You can tell someone loves their work when it shows up in every activity of their life. For me, I find marketing nuggets any place I go.
And this place is no exception.
besides a B2B sales and marketing copywriter, I’m a performing songwriter.
One day, I was co-writing with a fellow guitar picker. A quite skilled one at that.
He stopped me in the middle of our writing session, leaned in close, stared at my fingers on the neck of the acoustic guitar and said …
“What are you doing there?”
Dumbfounded, I was just playing a CAdd9 chord or something equally plain. I didn’t know what he was asking.
“No, no …“ he said with a mischievous little smirk on his face, “with your fingers there, what is that? What are you doing there?”
I still didn’t quite get it.
Turned out, he was asking about something I take for granted. A stylistic thing I picked up along the way to help fill in empty spaces, contribute a sense of percussion, and give a certain playing element not often heard.
I’ll tell you what it is quick, and you’ll see how it applies to marketing your business.
I flick my fingers off the fingerboard to make the next chord, and it makes a percussive arpeggio sound. It works in conjunction with a right-hand strumming technique for an interesting percussive effect.
The point is, I do this without even thinking. It’s just how I play. And yet other pickers are trying to figure out what I’m doing.
He wasn’t the first one to ask.
What could this possibly have to do with your marketing?
Everything.
Are you passing up a marketing hook for your business?
Do your products have qualities you’re not exploiting, because you don’t see the potential?
Is there something in your business which differentiates you from the competition? But you don’t see it, because you’re too close.
Even hum-drum activities could be a differentiating hook to market your brand.
Take the legendary Claude Hopkins for example. He was a marketing genius in his day. His marketing lessons are still used today.
You may not know Claude, but I do know you’ve heard of Schlitz beer.
Claude was responsible for putting Schlitz on the map of beer drinkers everywhere. Know how he did it?
He exploited one simple word every beer company used. He made a big deal out of a hum-drum process every brewery did every day.
Claude explained what brewing companies meant by “pure.” He exploited the sanitization process Schlitz used to produce pure beer.
Now that might sound boring, or maybe you wonder what the big deal is about exploiting sanitization in brewing beer.
Thing is, every brewing company used the same sanitization process in their breweries. They just didn’t tell anybody. It didn’t seem worth mentioning.
Until Claude tapped into it, and separated Schlitz from all other beers. It put Schlitz into the major league.
It took someone outside the company to find that golden nugget.
To anyone else in the brewery, it was an everyday thing … no big deal.
Just like me and how I play, I didn’t know what my co-writer was talking about … even when he tried to ask. It was totally oblivious to me, because I was so close to what I do every day.
And so, it might be for you.
Look, all it takes is one key separation from your competitor … something to give you a unique selling proposition (USP). Even if it is as plain as washing brewery lines, sanitizing bottles or … in my case full chord pull-offs.
Often times, spotting these nuggets comes from someone inside the industry, but outside your team.
If you need help identifying a marketable USP or that defining piece of information, let’s talk.