Tag: Business

Putting the cart before the horse

Posted on by philipdodson

This is what most businesses do.

They focus on the detail or the benefits of their products or services before actually looking at why their business even exists.

Like choosing what food to put on your restaurant’s menu before you’ve clearly defined the concept.

We go for the easy as we can all talk about what we do or the benefits of our offerings. It’s much harder to talk about our company’s purpose or why we do what we do.

If you start with a purpose, a mission, what you stand for, the business’s values and then it’s so much easier to get the details right and align everything.

It’s then easier for the right people to fall in love with what you do.

Mass produced generic services and products that sell on benefits and features are in a one way race to the bottom and very few remember them when they’re gone.

Long lasting businesses that people care about take time and a willingness to follow a mission, a purpose and stick to it.

Not better content

Posted on by philipdodson

We don’t need to spend all our marketing effort seeking to write better content and better marketing blurb.

The best marketing that we can do is to provide a level of delivery of our service that inspires our customers to tell others how great it was, to write good things about us online and to come back again as a repeat customer.

Marketing is everything we do as an organisation and delivery of service is right at the top of the list.

After all, I have yet to read on anyone’s marketing content ‘we at XYZ Corporation are shit at…’ as we all say on our own marketing that ‘we are the best at…’.

However, when a customer writes ‘XYZ Corporation is the best at…’ then as potential customers of that service we believe it and are more likely to become customers.

That doesn’t mean that great marketing content isn’t important but if we create an expectation and do not delivery, then the payback will be there for all to see in an average or worse review online that stays for good no matter what our message says.

Delivery trumps content every time.