 What is the one thing that you absolutely need to know to level up your marketing expertise? Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where you'll learn marketing agency insights, best practices and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly and I'm the co-founder and chief strategist at Slam Agency. We're a full service digital first marketing agency designed to help you captivate, motivate and inspire your target market to action through advertising. This show is really designed for the marketing director. It's designed for the small business owner, the startup founder, the people that are day in and day out looking to grow revenue and implement marketing techniques, marketing tactics, marketing strategies that will allow you to not only increase sales but to level up your marketing experience. That's what this show is all about. I was thinking this morning, what is the one thing that marketing directors, small business owners, startup founders, what is the one thing that you absolutely need to know to level up your marketing expertise to take it to that next level? What is that? I was thinking about it and really it's an understanding of the sales process. It's an understanding of why people buy. It's an understanding of how to make and generate more revenue. Marketing a lot of times is just about communicating a message, typically when it's in a silo, but when you align with the sales team, with the sales KPIs, with the sales goals, when you're able to actually come up and lift up that segment of the business because you are a sales expert, then it's not just marketing over here and sales over here. It's truly a cohesive unit of marketing and sales and the companies, the marketing departments, the sales departments of the next generation, of the now generations, the ones that are making a difference and making an impact on the bottom line, they understand sales. You should understand sales as well. Always, I would recommend as a marketing professional to learn as much as you possibly can about effective sales strategies and techniques and the reason why is because sales is all about messaging. It's all about that right person, right message, right place, right time. The sales person understands those elements, understands those dynamics and can adjust and optimize their pitch on the fly in person. But the thing is, as we know, and this is why marketing understanding sales is so important, 70% of the purchase decision is made before a prospect even reaches out to you, before they even visit your site. That decision is already made. That's just the nature of the world in which we live in where people are making up their minds about who they're going to do business with before the people that they're going to do business with even know who they are. And so that's the value of an inbound marketing campaign, a content marketing campaign that draws people in during this time when they're making up their mind. But as a marketing director, as a marketing professional, you need to understand through content and through that experience that buyers journey on your website, how to communicate because your sales team isn't getting the opportunity to do this in person or this over the phone pitch. The people aren't calling them up with their mind, not so made up. By the time they're reaching out to you, their mind is pretty much made up at that point, which means that they've already gone through what we call in sales, the objections, so they've somehow figured out the answers to their objections. And if they're calling you, then they've satisfied the need that you've satisfied their problems somehow. So where do you start? You start by reading sales books. You know, you've heard leaders are readers, readers are leaders. You've heard this phrase and it's true. And I think that the best way to level up as a marketing professional is to begin to read sales books. That way, you can understand not only the challenges and the experience of your sales teams, but also the state of mind of your potential consumers, of your potential customers. What is their mindset? As a marketer, you have to understand that buyer's journey. And that buyer's journey is really, it's a sales thing one on one. And to understand that buyer's journey, you become a better marketer. The best advertising people, the advertising giants that we know of, the David Oak Levis of the world, these people started off understanding the sales process, understanding how to craft a message, how to craft their copy, how to craft their advertising, their collateral in a way that moved somebody from attention to interest to desire to action. This is what made these people the greats. And you can be one of these greats as well. And the place to start outside of just like getting into the mindset of your sales team, understanding their challenges, their goals, how they connect with people in a one-to-one, in a personal way, it's understanding what's going on in the mind of the consumer at the time when they come across your content. And the best way, I think, to do that, like I said, the greatest advertising people in history were copywriters. They understood how to take that message and craft it in a way that drove results. And so over the next few weeks, I'm going to share with you some of my favorite copywriting books. Some, you know, readers are leaders. You have to really have to get in and you have to understand how to do your craft in a way that's far above and beyond the way that everyone else is doing it. And the way to do that is by learning how to do copywriting. Copywriting at its core is advertising. It's marketing. It's how to connect with people and how to drive action through advertising. So the first one I want to introduce you to is Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. This is a classic. There's lots of good nuggets in this. You can actually sit down in an afternoon and be completely through this. And if you're a