Social media marketing expert and speaker Ben Malol was recently interviewed at Affiliate World Europe 2018 in Barcelona about how marketers should approach marketing. “I’d say the biggest key takeaway is that when marketers and advertisers actually go into this world, the first thing that they come in is that they want to make money, they want to be successful, so they think it’s a plug-and-play type of system, where it actually isn’t a plug-and-play system.
There’s much more that goes on here. The biggest takeaway is the fact that you’re dealing with people, here with customers, with actual people with emotions and feelings and a history.”
“Everybody has a different story in their mind, everybody went through different things in life, and that these numbers on our ads manager are not numbers, they’re people that see our ad,” says Malol. “When you actually know the what, the who, and the why, of the customers, that’s where you’re actually gonna be successful instead of playing a gambling game.”
“The ‘what’ is what you are selling,” he says. “What you are selling is not actually what you think you are selling, or what people think you are selling. So if you’re selling a camera, for example, you’re not really selling a camera. Yeah, there’s a physical camera but what you’re actually selling is a specific technology that’s in the camera. You’re selling the tech of it, you are not just selling a camera.”
“The who is who you’re selling it to, which can be different from time to time to time,” Malol explains. “It’s simple when you think of it from a broad term, but it isn’t really.”
Malol said, “Take for example a cucumber slicer. The mother that buys it is not thinking of how fast will I cut a cucumber, what she’s thinking of is how great would it be to finish my salad in a minute so I can spend more time with my children. She’s not buying the cucumber slicer for the for the sake of slicing a cucumber, she’s buying it because of that story that’s running through her mind.”
“People don’t buy products, they buy stories,” he says. “More specifically, they buy the stories that run through their mind when owning this product.”
“How do you actually take that and put it into tangible terms?” he asks. “This is where you actually put your marketing ads in. You’re not gonna have an ad saying do you like this cucumber slicer, get it for 50% off with a picture of a cucumber slicer. You’re going to have a headline saying, ‘Spend less time working, more time loving.’ The image or video will be her with her kids slicing for a salad and going to have fun in the park.”
