My last two major marketing tasks couldn’t be more of a contrast; old fashioned sweets and insolvency practitioners.
It’s two ends of a very interesting scale, particularly when out at networking events. In engaging networking terms it seriously is feast or famine. One of these subjects is guaranteed to ensure you find conversations ending very quickly with nervous glances over to the coffee table (or ‘excuse table’ for many of us), whilst the other means fending off questions fired in with machine gun-like regularity (have a guess which one is which – answers on a postcard).
Neither in their own way make networking an easy ride, especially when you are trying to maintain a golden rule of the art, be interested and interesting. I love meeting new people and yet the daunting environment of a networking event still gives me jitters. This feeling isn’t helped by the contrasting challenges presented by the two subjects, either getting the nervous silence (is he going to make me insolvent) or feeling like your subject is dominating the conversation. Believe me, as strange as it sounds having the subject constantly returning to your passion isn’t as great as it sounds when you are loving finding out about others.
It is a challenge that is often replicated by clients across many industries we speak to, in areas that they see as un-interesting, unsexy and therefore un-marketable. However as we always say, nothing is un-marketable.
The key to anything like this is approaching it as you would if you were face to face with your customer. If you were to have a conversation with them what would you say? What would you want that person to take away from the 1 min conversation that you had?
For me it always boils down to a few key things. I want people to know something about me and I want to know something about them. I’d like to understand how I can help them, and I’d like to give them an idea of how I could do that.
These are the things I always keep in mind when I’m meeting new people at networking events. And they can be applied as easily to your general marketing. Take the time to understand your customers, learn things about them, help them, make their lives easier in some way and you’ll find that marketing becomes that little bit easier.
