Waypoint Insurance - Risk & Business Magazine Waypoint Insurance - Risk & Business Magazine | Page 23

SLOW MARKETING snack marketing, tasked with selling these familiar little packs to airline procurement departments? (Side note: Is B2B Snack Mix Marketer a career choice? I want to believe yes.) SLOW MARKETING MOMENT FOR B2B SNACK MIX MARKETER (SMMB2BSMM): I want to drive awareness of and interest in our new Tastee-brand passenger snack mix to all the major carriers. SO WHAT? SMMB2BSMM: Because our Tastee-brand snack mix features high-quality nourishment for your passengers. It’s a perfect blend of salty and savory, packaged both conveniently and attractively. And it’s shelf-stable—lasting for literally years inside in-flight trolley carts. It won’t rot or turn stale or rancid. SO WHAT? SMMB2BSMM: Because bad, inedible snacks will inspire your customers to mock you on social media. Flying literally sucks: They already are poised to hate you. Bad snacks could be the last straw that might inspire a negative hashtag. Which could trend. SO WHAT? SMMB2BSMM: Because that’ll be embarrassing to you, Ms. Carrier Procurement. More importantly, your airline brand will suffer because of your subpar snacks. And you’ll suffer when the Director of Procurement scapegoats you. SO WHAT? SMMB2BSMM: Because suffering is… umm… bad. And jobless is… debilitating. You get the idea. So the our Slow Marketing Moment B2B Snack Mix Marketing Writer might get to something like this: Our new Tastee snack blend will do more than just nourish your bored passengers. The blend will delight your passengers because it’s a cut above typical airline fare—so much so that they’ll maybe be inspired to share the good vibes on social media. They’ll Instagram selfies with the fun packaging (did you notice the packets are square, like Instagram?) Happier customers make for more brand loyalty, and more brand loyalty makes for a more successful company and a happier work culture. You’ll be a hero! You’ll get your picture on the break room bulletin board! Your own parking spot! The works! It takes you and your brand out of the story—and puts your audience at the heart of it. It makes your customer the hero of your story. And, ironically—and this is the wonderful part—slowing down enough to ask and answer that series of questions will get you results faster and more successfully. B2B SNACK MIX MARKETING IS A RIDICULOUS PREMISE Or is it? We’ll Instagram literally anything. Snacks. And how much they suck. Or not. At its heart the question embraces the philosophy of what the very best marketing really is: understanding our customers and helping them make the best decisions by framing things on their terms, not ours. Whether you sell snack mix or motor oil, cacti or kittens: This “so what?” question is the Slow Marketing Moment makes you hit pause. And that’s true whether you sell apps, apples, appliances, apparatuses, airplanes… or the snack mix they carry. + And embracing that Slow Marketing Moment can help you reframe a product or service as a clear value for the customer. It becomes a shortcut—a kind of “hack”—to achieving empathy with customers. If you slow down and ask yourself this question before starting every marketing program and every piece of content and everything you write as part of that program, you will serve your customers—to the benefit of your brand. But you’ll do that by avoiding droning on about your brand. You’ll avoid making your brand the focus instead of the things that matter to the people you are trying to reach. (Really, they don’t care about you all that much.) You’ll put your products in the context of your customers’ lives… instead of the other way around. EMPATHY, HUMILITY The so what question is an empathy shortcut, and it’s also a humility shortcut. ANNHANDLEY.COM Ann Handley is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author who speaks worldwide about how businesses can escape marketing mediocrity to ignite tangible results. IBM named her one of the 7 people shaping modern marketing. Ann is a digital marketing pioneer and the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, the leading marketing training company with more than 600,000 subscribers. She is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content , and co-author of Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business . Her books have been translated into 19 languages, including Turkish, Korean, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese. 23