In turbulent times, many businesses naturally respond by cutting back on their marketing budgets. Why could this be a damaging move?
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Marketing Challenges: Should You Think Differently About Pitching?
M3 Media Publishing’s recent Marketing Challenge event, held at The St James’s Club in Manchester City Centre, focused on storytelling as a prospecting tool.
Pitching to prospects, or even starting a conversation, can be an important part of your marketing strategy, and it should involve content.
The Marketing Challenges of Storytelling
What sort of introduction should you make when meeting potential prospects?
You might provide an answer that may just be a job title or role. You may describe the nuts and bolts of what you do. Instead, you should capture concisely how you help others.
The legacy of what you do is what counts. If you have substantially made a difference to a business, or saved or made them lots of money, that will immediately get your potential prospect’s attention
How does this translate into a narrative?
It’s like constructing a plot. How many films or books have you seen where they begin with something riveting and explosive? They might even begin with a climactic event, then work back to show you how this event has come to be.
In our recent Marketing Challenge event, we encouraged our guests to look again at how they communicate on a personal level, and how to leverage storytelling to help them become pitch perfect.
What Content Marketing Means
One of the marketing challenges is that people don’t always realise that certain aspects of their communication and interaction are marketing activities.
Content marketing is not restricted to words or images, or things posted online or put into print, as it can also be about the verbal delivery of content
This is one of the ways our Marketing Challenge events set out to challenge thinking: it’s about how marketing is integral to your business objectives.
It’s not simply to do with whether you choose to spend your budget on campaigns, or enlist specialist help.
You are marketing yourself whether you intend to or not, by the very act of communicating to others about your business
That means that it makes sense to make this marketing activity count.
What marketing challenges do you face? Contact us to find out how we can help you think differently about addressing them.
Alternatively, to discover more about our Marketing Challenge events, or to book onto a future event, please click here.
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What is Challenging Your Business Prospecting Success?
Business prospecting has certain things in common with a much older form of prospecting.
The California Gold Rush began in 1848, drawing approximately 300,000 people to what became a frantic scramble for gold. For many of these prospectors, they relied on basic, labour-intensive techniques to extract gold from streams and riverbeds, such as panning.
Later, more advanced mining technology allowed people to recover the modern-day equivalent of billions of dollars of gold. However, by the end of the Gold Rush, relatively few prospectors had significant riches to show for their efforts.
In business prospecting, competing for the attention of potential prospects, it can also feel a touch primitive, involving lots of energy for little return
What if there a was a way of striking a richer seam of reward, using more sophisticated methods to attract prospects?
This is what dynamic content marketing offers.
Is There an Alternative Route to Prospecting Success?
There’s a potentially valuable online business audience looking for answers, for guidance and for things that will make their lives easier.
How would you get their attention? How do you attract, engage and connect with these valuable business leads?
Like the original Gold Rush prospectors, do you run with the crowd? Are you attending the same networking events as everyone else, or looking for the same kind of contacts, the managers and decision-makers?
What if there was an alternative route to success, a different map to lead you to the richest seams for prospecting? And what if you could use it to partially pre-qualify your prospects?
This is where using powerful content can make a difference.
Content marketing is the map to your gold seam. But there’s a twist. You supply the map to your prospects, so that instead of you spending all your time looking for them, it brings them to YOU.
Will You Take the Marketing Challenge?
What’s the best way of discovering alternative routes for business prospecting, how to use content to attract your target audience, and how to help you build useful and potentially profitable relationships?
M3 Media Publishing’s regular, dynamic Marketing Challenge events, held at The St James’s Club in Central Manchester, answer these questions and more.
The Marketing Challenge event, on 3 October 2018, focuses on how you can avoid the competition when prospecting. To attend this event, or to discover more about future events, please click below:
For an accompanying read about our previous events, please visit:
- M3 Media Publishing Affirms the Power of Storytelling
- Marketing Challenge Event Explores the Power of Legacy