Sometimes the seemingly easiest things are the hardest to do. Our lives (and businesses) are complicated, there are many moving parts, lots of decisions and everything goes round and round.
Yet that complexity may be one of the biggest barriers to marketing success, in part because potential clients don’t care so much about the details — they are looking for clarity and ease-of-understanding.
Mark Mitchell explains these concepts (with an intriguing strategy to attract new clients for his building products consultancy, in this post: Your Product is Better! Why Aren?t You Selling More?
He writes:
The problem with most building materials companies is that they suffer from the ?curse of knowledge.? They know so much about their product and its uses that they end up making several mistakes:
- They think their customers know the same things they do. It?s so obvious to these companies that it?s hard for them to imagine that the customer doesn?t have much of the same knowledge.
- They think they know better than the customer what the customer should be concerned with.
- The more a company thinks their product is better, the longer the list of reasons they feel their product is better. And they feel the need to share everything on that list.
?Customers don?t tend to buy the best products, they buy the products that are easiest to understand.? Donald Miller, president of StoryBrand
As soon as I heard this, it reminded me that this is the most common reason why your building materials customers buy from your competitor, even though their product isn?t as good as yours. They make it easy to understand; you make it hard.
Of course, simplifying your business message may be a challenge — you really need to know its heart, and that message must resonate with your clients. In my opinion, the simplification question can be the key differentiator, the unique selling proposition, or whatever you do that truly makes you stand out from the crowd (in a good way.)
Mitchell concludes his post with an invitation to clients for a free consultation to begin finding the answer to that question. I can do that too, using my unique journalistic research techniques that make possible the ferreting out of live competitive and marketing intelligence. You can reach me at buckshon@constructionmarketingideas.com or through the contact link (where you can arrange a free 30 minute phone consultation.)
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