The fundamental truth that humans want the freedom to choose and aspire to enjoy a few top draw items from time to time is revealed very well in Malcolm’s presentation.

How many companies do you know endeavour to keep their customers happy by offering them both choice and quality?

“Hey man, put out the worst single on our new album, okay?”

No, they’ll NEVER say that to their record company. Why?

Because, they understand that when they give away their best songs for free, their fans will go out and buy that single or better yet, the album. But before they do, they can enjoy hearing the single over and over again — free!

What’s the result of giving away the good stuff for free?

Fans go out and buy the single or better yet, buy the album, then maybe go to a concert. And if they really like them, they happily buy whatever else they offer them.

It’s a well known fact, devoted fans are very willing to go the extra mile for their favourite artists. Because, besides them being very good at what they do, they’re willing to give away their songs first. Just look at how fast Michael Jackson’s tickets sold out in London recently; warp speed fast.

Giving freely without expecting anything in return takes courage

The same holds true for businesses; prospects are so impressed when businesses move the free line. It shows a trust and relationship that goes beyond the cold act of exchanging goods for money. Nevertheless, giving freely without expecting anything in return takes a lot of courage.

But the positive impact that simple act can have on a business is phenomenal.

Imagine, you’ve been invited to visit a friend on a regular basis to chat. How would you go about building that friendship? What questions would you ask him on the first visit, what about the second? What questions would he ask you?

Envisage how your conversations would blossom over a period of twelve to twenty four meetings. At what point would you expect to start asking him questions about his problem, at what stage would you expect him to put his cards on the table about a certain problem he’s trying to solve?

What level of education does your friend have? If you blinded him with science would he understand or would he ask you to leave his house? You’d be amazed how many sites use Ph.D. level language on their sites and in their newsletters. Unless it’s a site that is targeted towards doctors, of course, the language should always be at fifth grade level.

What tone of voice would you use throughout? Professional and cold or friendly, warm but professional? Thinking this through beforehand is vital, as it could dictate whether the friendship lasts a long time or a very short time indeed.

Do you prefer to write to a woman or a man? Deciding this beforehand could dictate how you phrase your messages. You may not realise it but it could.

Once you have the outline written and answered all the questions you think he or she would ask, start to write a sequence of emails that reflect that private conversation; just between you and him or her.

If you stick with this simple principle you should never have any problems producing future email campaigns or extending the present one.

Not sure what an incentive is?

An incentive is something that spurs someone to action, in this case, to opt-in to your e-newsletter. An incentive usually takes the form of a free webinar, report, e-book or sample of something for a certain amount of days e.g. the use of software.

Incentives are like honey is, to a bee. When they go visit the flowers they love, they hope to fly away with something of value for their efforts – honey. Surfers are no different.

When prospects come buzzing around your site, it’s vital to have some kind of ‘nectar’ to offer them; something that motives them to sign up to your e-newsletter before they click away. Something that will add value to their lives; that answers a burning question or solves a nagging problem.

You may think you don’t have any incentives to offer but the great news is, you already do!

Your incentive could be a part of materials you send out to prospects, or be part of a training course, or webinar you conducted; all you have to do is repackage it , write appropriate copy to go above the sign-in box and upload it onto your website. And you’re done.

Now forced to use their brains rather than their budgets, one source being tapped into for inspiration is social marketing, a ‘let’s get in touch with our consumers’ campaign.

Marketers are now using ‘consumer communities’ to help guide new product development and design. And while 23% of marketers involve consumers before an idea exists, 41% report plans to involve consumers earlier in the innovation process.

But while marketers think consumers want to be involved in the innovative process and for companies to come-up-with-new-ideas-in-a-hurry; consumers actually crave comfort and community in this time of crisis — not further change.

As a people, we are not known for our deep love of change. In fact we avoid it at all costs. But in this world of constant change, we have to push ourselves through with great dollops of courage in our hearts and a whisker of hope in our minds.

