Tuesday, 8.21pm
Sheffield, U.K.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. – Peter Drucker
I thought I would go back to basics for a bit and think about the practical things that we have to do, with a view to taking out some of the confusion and replacing it with a process.
For example, in these days of online work we’re all thinking about webinars as a way to engage with prospects. I noticed LinkedIn suggesting online events – that’s a thing now – and there’s a bewildering array of options. The attendance numbers seem big as well, in some cases with thousands, tens of thousands of attendees. Being able to talk about what we do online in a way that’s effective and engaging is a skill we’re going to have to develop. That’s not a choice.
So, where do we start? I had that question today, thinking about how to plan a session and it seemed like a good idea to go back to basics, start with the essential elements that are needed with questions like:
- Who are we trying to engage with?
- What are we going to talk about?
- Where are we going to run the session?
- When is the best time?
The thing with using these questions is that you can come up with simple, surface level answers. The point is not, however, to just answer the questions. The questions are, instead, prompts to think about what you’re trying to do more deeply. All too often these sessions turn into a lecture where we talk about what’s important to us. But what matters is spending time talking about what’s important to the listener or viewer. We obsess about slide design and layout and colours, while what really matters is content. We hope that people will listen and then clamour to buy from us, while what we need to realise is that this is the very first step in building a relationship.
Questions are powerful, if used effectively to help with our thinking. We can make them more effective by using scaffolding, frameworks and rubrics that help us isolate and focus on elements but then step back and see the big picture. Something like this.
How do we know what we’re doing this well? I think I might look at that in the next post, with something I learned about the difference between effective and efficient.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 