It looks good enough to eat!

Picture by Darwin Bell

Have you ever been watching TV when you were really hungry?

The pizza ad with the impossibly good looking slices of gooey cheese and crispy crust, super piled high with great looking toppings.

The steak on the grill just that’s just about done, juices dripping down into the flames and the char marks in perfect stripes across the top.

The decadent chocolate dessert with ice cream and chocolate sauce drizzled on it.

I’ll admit, I have been swayed to try out certain restaurants and foods just because of the commercials (curse you Taco Bell…next time I’m saying no!!!). Invariably they don’t live up to my expectations, but they do succeed in getting me to give them a try, which is really the point.

Is your marketing cheesy and gooey?

As a small business owner you’re more than likely not using a lot of TV ads to promote your business -and let’s face it, most products without cheese in them aren’t great candidates for that kind of advertising approach.

However the reason those ads are made is because the really big Madison Avenue type of marketing firms understand that people want to understand, to feel, the benefits of the product and if possible experience those benefits as much as possible before they’ll be ready to buy.

Are you illustrating your benefits to your customers?

Can they experience at least some of the great things you can do for them – for free, without pressure or hassle?

Here are some ideas that might work for you:

Experience a free trial – Chris at Math Monkey offers a free class because he knows that once kids get a chance to see how much fun they’ll have (and once parents learn how much the kids can learn) that the sales process is pretty easy.
Hands On evaluation – Stephen at Get Smarter Prep offers a free, graded practice test for the ACT or the SAT. Stephen knows that this is the information most parents need to make an informed decision on whether their kids will benefit from the fantastic tutoring or prep they can get from his company. In fact, there’s no point in trying to sell them until they know where they stand.
Free Up Front Audit – Maggie at Lee Associates and Steve at Leadership Advocates both offer no cost audits (of telecommunication costs and non-cash payment processing costs respectively). The investment of doing that audit is well worth it because most of the time they will find opportunities to save their clients money…and they split those savings with them. It’s a win-win.
Give away valuable information – Check out my free Guide to Getting Started on Linked In. It’s a great resource that’s valuable, especially if you are just starting out on Linked In. (If you’re not using it, you should be). I’m happy to give that information away because I can keep building my list of connections to people that are interested in learning and doing more – which are great candidate for what I do at Aspire.

What other ideas can you think of to give away your experiences? What do you do so that people can get to know you, know your product?

I’d love to hear other ideas – share them here.

Shawn Kinkade www.aspirekc.com