Get specific, get noticed — Kelford Labs Daily

“We must get down to individuals. We must treat people in advertising as we treat them in person. Center on their desires. Consider the person who stands before you.

However big your business, get down to the units, for those units are all that make size.” 

— Claude C. Hopkins, Scientific Advertising

Marketing gets easier when you stop thinking about it like “marketing.”

That word implies an idea of mass attention, broad awareness, wide appeal.

But that’s a trap. 

Good marketing works—works even on us, marketers and entrepreneurs—when it focuses on our specific wants, needs, and preferences.

In fact, when someone tells you about a product or service that sounds perfect for you, you usually don’t even clock that as “marketing”—they were just being helpful.

Bingo.

That’s all good marketing is. It’s identifying how your product or service can genuinely help your ideal customer, and then you demonstrate its value to them at a distance via words, pictures, or videos.

You get down to the individual, you center on their desires, and you talk about the particular things that they specifically care about.

Because, it turns out, when you can be specific, everyone else who might be interested sees themselves in your specificity. They can relate, they can adapt what you’re saying to match their own needs and desires.

But when you try to talk to everyone, no one sees themselves in what you’re saying. So nobody notices.

“When you write well about the particular,” as Dave Trott says, “you write well about the general.”

So get particular. Get specific.

And get noticed.

Kelford Inc. shows you the way to always knowing what to say. Marketing positions and messages for hands-on entrepreneurs.