May 26, 2008

Passion: The Greatest Marketing Tool of All

by Brian Turner

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There is no greater marketing tool than passion - a belief in that what you are doing is right.

It doesn’t matter whether your approach is sales, publishing, or general brand building - passion like laughter is infectious.

If you want to create passionate users, you have to provide a passionate message in the first place.

That doesn’t mean telling your audience you are passionate - it means empowering your audience through your passion.

If you can offer nothing different to everyone else, you are unremarkable.

Passionate Web Publishing

This is fundamental to content creation, because in crowded markets you need something to make your contribution to the web stand out.

So if you really want to build a great website, there is no better asset than the passion to deliver something that is different and remarkable.

Of course, this presumes competence in delivery, but if two people can publish to the web competently, and only one is really passionate about what they are doing, the audience is likely going to migrate towards the passionate one.

I’ve faced this lesson repeatedly in building websites myself.

Sometimes I have a good idea and develop a project, but then the passion wanes. The result is that I’m left with something little better than a domain with holding pages.

Where I’ve managed to maintain some degree of passion, the rewards eventually come in.

I just checked my referrer logs for one site and noticed traffic from a major UK publisher. It turns out that they have blog rolled not simply one, but two of my sites.

Gaining links in this way is nice, but not as much as the recognition. Publishing seeks development of an audience, and as you grow this, you grow marketshare, mindshare and linkshare naturally.

Passionate Sales

The best sales people believe in what they are selling.

Clued in companies hooked into this long ago, by making the value message a core part of the sales training program.

The result is sales people who believe they are not selling, but educating - not least that their product delivers more benefits as everyone else, and that to not use this product/service would cost the consumer money.

The sales person’s own passion that they are doing the consumer a favour by alerting them to this makes for a more effective sales process.

Energy and telecoms companies routinely take this approach with sales teams, where the service is sold on price points by comparison to other providers.

The fallacy is that what the sales person is trained to believe may not actually be true.

In my teens I did a month as a “financial advisor” - nothing more than a commission-based salesman of investment products, such as pensions, savings-linked insurance, and of course, endowments.

Our sales team was provided with graphs comparing fund performance far above major brands, and booklets showing expected returns according to different percentiles - with us being told that actual returns were actually far in excess of even these guides.

The sales people showed potential clients how amazingly well the company was doing, and while they presented the legal disclaimer of past-performance not a guide to future performance, added just how amazing that past performance was.

The approach closed sales.

I left after a month having never made a sale - because I couldn’t sell something I believed to be a lie.

When I’d added up the actual figures, the company’s investments were nowhere near as high as claimed, and the investments were providing returns at the bottom end of the guides. Consumers were being sold mediocrity.

It wasn’t the only company doing this - in the end there was a massive backlash against these policies across the financial services sector and consumers were given billions in compensation.

Passion drives business

Many of us have built up business models in the belief that we can offer something different, important, and valuable to our customers/clients.

Our businesses are driven by the passion of our own belief in ourself.

When times get hard, it’s not avoidance of employment markets that makes us struggle on - it is the passion of our ideals that keeps us going - of our individual strengths and how these can benefit clients.

After all, the insecurity of running your own business compared with strong wages these days means selling out could make many employee positions very attractive. Heck, I could probably make more money running an internet marketing team at a big corporation than running my own business.

The difference is, I am subscribed to my own beliefs and value system - I would need convincing of theirs.

The bottom line is that if you believe and enjoy what you are doing, the passion that results from this does not simply widen your potential audience over time - it also gives you momentum enough to keep gaining that audience.

After all, no matter what your business model, and whether you consider yourself directly involved in publishing or sales, that is surely one of your core aims.

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