Smart marketing is about firstattracting visitors by talking about their symptomsand then getting those visitors to see their symptoms from a whole new angle, with you as the best solution. But how do you do this through smarter marketing, achieving it time and time again without too much effort?

Marketers who understand the psychology and processes that make this happen are in a league of their own. And this isn't magic—anyone can learn it. In this blog post, we'll look at exactly how to do it, in three steps.

Step 1: Smart marketing gives customers a frame of reference that makes competitors irrelevant

When a customer experiences a problem, they rarely search for the problem itself, but rather for the symptoms that the problem entails. You attract them by talking about these symptoms, not about the problem or your solutions.

This means that you meet the customer on their playing field and get their attention. But the customer is usually wrong. They think they need to solve problems with broken drivers, but what they really need is global driver management. They think they need odor removers, but they need biological grease separators. And they think they need better developers, but they need training for their product managers.

But if you say this to the customer, they will just walk away. They don't yet share your worldview. You are looking at the same problem, but you see completely different things. The customer sees a user who is unable to print their document and thinks about drivers, while you see the same thing and wonder how their IT administrators on the other side of the world updated that printer along with all the other thousands of printers in the company.

Therefore, the marketer's first task is to give their customers a new worldview. Your first job as a marketer is therefore to give your potential customers a new pair of glasses through which to view their symptoms.

If you manage to get your brand to create its own way of explaining problems, based on a worldview that your competitors do not share, and get customers to see their symptoms through the same lens, you will have eliminated all competitors in one fell swoop. When competitors describe their features, customers will simply ignore them, because their framework for interpreting these features will not be able to make room for them in their worldview.

This may sound very vague, but let me give you an example. When Bioteria's existing customers think about grease separators, they don't actually think about grease separators. They think about biology, they think about the environment, they think about environmental friendliness, they think about their children's future, and they think about ecological cleaning. When competitors say that their grease separators do something amazing, it just goes over their heads, because that's not what customers are thinking about. Instead, they're thinking about the world they want their children to grow up in.

Step 2: Smart marketing to position your brand above the competition

When your unique way of seeing the world has opened your potential customers' eyes to things they had never thought of before, you will have eliminated most of your potential competitors (both suppliers of competing solutions and alternative solution methods). However, there will probably still be a few competitors who share your worldview and who compete for customers with the same basic message.

This brings us to traditional strategic marketing: positioning yourself in relation to your competitors.

While the battle to give context to the symptoms (the chapter above) was about ideology, this battle is about tactics. Your job here is to create a position for
your brand that gives it a unique place in the minds of customers, compared to other competing brands. You do this with messaging, color, and form.

This battle is often won in the customer's heart, not in their mind. If the customer trusts you, they will buy your solution, even if your direct competitor has more, cheaper, or slightly better features. You need to make the customer trust that your brand is either the best in the context you have just set, or that your culture is such that you will soon be the best.

For Bioteria, in the example above, this would involve convincing the customer that their grease separators are the best environmentally friendly grease separators and talking about their culture in a way that makes customers feel confident that their employees are passionate about environmentally friendly grease separators and everything they stand for, are experts in the field, will do everything in their power to manufacture the best ones, and have the best methods to succeed in doing so.

Step 3: Smart marketing communicates your vision and position through high-quality, relevant content.

You have defined a worldview that helps customers understand their symptoms in a whole new context, and you have defined a good brand strategy that establishes you as the best in that context. But without good content, no one will find out how you see the world and that your brand is the best. That's why good content is your means of spreading your worldview and your position.

But it's not enough to spread it to as many people as possible and hope for the best. If you send out everything you have everywhere and all the time, people will eventually get tired of you. You could do that in the past if you had money because customers had to see your advertising, but not today—today, customers can choose to ignore you and read or watch someone else's content.

That's why your content needs to be relevant to where the buyer is right now in their mental journey (whether they think they need to solve specific symptoms, whether they've already bought into your worldview, and whether they're interested in evaluating your solution). It also needs to be tailored to the buyer's areas of interest—for example, you can't send information about all your solutions to a customer, but only the specific solution that solves their specific problem based on your shared worldview.

Content can also be distributed across different channels, and it is important that customers receive the same message regardless of which channel they are on. That is why you need to be able to follow your customers and read their digital body language wherever they go.

To do this, you need not only a content strategy, but also a system that senses where your customers are, what they are interested in, and delivers the right content at the right time.

Summary: How smart marketing wins over larger and stronger competitors

Most of your competitors write about their products and send out as much as possible to as many people as possible on as many channels as possible. The more money they have, the more of this they can do. They simply use brute force, hoping to ram their message down the throats of as many people as possible, so that a few who happen to be in the right mindset at the right time will take the bait. If they are somewhat better, they also write about the problems that underpin the solution.

Brute force works as long as you have money and resources, and as long as you keep doing it. But as soon as you stop producing, the leads and deals stop coming in. And brute force is very expensive. Finally, it's annoying. How did you feel the last time you read a corporate brochure about their latest products and services, or received an email you never asked for about how great someone's products are?

Smart marketing does the opposite: it starts with the symptoms that customers experience—even if they seem unrelated to your product. After piquing the customer's curiosity in this way, it puts the symptoms in a new context that makes the customer gently question whether their current assumptions about the symptoms they are experiencing are really true. They get the customer to think and see the symptoms from a whole new perspective. The customer, who previously experienced seemingly unrelated problems, suddenly understands how everything is connected in a much larger and more important context.

At this moment, a whole bunch of your former potential competitors suddenly cease to be relevant to the customer. When they continue to describe their products, it sounds like gibberish to your customer's new ears. The customer ignores them.

The customer discusses their new insights and perspectives on their problems with their friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in the industry. More people are buying into your approach, more people are reading your articles, and more people want to understand how this fits in with their way of working and with problems they have but never thought about before.

Your smart marketing automation system senses all of this – and suddenly it pings. One of the potential customers is probably ready to buy – and should be contacted. A salesperson suddenly gets a new lead in their CRM system and calls the person. And unlike all the usual cold calls your competitor is forced to make, the customer is happy when your salesperson says which company he or she is calling from. The meeting is booked, and since they already speak the same language as your salesperson, it goes smoothly. You have a new customer.

This is how smart marketing can win over much larger and stronger competitors. Because while they blow all their energy, most of that energy is wasted. Meanwhile, you open the door and gently show curious people how they can solve their problems if they just think about the symptoms from a slightly different perspective.