But how can we as marketers, armed with ideas and smaller budgets keep moving ourselves and our consumers forward. Constantly striving to be innovative while not alienating our consumers in the process?

By showing up.

By simply showing up more in our blogs, websites, products and add campaigns, will help our businesses come alive. Make our companies more human, more real.

You never know what resonates with consumers but guaranteed, you will when you show up.

This is where a company’s ‘personality’ has the chance to come alive.

How many companies do you know show up, have a personality that resonates through everything they do? Not many.

People do business with people, not companies. That’s why Apple does so well.

How about you?

What one publishing house found out

If you’ve ever read a woman’s magazine, you would notice that there are topics that appear regularly like, how to lose 10 Ibs in 10 days or how to make a house beautiful. Women never get bored of hearing about these things, irrespective of what the breaking news is that day and one publishing house understood this fact all too well.

Over 30 years ago, Reader’s Digest conducted a savvy marketing strategy. They asked their readers to chose which titles they would like to read, from a list of carefully chosen titles, every month.

From the replies a trend started to unfold; so over a 10 year period, a survey was conducted to see what topics the public most liked to read about, regardless of what was going on in the papers at the time. Here are the top three topics as revealed through Reader’s Digest’s headlines:

Health Care: Here are some header examples:

How to prevent – relieve – an aching back
Flu – how to protect yourself
How to build a better body
How to feel fit at any age

It’s clear that people were concerned about their health then and are still concerned about it now. If you sell a product that relieves an aching back, protects you from flu, builds better abs, or can make people feel fit at any age, then your product will appeal to a huge audience.

Money: Here are some headers:

How to save money buying a car
How to keep your debts under control
Six ways to avoid tax troubles
Ten ways to beat the high cost of living

In our present credit crunch climate and money woes, anyone who makes statements like these in their headlines today, is going to have a lot of interested readers on their hands.

Self-Improvement: Here are some of the headers:

How to cope with criticism
What concentration can do for you
Seven steps to greater personal freedom
How to make habits work for you

The other five topics are:

Marriage, getting ahead, the pursuit of happiness, child rearing and popularity.

What’s on people’s minds now?

The same issues.

Then as now, people want to improve themselves, save money or stay healthy. These are powerful headlines that sold millions of copies for Reader’s Digest and similar headlines have the same impact today because they touch on topics that people really care about.

So read headlines. Not the newspaper headlines that are there to shock and titillate but the many magazine headlines and trade journal headlines. Then you will really see what’s on people’s minds at any given time and can hold up your product or service as the answer to their needs, wants, hopes and desires.

After you’ve read this article you will know how to tap into the mind of your market, design powerful marketing campaigns that resonate with them and boost your profit margins.

How they chose profit boosting titles

Many years ago, the way copywriters used to tap into the public’s mind, was by reading the paper cover stickers attached to news-stand copies of Reader’s Digest.

But these paper cover stickers contained no ordinary titles; slapped together at the whim of one Editor, oh no. These titles were representative of the collective wisdom of many Editors, including RD Editors.

How it worked was, every month, hundreds of magazine Editors would read thousands of manuscripts in order to select the best titles to publish in their publications. Then, the Editors of RD reviewed these titles and selected the cream of the crop.

They went further; the business department of RD would then pick from the thirty or more articles for the issue; clinically pruning the list until they had the best three or four titles, they felt, would sell the most copies that month and they always got it right.

Then they decided to take this strategy a little further. RD decided to let their readers chose which topics they would like to read over the ensuing months.

Through a simple advertisement placed in a daily paper, the public were given all the titles for next month’s edition. Then the readers where asked to chose which titles they found most interesting or which topics, based on the title, they would most like to read in the next publication.

The results were very revealing; some titles pulled 5% and yet others 25% or more, in level of interest. Giving RD enough research fodder to work with for months to come.

What made this idea a run away success?

