Your marketing power

These days marketing is all about meeting and exceeding your customer's needs. It is no longer about the flashiest ad campaign, or the most money dumped into marketing, but about who is connecting with, and serving their customers best. Customers that feel understood, appreciated, and whose needs are being anticipated turn into loyal customers, regardless of the amount of money or degree of fanciness in the marketing campaign presented to them. Thus, if you want to succeed in your marketing attempts, the best thing you can do is replace the word "marketing" with "service". Instead of asking how you can market to your customers, ask how you can provide service to them?

Give them something the need BEFORE they need it. One of the best things you can do is provide a needed value to their life before they even recognize the need for themselves. This means help people be healthy, before they get sick. This means help them build their own business before they lose their job and need their own source of income. The idea is to provide a value that is going to benefit them no matter who they are, or what situation they are currently facing.

Help them become self sufficient- When you provide a service that helps someone to become self sufficient, you have a huge power in marketing. Look at Apple, they gave people the power to create websites, to learn to play guitar, to edit photos, and so much more with an easy user interface that anyone can learn. In other words, they took something incredibly complicated, and simplified it so that anyone could use it, and as a result, people line up for blocks to pay top dollar for the latest and greatest Apple gadget or version of an Apple gadget, and they do so happily. They do it with pride, bragging to their friends about dropping large sums of cash to get the newest version the soonest.

Be on their side, and on their team. Do not be the person selling them something, be the person helping them to achieve something, and you will never have to sell yourself or your product.

When you provide great service, you allow their independence, knowing they will always come back for more, and do so happily.

The most powerful marketing approach is providing a good or service that really enriches the life of the customer, and helps them see greater things for their future. This might be a healthy option food, an easy and intuitive piece of technology, or a sustainable material article of clothing, etc. It might mean doing good beyond adding to your bottom line, such as helping someone in need, or preserving the earth's natural resources. To truly succeed in marketing, you have to stop looking inward with the selfish views of marketing's past, and start looking outward at the bigger, more global, and far more social picture.