Marketing and Promoting to Decision Makers

Commercial enterprises invest millions of dollars annually marketing products and services to their targeted audience.  

Depending on the audience, the means of communicating the benefits of a product can vary, depending on the preferred means of communication that the audience prefers, as well as what has proven to be an effective approach to market a product to an intended audience.

Written advertisements that appear in newspapers, magazines and direct mail represent one form of communicating the benefits of what a product has to offer a targeted customer, who is ultimately the Decision Maker (DM) who will either purchase the product and/or recommend it a friend or family member.

Because a good percentage of the population are visual communicators, written marketing collateral often is accompanied by graphic art such as illustrations, video segments and animations. When combined with the written word and sound (narrative), multimedia marketing campaigns can be powerful when persuading a targeted audience of DM's to consider purchasing the benefits that a product has to offer.

Some portion of a product's targeted marketing will have to effectively communicate benefits to kinesthetic learners, those of us who gain an understanding of something by physically, emotionally or psychologically engaging in the benefits of a product. For this segment of the population, words and images alone will not convey the benefits of a product.  

To target kinesthetic in nature, marketers develop campaigns that offer free trials, where the prospective custom can actually try the product being marketed.  

So, what's this got to do with marketing ourselves as career professionals?

Plenty.

Consider that we are products; when our targeted employers hire us, they enjoy the benefits of the services we provide (helping them progress their business enterprise) and the products (deliverables) that we create.

That being said, our task in developing a marketing campaign is to first identify who our targeted audience (employers: business owners, hiring managers, etc.) of DM's are. Next, we need to understand what kind of marketing campaign will best communicate the benefits of what we have to offer to our employers.

Typically, we've been schooled in sending resumes, which is not a very effective means of gaining employment, since it communicates effectively to roughly a third of the population. Words alone do little with visual and audible DMs; kinesthetic DM's what to see and experience what you can do on the job. Resumes alone fall far short.

What if we instead developed a marketing campaign that effectively communicated the benefits of what we have to offer that utilized words, narrative, graphics representations and a free trial?

That kind of marketing campaign would communicate the benefits of what we have to offer as professionals, by utilizing all of the preferred means of communications that are most effective from the perspective of our DM's.