What comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘marketing?’ Is it ads, billboards, slogans, pitch meetings or even marketers in public, handing you their card and telling you about their campaigns? Well that may one’s first thoughts but really that isn’t what Marketing is about.
Marketing, in its most essential form is about communicating thoughts to people and forming connections with them. For something so essential to business, for something so seemingly corporate, it’s the human element surprisingly that makes marketing work; that makes it human.
You need to be a good listener if you are to be a good marketer. You need to listen to how people feel. You need to listen and understand what they need; what they want; their personalities; their interests. You need to listen to all of that if you are to have a conversation with your audience and tell them, “This is what you need.” You cannot do that if you haven’t listened. If you hadn’t listened, it wouldn’t have been a conversation. It would’ve been you shouting your wares like a crier in the market hoping you’d make a sale. If you listen and you appeal to what people need and to their emotions, they’ll respond. A person doesn’t just rely on logic to make a purchase. That emotional connection is necessary. You need that connection. You need that trust. The way to achieve that is- to listen.
With the sort of Digital tools we have today, it’s easier than ever to reach out and talk to your audience. It’s easier than ever to understand them. We have access to many sorts of useful data. Their search patterns, their engagement patterns. We even have the feedback they themselves submit.
A good marketer doesn’t just see the data and the feedback they have access to as data alone. They must see it as a way to create a real empathetic picture of their audience, to find out how to truly to connect with them. Once the marketer does that, once they establish the connection, and embed the brand into the audience’s mind with positive connotations, they can finally convert those conversations with the audience into real transactions. And all of that was possible because- they understood the people they were selling to.