Because the readers were not interviewed or asked to fill in a survey, they were free to chose from a list of simple headers like: ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power’ to ‘How to Stop Worrying’. They would simply tick which title sounded most interesting to them.

Through the many responses they freely received, RD were able to give the public what THEY wanted. They then channelled this valuable information through all their marketing campaigns and every month, continued to publish their new titles, asking the public to choose which titles took their fancy.

How can you implement these ideas into your own business?

Nowadays, there are many millions of niche magazines, trade journals, forums, chat rooms, blogs, e-zines and the rest, that express the thoughts of their niche markets or better yet, give the public a platform in which to express their opinions; Amazon the internet store, being a fantastic example – but are we listening?

Through the many powerful mediums at our disposal, social media, blogging, browsing the magazine racks, or by subscribing to the magazines or e-zines our public reads everyday, we can learn a lot about them.

We can also use our initiative; set up alerts that tell us every time someone talks about us or our product and be there to answer a query or problem. Build a blog and invite comments. Ask our customers how they see us. Ask them what kind of product or service they think we should produce or how we can fine tune them to fit their needs better.

Recently, I was watching Lionel Richie on a chat show. If you’ve never heard of him, he is the singer/songwriter from the 70s phenomenon, The Commadors. They had hit after hit. He’s been in the music business for over 30 years. But the problem with someone who has been doing something for so long, there is a tendency to get stale.

But Lionel was smart, he asked the young singer/songwriters of today, who admired him greatly, to write music they felt he should be singing now. The result was a fresh new sound with the essence of Lionel at its core.

But what about you?

It takes a lot of bravery to ask:

“How do we design products the public will love?”

“How do we stay relevant?”

But the only way a company will survive past the twenty first century is if its moved along by brave and supple minds.

Easier said that done, I know, but it’s worth doing. Because with marketing budgets slashed, we have no option but to use our imaginations instead of our budgets to first, find out what is on the minds of our public, offer products and services they feel they cannot do without, and stay fresh and relevant.

How are you staying fresh and relevant?

His tips include; why continuing to capture email addresses is vital, how to determine the value of your valid emails; why creating dynamic transaction emails is a must and why encouraging product reviews is vital, as surveyed by MarketingSherpa in 2007 who said, readers trust reviews over a critic.

And as someone who relies on reviews before buying a product, I would agree with MarketingSherpa’s findings.

So, if you want to build lifetime relationships, allow your subscribers to review your products. Because they’re doing it anyway, just behind your back — in social environments.

I can appreciate where they’re coming from, because I felt the same.

But if knowing what customers think of them or their products is important, then getting ’social’ is the way to go. But how? Should a CMO be social for social sake or should they have a focus, a plan?

Absolutely and here are three strategies to help make their ’social’ experience fruitful and constructive. They are to; a) always be present in the research cycle, b) fix any problems and c) get to know their customers better.

Assist in the research cycle

Customers don’t like to be sold but they do like to buy. They no longer listen to marketing campaigns. Instead, they conduct their own research in social environments, including the web. So the trick is, be where they are and communicate with them — often.

Smart CMOs offer lots of free information about their products and services, put up fun and interesting information in pdf format for them to download – free, produce videos on youtube.com. Have a blog where their customers can communicate with them direct. All these things build interest and trust.

If customers are saying bad things, CMOs have a chance to put the record straight

It’s never nice to be in the dog house with customers. But smart companies have figured out that by putting themselves in front of them, they have an opportunity to fix any problems or complaints. As a result, they grow from the process, while gleaning a ton of vital and insightful information.

Get to know their customers better

We’re all social beings and we’re happiest when we’re together; so why not live a little?

Smart companies get in the trenches; get to know their customers’ deepest fears, hopes and desires. But CMOs know, customers will not open up unless the CMO opens up a little first – allowing them to get to know them better. In due time, they’re in an amazing position to design products and services their customers love buying from them.

Result: Fantastic long standing relationships plus bigger, steadier, ongoing profits.

So go on… get social, you’ll be glad you did.