business owner or a startup founder, don't think that like this isn't something for you. This is definitely for you as well, okay? Because your job is marketing. Your job is to drive revenue through sales. At the end of the day, that's how you're graded. Even if you're the final decision maker, you know, if you don't drive sales, eventually you're going to be out of a job. So Scientific Advertising, this is super key. I would just say, read this in an afternoon and get this in your system so that you can begin to understand how to move people through copywriting and through advertising. You know, you probably think that the reason why people do business with you, the reason why they choose to be your customer is because of a, you know, maybe you have a better quality than everyone else, or maybe you have a lower price, or you have more features, better features, or you just have really good customer service. Maybe these are some of the reasons why. You know, but if you ask businesses why people do business with them, if you ask most business owners, they're going to say one of those things. And the truth is that, you know, every product or service can be bought for about the same amount of money. It's about the same quality, about the same level of service. So really, at the end of the day, it's not about those things. Why do your customers choose you? Well, you know, one of the things is that if you believe that your customers choose you for any of these reasons, then you're just going to, in your advertising, be very broad and not very specific. And it got me to think about this book, Scientific Advertising, and specifically Chapter 7. Chapter 7 is called Being Specific. Now, I'm not going to sit here and read the entire chapter G, but I do want to read the beginning of the chapter, which says, platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck. They leave no impression whatsoever. To say, best in the world or lowest price in existence is at best simply claiming the expected. Okay? So he goes on in this chapter to make the case that when you're not specific, that you're given the benefit of the doubt because in advertising, people expect for you to tell the truth. When you don't tell the truth, you come across, you know, organizations like the Better Business Bureau or the FTC. And really, you know, there's problems that you introduce for yourself when you don't tell the truth in advertising. Truth in advertising is essential to good business, to being a good business. Okay? And the reason why truth in advertising is so important is because when people see advertising, they assume that it's true. So when you are vague in your advertising, of course, they're going to assume that you have the lowest prices or the best quality. And they kind of give you the benefit of the doubt knowing that somebody else might also be able to match you in those areas. And that's okay. But what actually happens is that they forget you. They don't remember you. The way for someone to remember you is by being specific. Because people assume that you're telling the truth in advertising, it is in your best interest to not only tell the truth, but to get very specific about your truth. So what does this mean? It means use facts, use figures, use stats. Okay? Use these numbers and be specific. Tell your potential customers how they can benefit by doing business with you. What is that result that they're going to get? Be specific about it. Name it and watch the impact that your advertising will have. This is just one of the lessons in this book. Chapter seven, the importance of being specific. He gives specific examples. Of course, this book was written over a hundred years ago. And so those examples, although they're not current and timely, they're still relevant because they still make sense and they still apply when it comes to thinking strategically in the way that you do marketing. So this is scientific advertising, Claude Hopkins. You know, a lot of times we talk about the frequency that we're all tuned into the WII FM or what's in it for me. This is that frequency that's always on our mind as human beings. We're always looking. Our brain is we're trying to just pinpoint in this conversation, in this television show, in this article that I'm reading, you're trying to get to the root of what's in it for me. I mean, that's that's what our brain does. And you know, Claude addresses it in chapter three, chapter three is offer service. And he says, remember that the people that you're addressing are selfish. They care nothing about your interest or your profit. Now, where are we heard this before? People don't care about you. They care about how you can benefit them, right? So this is number three offer service. They seek service for themselves. So ignoring this fact is a common mistake and a costly mistake in advertising. We've said it a million different ways. What's in it for me? People don't care about you or your product or your services, they care about how your products and services can make their lives better. Remember, people are selfish. And so you need to be the first to offer service, you need to be the first to offer specifics, you need to share with them what's in it for them. And if you do that, your advertising will stand out, it will connect in a way that will drive results. This I guarantee. So if you haven't picked up this book, you know, this is less than $10 on Amazon. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. This is one of those books that I guarantee will level up your marketing game. So make sure you pick it up. Let me know in the comments. If you've read it, let me know what you think. If you're going to read it, let me know that too. Thank you for tuning in to the We Are Slam show. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review, and we'll see you next week. Thanks for watching. If you like what you saw, subscribe and hit that bell. 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