Soft Sell Marketing - Online Money with Soulful Consciousness
By Laurie Morin from her blog “From Rags to Riches Roadmap”
Soft Sell Marketing
Do you ever have a squeamish feeling when you read marketing materials that seem to be screaming at you to “BUY NOW“…”LIMITED QUANTITIES“…”KILLER LEADS“…messages designed to compel you to act quickly or be left behind.
Do you ever feel guilty when you try to promote your product or service…even if you know it would be good for the person you are talking to?
Do you think that “selling” is a dirty word, synonymous with sleazy used car salesmen or door-to-door magazine peddlers?
If so, soft sell marketing is for you. Created by a husband and wife therapist team, Judith Sherven and Jim Sniechowski, soft sell marketing is aimed at service businesses and professionals who are more focused on serving people than on making money.
In their book, The Heart of Marketing: Love Your Customers and They Will Love You Back, Judith and Jim emphasize the value of service, heart-to-heart connections and the spiritual nature of serving others. At the same time, they support the idea that you are in business to be commercially successful. In their words:
We present the principle that Selling is Spiritual Service with the intent to heal the split that soft sell marketers feel between their desire to be of service and their need to be paid, and paid well for what they do. Care-givers, whose lives are grounded in heart-to-heart connection, have historically been viewed as those who should work without ambition for money, because it was thought that money would corrupt the value of tending to those in need.
We repudiate that notion and point to the validity and social value inherent in soft sell marketers’ ambitions to generate money as it ranks second but equal to their concern for the well-being of their customers and clients.
So what is the difference between soft-sell and hard-sell marketing? One way to think of it is the difference between an invitation and a command.
Both kinds of marketing are trying to lead the potential customer to buy. After all, that is the purpose of marketing.
But in soft-sell marketing, you are making a genuine connection with the reader. As you establish a relationship, you guide the reader through the benefits you have to offer. Then you trust them to decide for themselves whether or not your product is the answer they have been looking for.
Another variation of soft-sell marketing is conscious marketing. This is selling done with the conscious intention of providing authentic service or products, only to people who will really benefit from them, and only when the time is right for them.
If this approach resonates with you, I highly recommend that you read The Heart of Marketing to give you some concrete suggestions about how to write “soft-sell” copy.
>>> To get your copy go to http://TheHeartOfMarketing.com
