“Uncopyable” Strategies for Better Business
By
Beth Gainer on
May 26, 2020
On May 19, marketing expert Steve Miller conducted a webinar sponsored by the International Manufacturing Technology Show organizers. The webinar focused on helping businesses become “uncopyable” – or differentiating themselves from the competition -- coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pre-pandemic, customers frequently met salespeople face-to-face. But COVID-19 has changed this business landscape. “What would we do if all of our customers, all of a sudden, banned face-to-face sales calls? Now we can’t say for certain that this may happen,” said Miller. “With Zoom, [sales transactions] can go pretty darn far. We’re going to have a new normal in the way customers want to do business with us.” He added that too many businesses are going to come out of this pandemic using the same pre-COVID-19 ways of marketing.
Miller asked, “How many of us are simply going into that new normal using our old methods of sales and marketing? I believe there is a very high percentage of companies who are not really thinking about how they are going to change their strategies that much. They just want to restart where they were, restart what they were doing and go back to communicating with their marketplace the same way.”
“I think that might be a mistake.”
He suggested businesses should not continue communicating with all customers the same way because customers are as different as marketing strategies themselves. “Not all customers are equal, and so why do we send marketing messages out en masse to everybody, assuming that same message is going to work for everybody? Think about the 80/20 rule: if we look at our customer base, 20 percent of our customers represents 80 percent of our business,” said Miller. “Those customers, and prospects who are like them, should have a completely different message, they should have completely different campaigns aimed at them and not at everybody.”