Put yourself in the receiver’s shoes

I had been in practice for a number of years, working hard at servicing my clients, asking for referrals and trying to figure out a way of reaching the general public. My marketing efforts were greatly geared at showing everyone my knowledge with experience in all areas, expecting everyone to see that I was exactly what they needed. My way of looking at marketing all changed when I realized that people didn’t care much about how good I was.

Driving around, I see merchants advertising how great their products or services are. And yet, I’m not buying. Why not?

It finally dawned on me that too many of us in business are far too preoccupied with ourselves and spend too little time really trying to learn what others really want. I finally learned that the questions we should all be trying to answer are the following:

How will hiring me or buying my product enrich your lives? How much better will your quality of life be? Will they have more money? Save taxes? Have better quality of life? Put differently, what my clients really want to know is how good will I make them.

With this always in mind, I will continually scrutinize whatever goes out. I put myself in the receiver’s shoes and ask myself “If I received this advertising, how convinced would I be that these are the people I need to talk to and how motivated could I be to give them a call?” If the answer is “not very much so”, then my ad will very likely fall short.