In case you didn’t know, marketing is all about pain.
You identify or create pain.
You create a way to make that pain excruciating.
You exploit the pain.
I know it sounds cruel and heartless but what drives marketing is fear and greed, both of which produce pain.
Traditionally, marketing has been about advertising because getting the answers to your pain often took a long time and provided less then great results. Advertising fulfilled something, often pretending to fulfill an existing pain (need for acceptance) by creating a new one (need for the latest perfume)
Advertising took on the role of not only exploiting pain, but also further creating it. Advertising, in fact, created artificial markets and built a house of cards of industry. Hallmark created new holidays that were not to be missed. The beer companies followed suit.
Find the Pain instead of creating it.
Yellow pages were there when we associated the pain with a solution. You were hit by a taxi in New York City? You need to find a Personal Injury Attorney in New York City, so you looked up “Lawyer” in the yellow pages. Eventually, the money was big enough to start creating an artificial pain, or frivolous lawsuits.
Now people can ask questions quickly, easily and confidentially. You, as a small business owner, can listen to what they are asking and modify your service offerings relatively easily. You can further target people asking specific questions.
Where as you had to work creating pain before, now you can identify it and give specific steps to curing it. Telling a consistent story as to how your small business cures the pain is your Authentic Web Marketing works.
Advertising is great for large manufacturers because Advertising is for offerings for which there is no identifiable pain but one that needs to be created, then sold. It is about economies of scale.
Which do you think offers more leverage to a small business owner? Creating Pain or Identifying Existing Pain?