Get ready to start engaging with your customers through your ideas rather than your product. Here to teach you about improving the effectiveness of your marketing is Ben Worthen. You’ll learn about what separates your idea store from your product store and why this provides more value to your customers. Prepare to find out what happens when you judge success by the outcome for the client, how to connect with your customers, and what your content desperately needs.   Busted Myths: The best way to sell your product is not to just talk about your product! This is what 90% of advertising is today and people have gotten good at filtering out this noise. There are cases when this is effective, but on the whole it is used inappropriately. Talk about what people do with their lives when they aren’t in buying mode.   Takeaways: So many in marketing are afraid of engaging in one on one conversations with their customers and would rather just try and cast a huge net and hope to bring in a few customers. Talk to your customers! Find out what they are interested in. By engaging with your customers and focusing on what they really care about, you create a relationship with them outside of your product that you can foster and grow which will lead them back to you when they are ready to buy. There are two questions customers ask when making a thoughtful purchase: 1. How does someone like me solve this problem that I can relate to?; 2.What information can help me make better decisions? The story behind a brand is one of the deciding factors for many customers when they are comparing products which have the same or similar attributes. The people who become repeat customers of your ideas will continue to come back to you and engage with other ideas of yours and will eventually become aware of your product and are more likely to purchase them.  When creating content, ask yourself, “who is going to care about this?” You should focus your content on providing the most value to the people who are going to consume it.  Talking about a vision of what’s possible is much more engaging to people than rattling off product attributes one after the other. Content aimed at providing value to very knowledgeable customers, should be written as if they are hearing it from a peer. The content should be relatable to that target and correspond to their level of expertise on the topic. Avoid trying to make it very broad.   Quote of the Show: “People who engage with your ideas are more likely to become customers of your product at some later point” - Ben Worthen “Get people to think about success, not as, ‘did you sell something’, but ‘did you engage someone?’” - Ben Worthen   Shout Outs: Ezra Klein Show - Podcast for the NY Times hosted by Ezra Klein Imaginary Tent Company Meta4 Time tracking Software   Book Recommendations: Big Ponderously Long Biographies - Esteemed Author   Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benworthen/ Website: https://messagelab.com/  Ways to Tune In: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hard-corps-marketing-show/id1338838763 Amazon Music/Audible: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/37228621-2f9c-4905-a223-1844effb49dd Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/show/1vVLpNI1LssMTiL6Kdsamn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-hard-corps-marketing-show Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/m/Im7mytmu2wa2mekhoeixlja5hpe?t=The_Hard_Corps_Marketing_Show YouTube: https://youtu.be/IloTD7NcnZU