New Method Marketing Puts You in Your Customers’ Shoes

New method marketing focuses on listening, empathy, connecting the head and the heart, and coming from the lens of walking in your customers’ shoes. When done well, new method marketing can transform how you do business and how your clients feel about your brand.

Keep reading to learn all about new method marketing and why it is so important.

TL;DR: 4 Tips For New Method Marketing 

When done well, method marketing can help you connect to your customers by understanding and empathizing with their wants, needs, and desires. Here are four tips for walking in your customer’s shoes:

Tip 1: Method marketing stems from the term method acting, where an actor is so convincing that the audience experiences a suspension of disbelief. This marketing technique is similar as it aims to truly understand customers’ lives to create sincere and emotion-based connective messaging.  

Tip 2: New method marketing differs from classical marketing in that the focus is on eliciting emotion from a customer rather than merely an action or reaction to a product.

Tip 3: This marketing style hits on those hot points and delivers relief based on your customers’ inner motives.

Tip 4: Even if you only have a small marketing budget, you can use marketing language related to your customer’s needs and desires.

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How New Method Marketing Focuses on Empathetic Listening to Really “Get” Your Clients

In our #BizHackLive webinar Method Marketing: How to Put Yourself in the Shoes of Your Customer, Sheryl Cattell explained how this marketing style can leave a lasting impression on your clients. Cattell, Sr. Digital Marketing Strategist for Starmark International, is a marketing guru with more than 30 years of experience. In this webinar, she shared how to implement new method marketing communications regardless of budget. She focused on connecting to your customers’ hearts and heads through messaging that resonates with their wants, needs, and desires. 

Her biggest takeaway: Your business is not about you. Your business is about them. 

New Method Marketing stems from the term method acting, where an actor is so convincing that the audience experiences a suspension of disbelief (think of Heath Ledger in The Joker). Lee Strasberg perfected method acting at the New York Actors Studio. He became renowned for coaching movie stars like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Al Pacino. 

Method acting focuses on bringing up emotions in the audience compared to the more traditional style of theatrical acting that focuses on the actor’s actions. In method acting, the actor aspires to create sincere and emotionally-expressive performances and, in a way, almost become their character, wherein it’s hard to differentiate the actor from their role.

New method marketing is similar to method acting in that marketing professionals aim to truly understand their customers’ lives so that they can create sincere and emotion-based connective messaging.  

How New Method Marketing Helps You Move Beyond Traditional Marketing Ploys

New method marketing differs from classical marketing in that the focus is on eliciting emotion from a customer rather than simply an action or reaction to a product. Check out Method Marketing by Denny Hatch for an overall deeper dive on this topic.

Cattell shared a few essential ways in which she separates it from traditional marketing:

• It extends your marketing beyond traditional market research.
• It moves beyond personas and merely the voice of the customer.
• It focuses on really knowing what’s inside your customers’ heads and under their skin.
• It allows you to become your audience by walking in your customers’ shoes, experiencing their emotions, and feeling their struggles firsthand.
• It focuses on knowing what keeps your clients up at night.
• It allows you to investigate what your clients think will save them from their specific problems.

This marketing style hits on those hot points and delivers relief based on your customers’ inner motives.

Niche Your Business and Create a Value-centric Form of Messaging 

To do this kind of marketing well, you need to focus on a tightly defined niche. This makes it easier to understand your customers and let them define what it is that they need, want, and desire. This also allows you to step away from marketing that makes a customer feel like you are pushing a sale on them. 

Cattell specified the following common marketing mistakes to watch out for:

• Marketing products, services, and features rather than resolving pains and delivering on desires.
• Marketing from the company perspective of lost cost rather than from the customer perspective of value gained.
• Selling what you offer rather than selling what the customer needs.
• Focusing your marketing on your product rather than on an experience.
• Using reasoned-based selling rather than emotionally-based buying.

New method marketing paints the picture of your customer becoming a better person because of what your product delivers. This also forces you as a business to better understand your reasons for doing the kind of work you do, explored more in Simon Sinek’s best-selling book, Start with Why.

Some Tips and Tricks to Apply New Method Marketing to Small Businesses

Even if you only have a small marketing budget, you can use marketing language related to your customer’s needs and desires. Think about a day in your customer’s life or become a secret shopper of your own business. You can also do something referred to as double-jacking, which includes a regularly scheduled meeting with the marketing team where you intently listen for the “why.” Also, remember that subject experts matter. Hire them, read their books, follow them online, and listen to what they are speaking about in general.

Cattell provided some of her favorite tips to engage with your customers genuinely:

• Recruit and use customer advisory boards when creating your marketing campaigns.
• Pause, reflect, and evaluate marketing messages from the perspective of a customer.
• Push back on features and functions by asking “why?” and “who cares?”
• Dig deep for emotional triggers.

In all of this, it’s vital that what you are sharing resonates with your customers. Above all, Cattell wants you to remember this: If you don’t feel it, you don’t have it.

Want to learn more about nuanced marketing that can really make your business shine no matter your budget. Check out the multitude of information and learning tools that BizHack has to offer here.Want to grow your bottom line by mastering online marketing skills? Sign up for a fast-paced, high-impact BizHack Academy course designed especially for growth-minded, ambitious business owners and professionals in marketing, sales, and public relations. For a list of upcoming classes, click here.