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How to market your product without being salesy

How to market your product without being salesy

You might say this post is a continuation of my last post.

Earlier today I was on with a client as we were planning for 2021. I feel like all day, everyday, especially on the #MarketingTwitter community, we talk about how social is coming back to being what it started as, was meant to be and (in the mind of this marketer) should be. That is, two-way, real, authentic conversation is how brands are communicating again.

So as I am pleading with my client to send us some quick videos with his thoughts on a few (specific) topics, he wasn’t sure about this whole thing. “I don’t want to be a talking head,” he said. “Why would anyone care what I ate for breakfast?”

Agreed. I don’t care what you ate for breakfast (unless you’re chef or something related to breakfast-making). The biggest challenge is that his business is producing content – he has a show online so his ability to share produced video content is basically limitless. He’s got a full library of it. But sharing clips of that – that’s selling his product. That’s not marketing.

I explained it in these terms;

Let’s say you own a company that manufactures refrigerators. You cannot (at least if you’ve got my team working with you) just load up your instagram feed/stories with images of your refrigerator. Who is looking at this? Who will click like? Who will join your community?

Rather, I recommend that refrigerator company share content about food storage, energy efficiency, recipes, proper temperature for foods, food prep, etcetera. Think of all the great content we could build out of that – in words, photos and videos. Attention refrigerator manufacturers – steal this idea or hire us.

The difference here is that the refrigerator is the product. What’s on social is marketing that product.

In the case of this client, if all we do is share clips and images of his show, are we giving the audience too much? Will they click through to see more? Sure sure… we do need SOME of that product shown out there. My point is, mix it up. Make it real. Give some content peripheral to your brand in order to show off you and earn some credibility.

I hope he’ll work with us on this as we continue to collaborate and make his brand shine. Whatever plans you have for your brand’s marketing in 2021, make sure it’s real. Make sure it’s interesting. Make sure you aren’t using your marketing tools as sales-only tools. They need to be bigger than that.

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