The Biggest Marketing Mistake Big Companies Are Making

Imagine you are the President of a large company that has individual sales people covering territories. How do you conduct your marketing? Do you market around your brand i.e. ‘Come do business with XYZ!’ Have you ever considered marketing the individual sales people in their specific territories? This means marketing, ‘Come do business with John Smith at XYZ!’

Now I obviously simplified this message quite a bit to get to the point. The bottom line is are you marketing the individual territories or the whole company? If you’re like 99.9% of companies, you’re marketing the whole thing.

Why are you marketing that way? The first answer is that you almost always have turnover, and you’re afraid to market and build the brand around individual people and their territories. The second answer is that you are trying to save pennies on your marketing instead of doing marketing that could be bringing in real dollars. The third answer is probably the real truth, you never thought of doing it this way.

Here’s one problem you’re dealing with right now, and I hope you’re aware of it. Your clients are building relationships and doing business with John Smith in your company. The chances are pretty strong that they have no clue who you are, and have no business relationship in place with you. So if and when John Smith leaves your company someday how confident are you in your ability to keep 100% of that relationship at your company? If you answered me honestly you would share that there would be and is attrition from your clients when individuals leave your company.

Now I’m not looking for you to justify or bring up the reasons why you have marketed this way in the past, but I am letting you know that there is a shift in how you can go to market. If you embrace the idea of marketing John Smith and his territory, you can be on the front wave of the future of marketing in big companies.

The core idea behind this shift to marketing the individual and their territory is to make it personal. Yes personal, as in your people are the experts in your product or service within the specific territory you cover. That means if your people cover two or three counties for you, you discuss and market to the specific things happening in those counties. If there is a specific problem or challenge going on in that territory for your clients and prospects, market to it, discuss it, make it personal at the street level.

What do you think goes on in the head of your clients and prospects when they see how engaged you and your company are within their specific geography? Let me share what’s going on, they think you care. You and your company have taken the time to become involved and become a part of their local community. Is that going to sway their decision every time to do business with you? Depends on how good you and your people are, but it will definitely be an influence in their decision. How many times have you heard, ‘We want to do business locally.’ Hopefully you pay attention enough to know it’s a concern of your clients and prospects.

So what are some ideas on how to execute this course of action in your company? Let me share a couple of ideas that I’m implementing with a couple of my clients to put this into action.

Take the power of blogging and put it to work. You can set up your own WordPress blog website in a couple of hours. Start having your people create content on their blog sites that helps position them as a resource that is specific to the geography where they service your clients and prospects.

Start creating videos that address specific local problems, educate prospects, and help your current clients grow their business while reducing expenses. Set up a YouTube account and link it to your blog site. YouTube get’s a ton of traffic, take advantage of the exposure.

Also link it to your Facebook account, and create an individual fan page for each of your people and their territories. Start using the power of Facebook to create a loyal following of fan’s for your product or service. With five hundred billion plus of members you must take advantage of this opportunity to connect and communicate with your clients and prospects. Remember to use your social media channels for what they are, a place to start communicating with people. Nobody is going to Facebook to buy stuff….yet.

Create specific landing and sales pages directed to offers for products and services for the clients and prospects in your territories. Use PURL’s to create more personalization for your campaigns. PURL stands for the a personalized web page for the individuals you’re marketing to. You can use the PURL’s as part of your direct marketing strategy in print and online. This makes everything trackable.

One last thing to help you market your people in their local territories is that you can create a customized 800 phone number for prospects to call into to hear a free 24-hour recorded message. The gist of this message goes beyond the scope of this article, but this is a really cool service. I discovered this tool from a program I’m reviewing right now called Piranha Marketing by Joe Polish and Tim Paulson.

Now it’s up to you to go and start implementing this process, but only if you’re willing to do something that’s a lot different than you’ve been doing. My advice…pick one thing and start doing it, now!

Be awesome and take action today.