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Balance Marketing Between Novel and Familiar to Win Trust
The Sprocket Report
Election years are great opportunities to observe marketing in action. You may as well learn how to use these techniques to market your own business.
When a prospective client trusts you will help them is when they make the “buy” decision. To gain that trust requires a familiarity that you build through repeated visibility and to be visible requires a little novelty that will catch their attention. So now that you know the secret, just do it, right?
Of course that’s easier said than actually done, but these truly are the steps that walk folks along the path to making that final decision. There’s a ton of psychological research behind this thinking, but knowing how busy everyone is these days, you probably don’t have time for it. So let’s just hit the highlights.
Getting Noticed
Something new gets our attention, but at the same time, it’s hard-wired in us to be wary of anything unusual. That was to keep us safe from predators and environmental hazards in our cave-dwelling days. Our natural reaction is to step back and keep an eye on the thing that is new. At this point, your prospective customer isn’t ready to buy, but if you attract their notice, which is huge in this media-saturated world, you are on the way to building a relationship. The next time you hear of a politician doing something odd, you’ll know why – it’s to get you to watch them to see what they’ll do next.
Fostering Familiarity
When we were cave-dwellers seeing our first sheep, we were probably spooked. After all, it’s about the same size as a wolf and those things attack the weakest members of our group. We kept an anxious eye on the sheep, but every day, it was just munching grass and not attacking us and we eventually got used to having it around.
Being on high alert constantly is exhausting, which we all know from living through 2020. Repeated exposure helps the unfamiliar become familiar, which is a much more comfortable condition in which to live. The main job of political marketing is to put the candidates everywhere you look in order to build that familiarity, perhaps even instilling a habit.
This repetition, however, is particularly tricky to manage. When the viewer is engaged emotionally, no amount is too much, but if the viewer is uninterested, repeated messages are simply ignored or could even spark a negative reaction. No doubt you have experienced this yourself!
Relying on Trust
Working consistently to build that comfortable familiarity will provide you with the best opportunity for getting a prospective customer to make a “buy” decision. Folks might not need what you’re offering today or even tomorrow, so it may take a while before your Call To Action strikes the right chord. But when they are finally ready to make a purchase, you want to have already established a relationship that inspires trust and makes it easy for your prospective customer to choose you over the competition.
Marketing isn’t manipulation. Rather, it an understanding of how people naturally act and react so you can meet them where they are and be the answer for which they are searching. Even with all the available research and data, it’s more of an art than a science. But by paying attention to how marketing experts work during an election year, you’ll be better prepared than those who aren’t and that will give you an important edge.
If you want to talk about how you can improve your business’s path for visibility to familiarity to trust, give us a call and let’s discuss how Sprocket Websites can help.
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Kate Gingold
I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.
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