This week, I met up with three separate groups. One is a classic service provider. The second is establishing a sales campaign via the internet. The third is a very competent artisan. They all are based in Jerusalem, smothered by years of university education and are looking to ramp up sales.

I asked them what content they intended to use on their advertising space; flyers, websites, give-aways, and more. And the kind of responses that I received could be summed up by: “I want people to know how good I am at blah blah,” and off they ranted for another minute of explanations

Fair enough…until I followed up with 3 basic questions. Whatever your medium, whatever your font and colour: –

• Who is your audience
• What are they looking to hear 
• What is going to make you stand out from your competition?

These are some of the basic parameters that will drive content formulation. Two people could not believe that they had missed these 101 guidelines. A third asked me why the view of the client was so important.

These days we are inundated with marketing experts.

They are called strategists, consultants, sales’ dynamos, social media experts, website optimizers and so the list goes on. Any senior manager, struggling to raise his revenue figures, cannot fail to miss these guys. Their blogs and podcasts and tweets are to be found in every dark corner of cyberspace.

So what are my clients missing? Despite being surrounded by information and suggestions and despite being exposed to a culture of commerce, they were using a marketing opportunity as a platform for their ego. In fact, selling is all about helping and enabling your potential customer to make the correct decision. 

Simple, ain’t it?