WELCOME TO MOM'S STORYTIME
Formerly “blogs,” but what a blah sound blogs has! At SBD we know that telling visual and verbal brand stories is the most powerful tool in our bookshelf. Gather 'round, read some of our stories. We look forward to creating great brand stories for you!
Secrets of How SBD
Works
Like a MOTHER for You
Revealed!
Dec 21, 2022 | by: Peter Herring
Okay, so that’s a tongue-in-cheek headline. But we wanted to catch your attention, just like we work hard to catch your prospective customers’ attention. Plus, the team at Snow B Designs thought it would be a good idea to let you know the sauce behind how we get results for your company.
Why would we do that?
Well, mom’s all about house rules. And effective marketing has some fairly simple but very consistent rules that it follows. So, just as mom knows that everyone in the household gets along better when they all know the rules, we find it more efficient and effective - and fun - to work with you as a single team achieving a shared goal.
Soccer moms know the rules of soccer. They also know that those rules are particular to the game of soccer and wouldn’t work for, say, badminton. The rules of marketing are similarly determined by our playing field. Our field is the human mind.
How Mom Sees People and Why that Matters to You
Marketing usually gets divided into two categories: B2C (Business to Consumer) and B2B (Business to Business). In truth, though, all marketing - whether you’re marketing high tech SaaS or fashion sass - is actually P2P (People to People). Consumers want one thing. Business executives or procurement agents want another. But they all need something solved and they’re all people. So knowing something about what makes people tick - or purchase - is the foundation of being a good marketer.
Mom knows a lot about people because mom’s main job is managing people and getting them to do things that are good for them. For instance, clean their room, go to school (even when you don’t feel like it) and take a bath. As the people mom manages get bigger and more complex, the things mom motivates them to do get more complex, but the methods are similar.
Here are some of things that mom, and marketers, know about people.
People Aren’t Motivated by Logic
We all like to think we’re mostly logical. We mostly aren’t. Or at least we’re rarely motivated by logic. If people were activated by logic then mom could simply explain to her kids that cleaning their rooms would result in their being able to quickly find the toy that’s lost in the pile - and the kids would hop to and do it. Every mom knows this approach doesn’t work. Ah, but what if cleaning your room leads to a cookie? A special privilege?
Motivating with cookies is similar to how we motivate with an emotional payoff.
People Are Motivated by Emotion
There are three reasons for this. Lions, tigers, and bears. We humans grew up in a world full of them, and if one came running at you it was a bad idea to ponder the situation. It was a good idea to hoist your spear. Or run. Quick action meant you got to have dinner that night, rather than being dinner. To this day human brains’ first assessment of a situation tends to be emotional. - or “prelogical.” We’re wired that way. Based on inherited and learned associations our brains decide “this good” or “that bad” before we think logically about it. Often before we even notice it.
Your prospective customers are drawn to companies, products, and services that they feel they can trust. So trust is the first emotional hurdle we seek to clear. We then look for emotional payoffs that appeal to your prospects. We’ll call those, “warm cookies.” We deliver just out of the oven cookies - with raisins, chocolate chips, or nuts, depending which your market segment likes - in the designs we make, the colors and typefaces we choose, and the targeted copy we write.
Logic Seals the Deal
Don’t get us wrong, logic has an indispensable role in decision-making. But, because the logical parts of our brains came later, it also comes later. After the prelogical part of our brain gives an “All Clear!” you do need to know that that sexy car in the to-die-for color also gets you economically from here to there. Or that the software system from the company you feel has your back will make your company more efficient and save money, as well as, possibly, your job.
How We Make Your Company a Trusted Stranger
Your spouses, kids, friends and dog trust you - if you’ve acted trustworthy. But how do you get people who have never met you to feel as though they trust you? Because that’s exactly what you’re trying to do with your prospective customers. It would be nice if you could just say, “Hey, trust me, I’m trustworthy.” But, trust us, the reaction to that is usually to run the other way. So how do we go about creating a feeling of trustability?
Stranger Appeal Vs Stranger Danger
Say you enter a room full of strangers and you don’t know whom to talk to. Some look intimidating. Then someone across the room catches your eye. Someone you think might be a good listener, easy to talk to, maybe even a future friend. Someone you’re willing to trust enough to approach and break the ice. You may not know why, because your prelogical brain made a lot of split second decisions for you, taking into account his attire, looks, posture, and gestures before giving you the green light.
Now, let’s say that the person entering the room is your prospective customer, and you’re the one hoping to catch her eye. Except that “you” - your company - is your website, your social post or ad, direct mail or email piece. So their first all-important glimpse of you is a marketing message. Two things need to happen for this meeting to occur. First, that website or post needs to stand out from the others and grab their attention in a world full of attention grabbers. Second, it needs to engender a willingness to “pretrust” you enough to email or call you, walk through your door, or order online.
This is what we’re in the business of doing for you. Simply put, our work for you gets your prospects’ attention, engenders trust and motivates action. In Part Two of this blog we’ll break down how we do that.
How Does Mom Know All This?
Mom’s pretty smart, including having a high emotional intelligence quotient, but she wasn’t born knowing your business and your target market. That’s why we start with a brand and market positioning discovery process. If you’re the Acme Widget company, we learn why your widget’s are a better solution for your target market. Or why you’re the nicer widget company. Or...whatever makes you an attractive standout.
We also learn more about your best target market – your most lucrative, and often most enjoyable, customers – by doing qualitative research. That is, we learn more about your customers’ lives, pain points, aspirations, and how to address them in language and designs that motivate action. First we listen to you. After all, you know a lot about your customers. But companies are sometimes too close to their own products and services, a little too wrapped up in the features. So SBD, as an objective agency, talks to your target audience to discover their needs and wants, their emotional drivers, and the way that they like to be talked to.
If You Don’t Have Something Nice to Say...
We all know how this saying ends. But if you’re a company with something to sell, saying nothing at all is simply not an option in today’s crowded marketplace. And we know that marketing can be expensive (although it’s often far more expensive to NOT market). So it’s most cost-effective to create relevant designs and say the right things to the right people - that is, the market segment that’s the best fit for you.
Here's where marketing mom differs from regular mom. Marketing mom will never say “...say nothing at all.” Instead, she says, if you want a mother of a campaign give us a call. And with a little leg work we’ll say a lot of very nice things about your company to just the right prospects.
