are the project management team, etc. You are responsible for growing the business, doing everything in the business. I understand that.
But customer service processes, especially as you start to use strategies that bring in a higher volume of customers, definitely become important and make a big impression. This should not require deep thought. How often is it on Twitter that you see people ranting and raving either for the good or for the bad because of a customer service interaction they’ve had with a company?
It’s going to be the same thing for your business, especially as you get more well-known.
And even if it’s not about it being on the public stage, what you want to do is avoid the temptation to only ever focus your marketing towards new business.
A lot of people get caught up in that. It’s not just about new business. Oftentimes the best marketing you can do is marketing to your current client base to keep them as clients! And happy clients will usually bring you more business by way of referral.
Product Design
Are your products or services just a willy nilly thing with no clear road map, deliverable, or intended result?
It would be helpful even if just to give the option to your potential clients or to your current clients of having a well-defined roadmap that they can take in order to utilize your services in a way that they can understand.
Remember, we talked recently about overcoming the curse of knowledge.
The problem is that your potential clients can’t understand how to do business with you and that leads to them passing you by.
Well, your product design is actually a process through which you can market to help overcome that. You could very clearly lay out on your website how your packages walk people in a certain time period through a particular set of goals, for example.
They take them through a roadmap of sorts and then, perhaps, you have three months of supporting work that they pay for each month in order to have those conversations with you that are a little bit more about the struggles and difficulties that they are facing along the way. But maybe it starts out with a well-defined set of goals that need to be hit in your conversations. That’s just one example.
There are so many different examples of this, but the bottom line is: market through your product design.
Want more help? We can help you design your products in a way that helps grow your company. Reach out here to get started.
To your success!
— Steve
