No product or service is perfect, but some have flaws or emotional baggage that trigger fear in your customers – ignoring these fears is a big marketing mistake!
Riding the Elephant Part 2 – When Customers Have Worries and Fear About Using Your Product or Service
Our marketer in Part 1 has a product that creates video emails and has seen lots of material from the parent company showing that these emails get higher open rates and results than regular emails. The disconnect? People are afraid of being on camera in the same way they are frightened of public speaking! A huge smelly elephant in the room that his company doesn’t address. We couldn’t help him with his wish for a hard-sell, simple way to convince them to buy this product, but in this article and continuing into Part 3, we’ll explore some remedies and realities that may help him “ride” that smelly elephant!
Direct sales is hard enough to master and succeed with even when you have a product people need AND want that is in demand. But when there is something that comes along with your product or service that people dislike, are frightened of or don’t want to tell anyone about, this is the classic “elephant in the room” scenario and you can’t ignore it or get rid of it.
Here is the big “elephant in the room” with his product. There are facts that this marketer through his company knows, that using his product/service can dramatically increase results in several areas, like SEO and sales conversions because it uses videos. That seems black and white – use it, get better results. But the elephant is visible if you look at it this way… (the way his potential customers do) – Using public speaking as a more proven example of resistance: Do people who are good at public speaking make more $ and have better conversions and success? Yes. Do people fear public speaking more than death? Yes.
So there is a small % of people who decide the money is more important or they are naturally already wanting to be center of attention – if you’re selling public speaking classes, that’s your immediate, reachable niche. You still have to show them that your product will help them and build value, but the remaining 90% when there is a strong fear, are unreachable if you use standard marketing. If you can engage them and entice them, you may be able to “soften” up the 30% that aren’t thinking they need it right now.
You’ll Need To Ride the Elephant and Get Them Thinking They Can and Want To Ride It Too! We’ll go over this with practical solutions in Part 3
I’m here to help! If you have a marketing challenge like this or if you can’t seem to get things going and you think you might be blind to an elephant, an hour of Marketing Consult is likely enough to get you on track or to help you evaluate if you have what it takes to ride that elephant and will it be worth it if you do? Contact me with the form below and get connected and energized! Kathryn Booth